টীকা বর্তমানে শুধুমাত্র ইংরেজিতে উপলব্ধ। বাংলা অনুবাদ চলছে।
Acts 10 — God Is No Respecter of Persons
Cornelius, a Roman centurion, devout and God-fearing, sees an angel — send for one Simon... Peter. Peter, praying on a rooftop, falls into a trance and sees a sheet let down from heaven with all manner of beasts. Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. He refuses; the voice — What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. He goes with the men, enters Cornelius's house, preaches Jesus. The Holy Ghost falls on the Gentiles as on the Jews at Pentecost. They are baptized. The wall between Jew and Gentile is breached in the gospel.
“Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.”
— Acts 10:34-35
- v.1-8 Cornelius's vision
- v.9-23 Peter's rooftop vision
- v.24-43 Peter preaches Christ to Cornelius
- v.44-48 The Spirit falls; Gentiles baptized
Peter names the cultural rule plainly and announces its overruling. God hath shewed me. He acted on a revelation against a strong taboo — the kind of obedience that costs.
The verse is the turning of the gospel from a Jewish renewal movement into a global mission. Without this step the rest of Acts does not happen. One man's willingness to be corrected by God opens the gate for the nations.
God is no respecter of persons. The privileges of birth, ethnicity, status, history do not move Him. He receives the one who fears Him and works righteousness from any nation.
This corrects every form of religious tribalism, then and now. Wherever a church or a Christian quietly believes some people are more eligible for grace than others, the chapter rises to rebuke it.
Whosoever believeth. The condition is faith, not ethnicity. The promise is universal in scope and personal in application. The Spirit fell on the Gentiles in the next verse precisely because they believed the gospel just preached.
Through his name. The remission flows through the Name, not through a system of merit. Forgiveness has a portal, and the portal is Christ. The Old Testament prophets pointed there; Peter says so to a Roman household.
Verse 34 examines you. Is there a category of person in your heart who has — quietly — less claim on God's mercy than another? An ethnic group, a profession, a political tribe, a class? Peter named the prejudice he had been taught and renounced it. The gospel demands the same renunciation in you. God is no respecter of persons, and a Christian cannot be.
The whole interruption — Cornelius's angel, Peter's sheet, the abrupt outpouring on a Roman house — is Christ's doing. He is opening the door to the Gentiles. The remission of sins is through his name; the Spirit falls because the gospel about Him is preached. Acts 10 is the Lord of the Great Commission carrying it out personally, breaking centuries of separation in a single afternoon.
The vision was about food but the meaning was about people (v.28). What God has declared clean — namely the Gentiles, now welcomed in Christ — Peter must not treat as unclean.
The vision had to be given three times (v.16) because the dividing wall was that deeply built into Peter's mind. The hardest prejudices to dismantle are the ones embedded in religious training. God overrules them by direct revelation.