Exiting Peer Pressure from Dead People

One of my friends recently said that adhering to tradition is like giving in to peer pressure from dead people.

So, fight or flight? Which option should you choose?

“I’m no quitter!” How many times have those three words helped you persevere where others might have given up? Yet, there is a time to back away from a struggle against tradition and those defined by it.

Paul demonstrated this in Damascus, Jerusalem and his numerous departure from synagogues to more open territory.

He left Damascus and its environs (Arabia) after being discipled there then confounding the authorities with his arguments that Jesus is the Messiah. A little nudge from people trying to kill him helped with that decision.

Arriving in Jerusalem the believers feared a conspiracy then admitted him into their number until “Hellenists” conspired against him.

Those Hellenists were the same people he would confront at the Jerusalem Council, in his letter to the Romans and they were certainly involved in the fracas that got him arrested in Jerusalem years later. Probably a mixed group of Jewish believers from foreign lands and adherents to Judaism from those places these people valued the Torah and all that went with it.

The believers among them preferred their traditions to Jesus’ commands to take the gospel to the nations. That door was tightly shut.

Saul/Paul’s departure is marked by a couple of interesting details.

Luke notes that the believers catching wind of threats against him took him to Caesarea, sending him off to Tarsus. Paul wrote in Galatians that he left because of a vision of Jesus. I think it was a mix of godly people and the Spirit that closed one door and opened another. He could have hardly shaken the Gentile world from Jerusalem.

The other observation is the Jerusalem hub “throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up…in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.”

Good things happened in Jerusalem after Saul left.

Could it be that his departure was meant for the good of those who troubled him as well as for the apostle himself?

Jesus never calls us to break old wineskins. However stifling they may be the church that Jesus built in generations before us has value to him—tradition bound or not.

Sometimes an exit may feel like quitting when, in reality, it is a doorway into the future for people on both sides of the threshold.