Spiritual Gifts
Commentary for the August 8, 2026, Sabbath School Lesson
"While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God." Acts 10:44-46
I like the apostle John. He is referred to as the disciple Jesus loved in the gospel attributed to him. He seemed to have a more advanced understanding of how love played into the Christian experience. This was an unusual perception since the Bible has often portrayed God as a jealous god with a hair-trigger temper launching cataclysmic events that flooded the earth, confounded language, and burned entire cities to the ground. Yet, John tells us, "God is love." (1 John 4:8) He asserts that those who are not loving have no relationship with God. This calls into question much of the Old Testament where punishment whether inflicted by God or by his followers is swift and lauded by both God and his prophets. If given the opportunity, I will ask God whether John's representation of God's character as loving, merciful, and compassionate was in any way related to the stories that the apostle survived persecution and attempts to make him a martyr and was the only disciple to die a natural death at the end of a full life.
The apostle Paul did not live the long life John did, but in the few years before he was martyred in Rome, he managed to raise up several congregations of believers across Anatolia where the seven churches of Revelation 1-3 were founded, as well as teaching in Macedonia, Greece, and even preaching from his prison cell in the heart of the Roman Empire, the imperial city itself. Where John's witness was grounded in witnessing to God's loving character, Paul's was founded in argument and debate. This may have contributed to the short duration of his ministry. His stoning outside Lystra foreshadowed the persecution that followed Paul throughout his missionary journeys until his efforts culminated in his beheading at the command of Emperor Nero. That sentence spared him the cross as a condescension for his Roman citizenship. Did his tragic fate propel this Johnny-come-lately apostle into becoming the most prolific and venerated author of what was to become the New Testament? No mention is made of Paul and John ever traveling together or writing to one another. Their two theological perspectives continue in opposition to one another today with those who see God as loving and compassionate even toward his enemies as portrayed in Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount, being drawn to the Johannine gospel and epistles, while those who want a vindictive God who will wreak revenge against all his enemies who happen to be their enemies lean toward the more authoritarian Pauline writings.
Revelation is an anomaly, purported to be written by John, it portrays God as Paul might see him in full havoc mode destroying the earth and its inhabitants as justice for all the evil that has filled God's cup with wrath to be poured out in bloody revenge. Martin Luther, the great German reformer, had trouble with this radically different characterization of God and doubted that John was its author and argued for not including it in the Bible even though its inclusion in the canon dated back more than a millennium before Luther translated the Bible into German. This schizophrenic representation of God as both loving and vengeful has presented an enigma as great as theodicy and that schizophrenia is echoed in the vast ranks of Christianity to the present. Those who preach hellfire and damnation, driving people to convert out of fear of fiery judgment are ever at odds with those who prefer to draw the hearts of others with God's loving and merciful character, especially as portrayed at the cross, doing the drawing, a very Johannine idea. (John 12:32)
These are not the only theologies that confront modern Christianity. The apostle Peter also had some very profound insights to contribute that are manifest still in the modern church. His two most major contributions are found in the book of Acts. First, he left no doubt that the Holy Spirit would be received by anyone who repented and was baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. (Acts 2:38) Peter was a man of direct speech without subtlety or nuance. There was no "maybe" in his statement. Strangely, some in the charismatic movement today such as Holiness Pentecostals who balk at the idea of baptizing using the formula of "in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" as in Matthew, chapter 28 and insist that the correct incantation is literally given by Peter as "in the name of Jesus Christ" do not nonetheless see the Holy Spirit as guaranteed but instead require that the new convert pray through to receiving it as evidenced by one peculiar gift - speaking in tongues. Those who never exhibit this gift are relegated to a lesser spiritual status within the fellowship, creating a tremendous pressure to come up with the required gift to be fully accepted by the rest. Even if we were to see no harm in the baptismal incantation "in the name of Jesus Christ," there is potential for great harm for excluding others from full fellowship for something Peter never said.
Peter's second contribution was through his experience with the gentile centurion Cornelius and his household. For many centuries the Jews were considered the uniquely chosen people of God. They were the repositors of the holy oracles that promised the advent of the Messiah and among the many things they misunderstood about the Messiah that caused them to miss the hour of their visitation was the belief that when he came, the Messiah was only interested in giving his chosen people, the Jews, power over their enemies and would subjugate the entire world to the descendants of Abraham. The violence that represents was established because of a mischaracterization of God as only interested in vengeance against the enemies of Israel. This was a common theme in the Old Testament evidenced by such passages as "Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks." (Psalm 137:8-9) This passage drips with venom and fails to accept the many teachings of the prophets for centuries that warned that the evil done by the Jews was piling up a horrendous reaction for the evils done by Israel that were repugnant even to the pagan kingdoms around them. The Jews saw themselves as alone deserving of God's intervention on their behalf despite their near total rejection of the many statements in the Old Testament calling on them to be merciful and compassionate, to reflect the very character of God that the apostle John tried to teach.
When Peter visited Cornelius all that was set on its head. An angel had directed Cornelius to send for Peter, not Paul, nor John. He was specifically to send for Peter, arguably the most outspoken and direct of the apostles. When Peter arrived, Cornelius gathered his entire household, and while Peter was speaking, the Holy Spirit came upon all the gentiles gathered there, and they began speaking in tongues. Since it could no longer be denied that God was working among the gentiles, Peter ordered their baptism. Interestingly, when Peter reports this experience to the brethren in Jerusalem as recorded in Acts 11, he equates what happened with the household of Cornelius with what happened to all the Jewish followers of Jesus on Pentecost at Jerusalem. In addition to placing the gentiles on an equal spiritual footing, this implies that the speaking in tongues was also the same gift they had received earlier, a gift that did not amount to speaking in gibberish but so that those who spoke other languages might hear the good news in their own language.
While there is no record of Paul and John communicating with one another, Peter did eventually unite with Paul in Antioch, and this experience may have informed some of the things Paul later incorporated into his own efforts. First, it may have encouraged his stand against circumcision for gentile converts. And through Paul's presentation and Peter's corroborating vision and experience, the fellowship in Jerusalem supported Paul over this issue. Second, it may have informed his statement, "So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:26-28) Paul who typically found rejection when he initially preached Jesus in the synagogues of the gentile cities he traveled to moved away from that approach to preach openly to the gentiles in their agoras where he sometimes found greater toleration than he received from his fellow Jews.
Peter found Paul difficult to understand sometimes. (2 Peter 3:15-16) But they had a profound influence on one another. Peter opened Paul's eyes to the full potential of the gentiles accepting Jesus and that God would bless them with the same spiritual gifts he had already blessed the apostles and many other Jews with. And Paul opened Peter's eyes to his need to more fully commit to what God had taught him through Cornelius by rebuking him when he slid back into treating the gentiles as lesser, unclean spiritual brethren. (Galatians 2:11-14) And Peter, after fleeing Rome and the persecution ongoing there returned to Rome to be martyred. Legend tells us that Peter met Jesus as he was fleeing the city, and Jesus asked him, "Where are you going?" (Quo Vadis?) Peter then took this as a sign to set aside his fear and return.
The lives of these apostles were demonstrations of the diversity of theological perspectives that God brought together in the early church that each might, despite a lack of uniformity, contribute to the unity of the faith something from each heart according to the gifts bestowed by the Holy Spirit, gifts we all receive according to the Spirit's largesse and determination of what is necessary and who is best suited for a particular need. This continues to be the need and the purpose of our ordination to service as we model the same mercy, compassion, and grace as our Lord.
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