With whom you eat with says a lot about who you are. Isn’t it funny that the civil rights movement began at a lunch counter? “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” Imagine that! Jesus had already broken through some of these barriers, but they were long, deep, and hard to overcome even among those who followed Him and believed in Him and saw Him resurrected from the dead in their midst. Even then they did not get it completely. This brings us to

Act II: The Breakthrough.

The breakthrough is Acts 10. Do you remember Cornelius? Cornelius was a Gentile — a God-fearing Gentile. He was not an atheist. He believed that there was a supreme being. He knew something about the Old Testament law. He was familiar with the scriptures of the Torah. He went to a synagogue perhaps from time to time. All of this is true. But there was still this fact that he was not a member of the covenant people of God. He was a Gentile. And Peter, even though he had walked and talked with Jesus for three years all around Galilee and Nazareth and Jerusalem; and had heard Him speak and had seen Him eat with sinners — even after all of that, Peter still harbored prejudice against Gentiles.

You remember what happened. He had a vision when he was at Joppa, at the house of Simon the tanner. This vision took place about dinnertime. Peter got hungry. He saw in his vision this cafeteria, this whole spread of food. It was soul food. It was pig’s feet, and collard greens, and pork chops. And Peter thought, “I cannot eat that! I would like to eat that — I am so hungry and that sure looks good — but I am a Jew. We do not eat that kind of stuff. This is not kosher.” And you remember the message he was given by Christ in the vision. “Take and eat, Peter. Enjoy yourself! What I have called ‘clean’ you should not call ‘unclean’” (Acts 10:15).

Here was a message from God which had a direct application to the missionary strategy of the early church. Immediately Peter goes to the house of Cornelius and he realizes that the vision was about more than what he should eat for lunch. It was about with whom he should eat at the Table of the Lord. So Peter goes there and he preaches the Gospel and the Holy Spirit falls on that group. Cornelius gets saved and the congregation that meets in his house encounters the living Christ. There is a baptism service and a whole new gospel breakthrough.

Now the Gospel can go to Gentiles as well as Jews. And Peter was the instrument of that breakthrough. Do not forget that. That point is important to Galatians. Peter was the one, not Paul.

Paul, of course, had his own breakthrough on the road to Damascus when the Lord revealed Himself to Paul in a powerful way. Paul was as deeply steeped in prejudice against Gentiles as Peter ever was — maybe more so. He was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, circumcised on the eighth day, all of that. He, too, had a breakthrough when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus and said: “Saul, Saul, why persecuteth thou me?” “I am not persecuting you, Lord,” he might have said. “I am persecuting these miserable Christians down here.” Jesus said, “Why persecuteth thou me? Because when you do it unto one of the least of these, you do it unto me” (Acts 9:3-5).

There is a correlation between Christology and ecclesiology. Paul learned that truth on the road to Damascus. He had a breakthrough. But this great breakthrough and new missionary strategy did not come through Paul initially, it came through Peter. And now we come to this pivotal passage in Galatians 2:11-16. We are now at