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Thank God for Barnabus
by Jeff Fountain, YWAM Europe
It was one of those moments when a familiar passage of scripture bubbles forth with enough new revelation to inspire a month of meetings.
Around the table sat a mixture of mainstream church representatives and leaders of immigrant churches in Holland. We were gathered to identify our common mission in darkest Europe.
The chairman opened the meeting reading from Acts chapter eleven.
After Stephen's stoning, we read from verse nineteen, the early believers were scattered in all directions, and went preaching the gospel ...to Jews only. Apparently, Jesus' last instructions to the disciples to make disciples from all peoples had not yet been taken seriously, even though a good decade had probably passed between the resurrection and chapter eleven. Earlier in the chapter we meet Peter having to justify his visit with uncircumcised pagans to a critical Jerusalem leadership.
But now, around AD 43, we read of Jewish believers from Cyprus and North Africa preaching to Greeks in Antioch, the third city of the empire after Rome and Alexandria. This was a stupendous new step forward. The very first church was now being planted among ethnic Greek people. We have met Hellenists earlier in Acts, but they were Greek-speaking Jews. Just who these bold innovators were who made this missiological breakthrough into the non-Jewish world, we're simply not told. They remain nameless and faceless.
News of this unorthodox endeavour reached the ears of the leadership back at headquarters in Jerusalem. Could this be really kosher? they wondered. Just who had given these maverick evangelists permission to go beyond the Jewish diaspora?
So they sent Barnabas to check it out. When he arrived, he was thrilled to see for himself clear evidence of the Spirit at work among these uncircumcised Gentiles. He encouraged and exhorted the new believers to remain strong in the faith.
Thank God it was Barnabas who went!
Imagine if one or more of those critical traditionalists had insisted on going. Judging from later hassles Paul had, it's likely these new Greek converts would have been forced into the old, legalistic, Judaistic mould. That would have meant a bunch of ritual observations, not to mention the painful, humiliating operation for the menfolk.
Good old Barnabas, however, could recognise when God was doing something new outside the box. He was a man of faith who had learned to expect the surprises of God. He understood how God often worked from the fringes.
Two chapters earlier, he had taken Saul the convert under his wing, when the rest of the Jerusalem leadership had doubted the sincerity of his conversion. Saul had already spent some three years as a desert recluse before visiting Peter and James in Jerusalem for a mere two weeks (Galatians 1:17-18). His rather cool reception there seemed to have set him on a sidetrack back home to Tarsus, where he sewed tents for a few years.
(to be continued)
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