Acts 15:29, Eat No Blood

//Most Christians interpret the New Testament as a sort of replacement for the old law. We eat all the pigs we want, we wear cotton-blend clothes, and though we may sometimes feel like stoning our children for disobedience, we quell the temptation. The old law has been replaced by Jesus, and all those weird rules don’t apply anymore, right?

So what are we supposed to do with with verses like this one, today, which tells us not to eat the blood of animals? This one is right here in the New Testament. Presumably, we should still be eating only kosher meat…or no meat at all?

With a little creativeness, you can surely devise several excuses why the rule doesn’t apply. The most important excuse is surely that it’s just a downright silly rule. We don’t want to be shackled with rules about what to eat or wear or say or do. If we followed all the rules of the New Testament literally, we’d all be plucking out our right eyes and cutting off our right hands (Matthew 5:29-30). So, we reason, most of the rules just don’t apply … they are “examples,” not “rules.”

Except for those rules that are easy. Those, well, they’re the ones we’re supposed to follow, right? If you haven’t gone through divorce, it’s easy to preach against divorce. If you aren’t gay, it’s easy to preach against gays.

Personally, I think the only rule we should preach is the one that says we are not to judge one another.