Peter Answers the Circumcision

In the text before us, Peter is brought to task for going to a Gentile home and eating with them. The apostles and elders in the Jerusalem church (they of the circumcision) were the ones who challenged the apostle. Peter's defense is simply that he had nothing to do with it. He was simply obeying what the Holy Spirit told him to do. In fact, the critics were doing to Peter what the Spirit expressly forbade Peter to do to Cornelius—to discriminate.

Peter was accompanied by six brothers from the church in Joppa. These men witnessed Peter's message and the resulting work of the Holy Spirit falling on the household of this Gentile just like He did on them in the upper room on the Day of Pentecost.

The issue is their failure to understand the scope of Christ's fulfillment of God's purpose. Salvation is to come to people from every nation (ethnos; Revelation 9:5). The incident at the house of Cornelius in Caesarea was the initiation of that work.