Acts 10 - God works in mysterious ways

Chad Werkhoven
Feb 18, 2022
2 min read

God overcomes every societal, racial and religious barrier to save people through the gospel.

Read / Listen to the chapter:

Acts 10 Summary

In the Old Testament, a key way that God demonstrated His covenant was by separating His people away from the world. Not only did the Hebrews maintain a far different diet than their neighbors, but they had little to no associations with them.

That all changes in today's chapter. Cornelius and Peter, two men who could not be any different in their backgrounds, are brought together by God's grace, and in doing so the door is officially opened for the gospel to go out to all nations.

This development was so mind blowing to Peter that God had to repeat the vision three times for him (v16).

Dig Deeper

Yesterday we saw that Jesus encountered Saul when he was in the middle of a trip.

Today in chapter 10, we see a link between Peter & Cornelius' experience with Jesus: they were both at prayer when they had their visions.

Just to be clear, God no longer needs to communicate through visions now that we have all of His written words, but the point is that, in general, you will be much more receptive to the Holy Spirit speaking to you through His Word when you make time to separate yourself from the busyness for awhile and spend some time reading the Bible and praying.

There's a ton of important theology being developed in this chapter:

v4 - [Cornelius'] prayers and alms have ascended as a memorial before God.
v15 - What God has made clean, do not call impure.
v28 - God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.
v34-35 - Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
v43 - [The Old Testament] bear witness that everyone who believes in Christ receives forgiveness of sins through his name.
v44 - the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the Word.

AAA Prayer:

ACKNOWLEDGE WHO GOD IS: God, the creator of all things, who has made all things clean through Christ (v15)
ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH GOD'S WILL: Pray that you will view all people as equal image bearers of God who are hungry for the gospel.
ASK GOD FOR WHAT YOU NEED: