‘And a voice came to him again the second time, “What God has cleansed, do not treat as common.” '
But immediately there came a word of rebuke. (We might even paraphrase as, ‘What God has cleansed, how dare you call common?') What was before him had been given to him by God. Surely he would recognise that anything that God gave him would have been cleansed, and was not to be seen as ‘common' (shorthand for ‘common and unclean' - Acts 10:14), for it would have been sanctified by God. It was now therefore not common but holy.
This was unquestionably intended to make him think. On the one hand were years of training and regulation. On the other was the undoubted fact that if God had provided something which He had cleansed, it must be acceptable, and fit to eat and could surely not cause uncleanness. It put him in a quandary.
We should note that this is not strictly dealing with the question of the Christian attitude towards ‘unclean foods'. Peter is not said to have eaten of them, and God is not saying that He has cleansed ‘everything' and that therefore everything can be eaten. What Peter had been called on to eat was a direct gift from God, prepared for him by God, and it was thus holy. God's purpose was to make him realise that anything, and any man, whom He Himself is demonstrated to have cleansed, could not be looked on as unclean.
There is no suggestion here that He has cleansed all foods. Only those in the sheet were cleansed. But it is clear that the very idea behind it does weaken the argument concerning the uncleanness of certain foods. It confirms that they are not inherently unclean, for they can be made holy. Compare Jesus' teaching in Mark 7:14-23.
This sheet full of such a variety of creatures, all of which had been ‘sanctified' by God out of creation in spite of what they were, was an apt picture of the whole variety of people whom God would call out of the world and sanctify to Himself in the Christian church. Peter would never forget the lesson that once sanctified all are precious to God.
It would take time for Peter to appreciate the full significance of this vision. His previous understanding had been that God had redeemed Israel. Now he was being faced with the fact that God had cleansed large numbers of Gentiles through the cross whose names were written in heaven (Luke 10:20) and was ready to receive them also in the one nation which would replace Israel (Matthew 21:43) as he later enunciates in his first letter (1 Peter 1:1-2; 1 Peter 1:18-21; 1 Peter 2:9-10; 1 Peter 4:3-5)