Let the Nations Be Glad!
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When Peter meets Cornelius, he says, “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (10:34–35). This is the sentence that might lead some to think that Cornelius was already saved from his sin even before he heard and believed the gospel. But in fact Luke’s point in telling the story seems to be just the opposite.
It will be helpful to ask two questions that are really pressing in this story. One is this: Was Cornelius already saved before Peter preached Christ to him? The reason this is pressing is that verses 34–35 have led many to say that he was. These verses are the beginning of Peter’s sermon: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
You can see how readers would easily conclude that Cornelius was already accepted by God since verse 2 said that he indeed feared God and prayed and gave alms. Did Peter then just inform Cornelius about the acceptance and salvation that he already had? And can we draw the conclusion for missions that there are unreached people who already have a saving relationship with God before they hear the gospel of Christ?
So the first question is, Does verse 35 mean that Cornelius and people like him are already justified and reconciled to God and saved from wrath? Is that Peter’s point in saying this and Luke’s point in writing it?
WAS CORNELIUS ALREADY SAVED?
Let me give you four reasons from the text for answering no.
1. Acts 11:14 says that the message Peter brought was the means by which Cornelius was saved. In Acts 11:13–14, Peter tells the story of the angel’s appearance to Cornelius: “He told us how he had seen the angel stand in his house and say, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon who is called Peter; he will declare to you a message by which you will be saved, you and all your household.’”
Notice two things. First, notice that the message itself is essential. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation. Then notice that the tense of the verb is future: “a message by which you will be saved.” In other words, the message was not simply a way of informing Cornelius that he already was saved. If he sends for Peter and hears the message and believes on the Christ of that message, then he will be saved. And if he does not, he won’t be. This surely is why the entire story is built around God’s miraculous act of getting Cornelius and Peter together. There was a message that Cornelius needed to hear to be saved (10:22, 33).
So Acts 10:35 probably does not mean that Cornelius is already saved when it says that people in unreached ethnic groups who fear God and do right are acceptable to God. Cornelius had to hear the gospel message to be saved.
2. Peter makes this point at the end of his sermon in 10:43. He brings the message to a close with these words: “To him [i.e., to Christ] all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” Forgiveness of sins is essential to salvation. No one is saved whose sins against God are not forgiven by God. And Peter says that forgiveness comes through believing in Christ, and it comes through the name of Christ.
He does not say, “I am here to announce to you that those of you who fear God and do right are already forgiven.” He says, “I am here so that you may hear the gospel and receive forgiveness in the name of Christ by believing in him.” So again it is unlikely that verse 35 means that Cornelius and his household were already forgiven for their sins before they heard the message of Christ.
3. Elsewhere in the Book of Acts, even those who are the most God-fearing and ethical, namely, the Jews, are told that they must repent and believe in order to be saved. The Jews at Pentecost were called “devout men” (2:5), as Cornelius was called a devout man (10:2). But Peter ended his message in Acts 2 by calling even devout Jews to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins (2:38). The same is true in Acts 3:19 and 13:38–39.
So Luke is not trying to tell us in this book that devout, God-fearing people who practice what is right the best they know how are already saved and do not need the gospel. The gospel got its start among the most devout people in the world, namely, the Jews. They had more advantages in knowing God than any of the other peoples of the earth. Yet they were told again and again that devoutness and works of righteousness and religious sincerity do not solve the problem of sin. The only hope is to believe on Jesus.
4. The fourth reason for saying that verse 35 does not mean that Cornelius and others like him are already saved is found in Acts 11:18. When the people hear Peter tell the story about Cornelius, their initial misgivings are silenced. Luke says, “And they glorified God, saying, ‘Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life.’” In other words, they did not already have eternal life. Repentance leads to eternal life (literally, it is “unto eternal life”). They received eternal life when they heard the message about Christ and turned to believe and follow him.
So Acts 10:35 does not mean that Cornelius was already saved because he was in some sense a God-fearer and did many right and noble things. That is the answer to the first question.
HOW WAS CORNELIUS “ACCEPTABLE” TO GOD?
The second is simply, What then does it mean when Peter says, “In every nation anyone who fears [God] and does what is right is acceptable to him” (10:35)? And what does this have to do with our commitment to world evangelization?
In trying to answer this question, my first thought was that what Peter means in verse 35 is what God meant in the vision about the unclean animals, namely, the lesson of verse 15: “What God has made clean, do not call common.” But something stopped me and made me think again.
Consider verse 28. Peter is explaining to the Gentiles why he was willing to come and says, “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation, but God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.” In other words, a Christian should never look down on people from any race or ethnic group and say that that they are unfit to hear the gospel from me. Or, they are too unclean for me to go into their house to share the gospel. Or, they are not worth evangelizing. Or, they have too many offensive habits for me even to get near them.
But the phrase that makes verse 28 so powerful is the phrase “any person” or “anyone”: “God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.” In other words, Peter learned from his vision on the housetop in Joppa that God rules no one out of his favor on the basis of race or ethnic origin or mere cultural or physical distinctives. “Common and unclean” meant rejected, despised, taboo. It was like leprosy.
Peter’s point in verse 28 is that there is not one human being on the face of the earth that we should think about in that way. Not one. Our hearts should go out to every single person whatever the color, whatever the ethnic origin, whatever the physical traits, whatever the cultural distinctives. We are not to write off anybody. “God has shown me that I should not call anyone—not one—common or unclean.”
Now, that is not what Peter says in verse 35, which is what kept me from assuming that verse 35 simply means that all people are acceptable as candidates for salvation, no matter their ethnic background. In verse 35, Peter says, “In every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” He is not talking about every person as he was in verse 28. Here he is talking about some in every nation. “In every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” The acceptability Peter has in mind here is something more, it seems, than merely not being common or unclean. That’s everybody. Peter said, Do not “call any person common or unclean.” Here he says that only some in every nation fear God and do right, and these are acceptable to God.
Now we know two things that verse 35 does not mean. (1) It does not mean that these God-fearing doers of good are saved. We saw four reasons why it can’t mean that. (2) It does not mean merely that they are acceptable candidates for evangel
ism (not common or unclean, not taboo), because verse 28 already said that’s true of everybody, not just some. But verse 35 says that only some are God-fearing, doing what is right and thus acceptable. Therefore, the meaning probably lies somewhere between these two: between being saved and being a touchable, lovable human candidate for evangelism.
My suggestion is that Cornelius represents a kind of unsaved person among an unreached people group who is seeking God in an extraordinary way. Peter is saying that God accepts this search as genuine (hence “acceptable” in verse 35) and works wonders to bring that person the gospel of Jesus Christ the way he did through the visions of both Peter on the housetop and Cornelius in the hour of prayer.
A Modern Cornelius
This “extraordinary searching” still happens today. Don Richardson, in his book Eternity in Their Hearts, tells of a conversion very similar to that of Cornelius. The Gedeo people of south-central Ethiopia were a tribe of a half-million coffee-growing people who believed in a benevolent being called Magano, the omnipotent Creator of all that is. Few of the Gedeo people prayed to Magano, being concerned instead to appease an evil being they called Sheit’an. But one Gedeo man, Warrasa Wanga, from the town of Dilla on the edge of Gedeo tribal land, prayed to Magano to reveal himself to the Gedeo people.
Then Warrasa Wanga had a vision: Two white-skinned strangers came and built flimsy shelters for themselves under the shade of a sycamore tree near Dilla. Later they built more permanent shiny-roofed structures, which eventually dotted an entire hillside. Warrasa had never seen anything like these structures, since all of the Gedeo dwellings were grass-roofed. Then Warassa heard a voice say, “These men will bring you a message from Magano, the God you seek. Wait for them.” In the last scene of his vision, Warrasa saw himself remove the center pole from his own house, carry it out of the town, and set it in the ground next to one of the shiny-roofed dwellings of the men. In Gedeo symbolism, the center pole of a man’s house stands for his very life.
Eight years later, in December 1948, two Canadian missionaries, Albert Brant and Glen Cain, came to Ethiopia to begin a work among the Gedeo people. They intended to ask permission from Ethiopian officials to place their new mission in the center of the Gedeo region, but they were advised by other Ethiopians that their request would be refused because of the current political climate. The advisors told them to ask permission to go only as far as Dilla, on the extreme edge of Gedeo tribal land. Permission was granted, and when they reached Dilla, the missionaries set up their tents under an old sycamore tree.
Thirty years later there were more than two hundred churches among the Gedeo people, with each church averaging more than two hundred members.29 Almost the entire Gedeo tribe has been influenced by the gospel. Warrasa was one of the first converts and the first to be imprisoned for his faith.30
The Fear of God That Is Acceptable to God
The main evidence that Luke is talking about this kind of “acceptable” unsaved person who seeks the true God and his messengers is found in Acts 10:31–32, where Cornelius says that the angel said to him, “Cornelius, your prayer has been heard and your alms have been remembered before God.
Send therefore to Joppa and ask for Simon who is called Peter.” Notice: Your prayers have been heard . . . therefore send for Peter. This implies that the prayers were for God to send him what he needed in order to be saved.
So the fear of God that is acceptable to God in verse 35 is a true sense that there is a holy God, that we have to meet him someday as desperate sinners, that we cannot save ourselves and need to know God’s way of salvation, and that we have to pray for it day and night and seek to act on the light we have. This is what Cornelius was doing. And God accepted his prayer and his groping for truth in his life (Acts 17:27) and worked wonders to bring the saving message of the gospel to him. Cornelius would not have been saved if no one had taken him the gospel. And no one who can apprehend revelation (see note 27) will be saved today without the gospel.
Therefore, Cornelius does not represent persons who are saved without hearing and believing the gospel; rather, he illustrates God’s intention to take out a people for his name from “every nation” (Acts 10:35) through the sending of gospel messengers across cultural lines, which had once been taboo.
We should learn with the Jewish church in Jerusalem that “to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life” (11:18). But we must be sure that we learn this the way they learned it: They inferred this from the fact that the Gentiles believed the gospel that Peter preached and received the Holy Spirit. They did not infer the acceptance of the Gentiles from their fear of God and their good deeds.
It appears therefore that Luke’s intention in telling the Cornelius story is to show that Gentiles can become part of the chosen people of God through faith in Christ in spite of their ceremonial “uncleanness.” The point is not that Gentiles are already part of God’s chosen people because they fear God and do many good deeds. The key sentence is Acts 11:14: “He will declare to you a message by which you will be saved.”
“No Other Name under Heaven”—Acts 4:12
The reason this message saves is that it proclaims the name that saves— the name of Jesus. Peter said that God visited the Gentiles “to take from them a people for his name” (Acts 15:14). It stands to reason then that the proclamation by which God takes a people for his name would be a message that hinges on the name of his Son Jesus. This is, in fact, what we saw in Peter’s preaching at the house of Cornelius. The sermon comes to its climax with these words about Jesus: “Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43).
The implicit necessity of hearing and embracing the name of Jesus, which we see in the story of Cornelius, is made explicit in Acts 4:12 in the climax of another sermon by Peter, this time before the Jewish rulers in Jerusalem: “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
The situation behind this famous sentence is that the risen Jesus healed a man through Peter and John. The man had been lame from birth, but he got up and ran through the temple praising God. A crowd gathered and Peter preached. His message makes it obvious that what is at stake here is not merely a local religious phenomenon. It has to do with everybody in the world.
Then according to Acts 4:1, the priests and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came and arrested Peter and John and put them in custody overnight. The next morning the rulers and elders and scribes gather and interrogate Peter and John. In the course of the interrogation, Peter draws out the implication of the universal lordship of Jesus: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (4:12).
We need to feel the force of this universal claim by taking several phrases very seriously. The reason there is salvation in no one else is that “there is no other name under heaven [not just no other name in Israel but no other name under heaven, including the heaven over Greece and Rome and Spain, etc.] given among men [not just among Jews but among all humans everywhere] by which we must be saved.” These two phrases, “under heaven” and “among men,” press the claim of universality to its fullest extent.
But there is even more here that we need to see. Commentators usually interpret Acts 4:12 to mean that without believing in Jesus a person cannot be saved. In other words, Acts 4:12 is seen as a crucial text in answering the question whether those who have never heard the gospel of Jesus can be saved. But Clark Pinnock represents others who say that “Acts 4:12 does not say anything about [this question]. . . . It does not comment on the fate of the heathen. Although it is a question of great importance to us, it is not one on which Acts 4:12 renders a judgment, either positive or negative.”31 Rather, what Acts 4:12 says is that “salvation in its fullness is available to humankind only because God in the person of his Son Jesus provided it.”32 In other words, the verse says that salvation comes
only through the work of Jesus but not only through faith in Jesus. His work can benefit those who relate to God properly without him, for example, on the basis of general revelation in nature.
The problem with Pinnock’s interpretation is that it does not reckon with the true significance of Peter’s focus on the name of Jesus. “There is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.” Peter is saying something more than that there is no other source of saving power that you can be saved by under some other name. The point of saying “There is no other name” is that we are saved by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus. Calling on his name is our entrance into fellowship with God. If one is saved by Jesus incognito, one does not speak of being saved by his name.
We noticed above that Peter said in Acts 10:43, “Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” The name of Jesus is the focus of faith and repentance. In order to believe on Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, you must believe on his name, which means that you have to have heard of him and know who he is as a particular man who did a particular saving work and rose from the dead.
The point of Acts 4:12 for missions is made explicit in the way Paul picks up on this very issue of the name of the Lord Jesus in Romans 10:13–15. This passage shows that missions is essential precisely because “‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”
“How Are They to Believe in Him of Whom They Have Never Heard?”
In Romans 10:13, Paul makes the great gospel declaration, quoting Joel 2:32, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” He follows this with rhetorical questions: “But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?” These are extremely important words relating to the necessity of the missionary enterprise.