It is easy, when you read the New Testament, to lose track of what the argument is about. (And there was an argument going on.) It was an argument for the heart and soul of the worship of God.

Sometimes it appears at times to be a Jew/Gentile argument, but it was rather more than that. What was at stake was whether the God of the Jews would be the God of the whole world, of all nations, or remain only the God of Israel.

When you cast the argument in those terms, the answer seems simple enough, but it was by no means simple at the time. The story of the Book of Acts is the story of the breakout of the worship of Jehovah into the whole world. It is, in Jesus Christ, God’s invitation to all men, not just to the Jews. But this development did not take place without cost or conflict, as we see in Acts 22.