I. It was God's will that, by Jew and Gentile, by heretic and orthodox, by men of the East and men of the West, the truth should be tried and sifted, the power of the word brought out, and the might of His Spirit demonstrated. Had Judaism prevailed, the sacred spark of Divine life must have been overlaid and ultimately extinguished. But, for the recognition of the Unity of God, for the conservation of the moral conscience, for the maintenance of the record of God's everlasting covenant, it was necessary that the Jewish element should abide and be incorporated. Long was the struggle before it would consent to pass into its place of testifying to Christ, and to take its yoke off the shoulders of the brethren. Nor let us think that it is yet at an end. In the whole ascetical and ceremonial system of Rome we have the successor of the Jewish spirit and practice.
II. Still, then, the conflict is being maintained, and let us never forget it. We stand on the immovable basis of Gentile Christianity. We know no difference of race or colour, of sex or condition in life; to us there is neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek nor barbarian, bond nor free. The struggle lasts, but the future is not without largeness of promise and brightness of hope. Day by day men stand up among us witnessing to these truths; lives are spent and souls are called to glory; of Christ's fulness we are receiving and grace for grace. And as, close upon the end of the first century, a Christian father could make it his boast that there was not a known land where God the Father was not called on through His Son Jesus Christ, so we, past the noontide of the nineteenth great secular day, may boast, by the same grace of God, that there is not a land on the now revealed earth where the free doctrines of salvation by individual faith and individual sanctification are not proclaimed on the testimony of the Word of God.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. iii., p. 235.
References: Acts 11:18. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. i., No. 44; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 545.