Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit?

But our last conversation isn’t the only thing that tends to stand out about the meeting in Jerusalem and Acts 15. After the meeting, the apostles decide to circulate a letter and the message of the movement’s decision. The letter reads as follows:

The apostles and elders, your brothers,

To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia:

Greetings.

We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul—men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.

Farewell.

In what always struck me as one of the most bizarre statements in Scripture, the apostles and elders declare to the theosabes that “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit.”

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit?

In the faith that I was raised in, I was told all about absolute truth. I was taught that truth exists in its abstract form and could not be moved or negotiated. Truth is truth, period. God is truth and God decides what truth is. Now, I’m certainly not here to dismantle the notion that absolute truth exists, nor do I write with the intent of engaging in the work of deeper philosophy. But at the very least, the notion that an idea and decision would “seem good” to the Holy Spirit — or that the Holy Spirit was in some sort of peer-level dialogue with the believers that day — was beyond my understanding.

How I understood the story, I would have said that the apostles needed to get together and pray and hear from the Holy Spirit. The Spirit would tell them the truth and it would be their job to hear it and respond in obedience. But make no mistake about it, the Spirit would be the one calling the shots. After all, the Holy Spirit is God.

But to paint a picture of the Spirit hanging out and being part of a conversation was too much. The idea that the Spirit seemed to be persuaded…

All of this changed when I was taught the concept of “binding and loosing” for the world of the apostles and first-century Judaism. The understanding of the people who wrote the Scriptures was that there are absolute truths in the world (and although they wouldn’t talk about it in such a western way, they did understand it that way). Many of those truths had been recorded in the Scriptures. In short, there are things in the Text that God has said. What God says is final. There is no changing, adjusting, or ignoring the statements and statutes of God.

However, there are a lot of things that God did NOT say.

Some things are black and white. Many others are very gray.

God very rarely engaged in the art of interpretation. God left that up to us. God gave us the Truth, but how we interpret and apply that truth is up to the community of God’s people. And ever since the Law was given at Mount Sinai, God’s people have had to gather together and decide, led by the elders of the community, what God’s intent was (or would be) in each and every context, generation, and circumstance.

The black and white issues were never up for discussion, but on those other issues that were difficult to interpret and apply, the community had to do the work of “binding and loosing.” If the community gathered together and decided that in their context, a certain command would be applied one way, then that is how the command would be applied. An example of this would be, “Can I drive on Shabbat?” The community would get together and discuss all of the issues at stake with what we KNOW to be black and white.

God told us not to work; is driving work? God told us not to light a fire on Shabbat; does the internal combustion engine constitute a fire? What was the spirit of the rule of Sabbath and what is being violated, if anything? They would wrestle with question after question until the community could come to a decision. If they decided to say, “No, you cannot drive,” that would be binding up the issue. If they decided to permit driving on Shabbat, that would be called loosing.

To be sure, the community very rarely agreed unanimously on these issues. There would always be groups of people who disagreed, but the process of “binding and loosing” was understood and they respected and submitted to the larger opinion of the community.

They didn’t leave and go find another church. They didn’t write nasty letters to the editor or send damning emails to the church office.

Imagine.

They respected the decision of the community and continued to love their neighbor.

Whatever the ruling of the community, the understanding was that God — on these issues of gray — would hold them to their decision. If they decided to bind it up, then God would hold them to the decision as if it were His. If they decided to loose it, then God would join them in their decision.

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit.

It’s as if God says, “I don’t know. I’ll let you decide. Please make your decisions for good reasons, but whatever you decide, I’m ready to go with it.”

Sounds crazy, right?

Listen to Jesus in Matthew 16:

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Jesus told his followers that he expected them to engage in this practice.

And I wish we engaged in this more, particularly here in the western world. It’s such a foreign concept to us. In a sense, we bind and loose all the time. It’s how we created denominations, only we did it out of ignorance. I wish we knew how to respect the dialogue and opinions of others more. I wish we knew how to honor our elders and equip them with the positions and respect that would allow them to teach and lead more. I wish we respected the community’s decisions more than our own personal opinions. It seems like we might be able to do more for the Kingdom — and in an ironic twist, we’d actually preserve the space to disagree in a healthy way.

I find there’s so much more that I want to unpack with this teaching. And I know that when I introduce this idea to my students it changes everything — so I know there’s so much more to be said. But it’s pretty interesting to watch an ancient community of people who came together with a really big problem and some really good arguments. They hashed it out, they weighed the options, and they decided to side with grace. They loosed the Gentiles from the miqsat ma’asay haTorah.

May we find the courage to follow in their steps.