Good morning friends, welcome to yet another Let's Talk. It's 15th of May, Monday the 15th of May, and we carry on with Memorable Monday where we look at various church history events. And we've been looking a little bit about how the Jews and the Gentiles were in the early church. And in particular, we started to see how this was mainly a Jewish affair. You know, you had, it was split up really this first century Christianity into what is known as Hellenistic Jews and Hebrew Jews, but it started to fracture a little bit at an early point and then you started to see kind of an outspilling from Jerusalem into the rest of the known world. And that's what we're going to focus a little bit of our attention on This morning as we see some of the way that the early church began, it's helpful for us to see this because when we study in the New Testament and we look in at the Book of Acts, it's helpful for us to see the way in which this continued and the way that this started. So, we see that this process began, this kind of tension began, quite early on. I remind you that I'm Rocky Stevenson, pastor of Benoni Bible Church. If you ever want to get a hold of me, you're welcome to do that at pastatbenonibiblechurch.co.za. In Acts chapter 6 verse 1 we see some of the tension beginning. It says there, Now in those days, while the disciples were multiplying in number, there was grumbling from the Hellenists against the Hebrews, because their widows were being overlooked in the daily serving of food. And so this is where we start to see in the book of Acts a little bit of a tension arising between those that are now known as Hellenistic Jews and those that are known as Hebrew Jews. The Hellenists, as we've looked at once before, is really more of a common intellectual culture. It's those that were Greek by culture, but they may well have been Jews in their kind of heritage, but they had adopted Greek as their main language. Those that would have been in Jerusalem would have used Aramaic most likely as their main language not necessarily even Hebrew as such but more Aramaic and they would have been holding on to the more Jewish kind of a tradition. but those that were of this Hellenistic nature were more Greek in their culture and they would have seen themselves as a bit more forward thinking than what they would have their Hebrew kind of brothers or sisters. So you find this tension really boiling up in Acts chapter 6 where you've got some of the Hellenists accusing the Jews there of or the Hebrew Jews of not looking after their widows as well as what they should have been. Whether this was true or not, we're not 100% sure. The text doesn't tell us. So you have very much a language difference being something of a tension point in the early church. And that takes you back to something like Genesis chapter 11, where you see God confusing the language of the people groups, which caused them to have a bit more of a tension between each other and causing them to split up into the rest of the world. this kind of happens even here at in Jerusalem with the early church as you start to have this tension between the Hellenistic Jews and the Hebrew Jews the Greek speaking Christians now and Now that the Hebrew speaking or Aramaic speaking Christians so the chief language that was spoken in all of Israel at this time was actually Aramaic not Greek and the Hellenistic Jews and would have known very little or no Aramaic and so then the Hebrews by contrast were Jews that were native to the land of Israel and a lot of their brothers and sisters that had adopted Greek as their spoken language would have known Greek instead of Aramaic. and that that would have been their first language choice which interestingly enough the New Testament is written in Greek and that is there's very clear evidence of this. Today there seems to be a group of people that are really propagating that the New Testament was written in Hebrew that Jesus name is not Yesus but Yeshua, and you have to call Jesus Yeshua, otherwise you don't call him the name that he's supposed to be called, but there's really no evidence at all. It lacks so much evidence. God has written the New Testament. He's inspired the New Testament in the language of Greek, which is a real wonder because Hebrew has got such a poetic nature to it and so good for really the way that it's been written with a lot of it with song and a lot of it as narrative whereas the New Testament is very specific and written in Greek and God has chosen to do that not us and there really is no evidence of the New Testament having been written in Hebrew It could be that the book of James was written in Hebrew but even there there's no evidence of this. People have said it for a while but there's no manuscripts written or that we can find any manuscript evidence of James even being written in Hebrew. So this cultural divide between the Hebrew Jews or let's say the Hebrew Christians and the Hellenistic Christians would already have produced a lot of friction in these people before they even became Christians. You can think of this in a multicultural kind of a setting within a church environment. Oftentimes the language causes a barrier. I can remember even when I was the pastor of Middleburg Baptist Church, there were times where I needed to ask certain individuals to please speak a language that others in the room could understand. because some would want to speak in their home language, but others standing around were not able to speak the language that was being spoken. And so it is in the best interest of those around to speak the same language that everyone can understand, even if it is broken, rather than to speak in such a way that it excludes somebody. As the scriptures even teach that it's when you speak a foreign language that somebody becomes a foreigner to you, in many respects. So the problem was that the Hebrew Christians thought of themselves really as true Jews in many respects, born and brought up in the Jewish homeland which God had given to their ancestors and They would look down on the Hellenistic Jews as partly foreigners. These guys have come out from outside of our country and they speak a different language and perhaps corrupted by contact with the pagan society. That's how they would see them. They'd look down on them. And on the other hand, the Hellenistic Jews tended to think of themselves as being more cultured and civilized than their Palestinian cousins. They regarded these Hebrew Jews or from the Palestinian type of origin, it's what we call Palestine, is that broader area of Israel. They saw them as narrow-minded. They saw them as too traditional, not aware enough of even the outside world. And so you have both groups of these people really looking down on each other. And this is the old way that man in his pride puffs himself up and always looks at his neighbor down his nose. So this description of the Hebrew Jews and the Hellenistic Jews applies really only in a general way to what most of them tended to be like. There were exceptions, of course, and the most notable even exception is the Apostle Paul. He was brought up in a Hellenistic city of Tarsus in Asia Minor, but he surpassed even the Hebrew Jews in their intolerant zeal for the traditional Judaism before his Damascus Road experience convinced him that Jesus really was the Messiah. And so you have somebody like him who's an exception to the rule. There existed this problem between the Palestinian and the Hellenistic Jews or let's say the Hebrew Jews and the Hellenistic Jews and it carried over into the first century Christian Church. Jesus of Nazareth had followers that were from the Hebrew Jews as well as from the Hellenistic Jews and from these sections of Jewish people that had now turned to Christ and become Christians. and so these frictions between them continued despite their common faith in a risen Messiah and we can see this playing out in some of the New Testament in Acts chapter 2, 44-45 it says and all those who had believed were together and had all things in common and they began selling their property and possessions and were dividing up with all as anyone might have need. And so there was really this oneness because of Christ but there was still this tension between the Hellenistic Christian converts and the Hebrew Christian converts. and we can see this happening in the early church in particular with their widows as we see in Acts chapter 6 how the Hellenists complained that their widows had been overlooked when it came to the distribution of food and this particular problem was really resolved by the appointment of seven deacons whose names were all Greek names so most likely selected from the Hellenistic group within the early church but underlying tensions between these Hebrew Jews and the Hellenistic, let's say the Hebrew Jewish Christian converts as such, and the Hellenistic Christian Jewish converts remained. And there's this non-traditional attitude and the outlook of the Hellenistic Jewish Christians surfaced in a very dangerous way. as they began to take more open, negative, critical stances towards the history, the traditions of Israel and it seems that it started to view these things afresh in the light of their new faith in Jesus and this then caused them to have even less respect towards the temple, the law of Moses, its customs and this would even show itself later on even with some of the controversy regarding circumcision One of their spokesmen, in fact one of the early Christian martyrs, was Stephen. We battle to see some of the tensions when we're reading in the book of Acts because we've been somewhat far removed from this, but in Acts chapter 7 we see some of the criticism that the Hellenistic Christian converts, these believers, could make of their Jewish history and tradition. and this really provoked and outraged the Jewish authorities and it led to the first great persecution of the church. Stephen could be seen as one of those biblical non-conformists in many respects and Stephen was stoned to death. Many believers were forced to flee from Jerusalem in particular of the Hellenistic Jewish convert section of the early church. This persecution however seems to mainly have affected those Hellenistic Christians and that section of the church. the more traditionally minded Hebrew believers represented by the Apostles in particular by James the half-brother of Jesus didn't seem to have as much trouble and Luke makes that quite clear in Acts chapter 8 verse 1 that the Apostles were not affected by the persecution ordinary Hebrew believers they didn't really scatter from Jerusalem they were not dispersed like those Hellenistic Christian converts and those Hellenistic Christian converts were really dispersed to all around that area and they resemble these Hebrew Christian converts reassembled in Jerusalem after the trouble that died down and in Acts 11 verse 1 it indicates this to us that the Hellenistic believers however appear to have even left the area entirely so this is part of what we see happening as you have this tension between the more Greek speaking Christians and those that would have been more of the Aramaic speaking Christians at this time and you have those that were let's say the Hebrew converted Christians that stayed inside of Jerusalem underneath James and you have those that were of the Hellenistic Christians that seem to have dispersed and so the gospel would be spread towards other parts and it's helpful for us to see this as we start to see more and more of the history of the early church. So I pray that the Lord would use this. I pray that it would also really come to life in your own mind as you think through this. But we'll look more next week at the ways in which this played its way out.