He was wide awake. Yet it was dream-like. But real. Three o’clock in the afternoon Cornelius saw an angel. Terror gripped him, but he couldn’t look away. He heard himself stammering: “What is it, Lord?”
The angel announced: “Your prayers and gifts to the poor have not gone unnoticed by God! Now send some men down to Joppa to find a man named Simon Peter. He is staying with Simon, a leather worker who lives near the shore. Ask him to come and visit you.”
Then the angel was gone. Cornelius was alone again. He was more used to giving orders than taking them. He commanded 100 Roman soldiers. His unit was part of the Italian Regiment (the Cohores II Miliaria Italica Civium Romanorum). Centurions like him were the backbone of the Roman army, natural leaders, men who would hold their ground when being beaten and hard pressed, ready, if necessary, to die at their posts.
He was also a Gentile worshiper of the God of the Jewish Scriptures. He kept their ethical code, attended synagogue, and observed the Sabbath. However, he wouldn’t become a Jewish proselyte. Therefore, Jews counted him a ritually unclean Gentile.
Despite the strangeness of the angel-experience, Cornelius chose to believe and obey. Calling two personally-close household servants and a faithful soldier, he confided everything that had happened and sent them on the thirty mile trip to Joppa. He wondered what might come of it.
* * * * *
After the raising of Tabitha from the dead, Peter remained in Joppa at Simon the leather maker’s home. The day after Cornelius’ vision, his servants neared the city. Meanwhile, at Simon’s house, Peter tramped up the outside stairway to the flat roof. The Mediterranean breezes and awning would help cool him during noon prayers.
As he prayed he could hear a meal being prepared downstairs. The aroma wafted on the breeze and his stomach growled. A movement in the heavens caught his eye. He was awake. It was real. But like a dream. The heavens opened and a great sheet, like a ship’s sail, was being let down by its corners. He could see inside it now—animals and reptiles and birds of all kinds. A voice came to him: “Peter, get up, kill and eat!”
He refused. He’d never eaten anything the Jewish food laws called common or unclean. But the voice spoke again, more insistent: “What God has made clean, don’t call common!” Three times the scene repeated. Then slowly the sheet-sail ascended to heaven.
Peter rubbed his eyes. What did it mean? He was perplexed. At that moment Cornelius’ messengers stood at the front gate calling for a Peter who might be staying at the house. On the roof, the Spirit spoke: “Peter, three men are looking for you. Get up and go down and go with them right away. I have sent them.”
Peter lumbered down the outside stairway. “I am Peter. Why have you come?” The messengers explained, “We were sent by Cornelius, a Roman officer. He is a devout man who fears the God of Israel and is well respected by all the Jews. A holy angel instructed him to send for you so you can go to his house and give him a message.” Peter invited them in to be his guests.
* * * * *
The next morning they all set out for Cornelius’ home in Caesarea, accompanied by some of the believers from Joppa. When they arrived the following day, they found Cornelius had invited relatives and close friends. Peter entered the house and Cornelius bowed down to worship him. But Peter rebuked him saying, “I am just a man.”
Peter knew he was on unlawful Gentile ground. “But God has shown me, he said, that I should not call any person common or unclean. That’s why I came. Now tell me, why did you send for me?”
Cornelius explained his angel-appearance. “So I sent for you at once, and it was good of you to come. Now here we are, waiting before God to hear the message the Lord has given you.” (all the above from Acts 10:1-33)
* * * * *
Happenings like this provoke unbelievers to deny the Bible. Visions? Of an angel to Cornelius? Of an animal smorgasbord to Peter? Surely if God wanted two men to meet, he could have found a more normal means! Maybe so. But my point here is to comment on visions.
Why dismiss them as weird? Since God can create out of nothing, open the Red Sea, speak to humans, and so on, why is it weird for his angels to take God’s message to men? Admittedly, a sail holding a zoo is a little “out there”, but it obviously got Peter’s attention.
If we begrudgingly believe visions might have been real then, what about today?
In his book, “Killing Christians”, Tom Doyle tells eight thrilling stories of Muslims becoming Christians and the sufferings they endured. One tells of a woman on foot with her two children fleeing war in Syria. At one point along the way they are befriended in Amman, Jordan by a Muslim Christian woman who gives them an apartment to temporarily shelter in. It had been a dangerous, frightening journey.
One morning Dori’s daughter Hania says, “Mother, I had a dream that lasted almost all night. A man in a white robe told me that we are safe now, and He would take care of us. He said His name was Jesus.”
Dori asks if the man in the dream said anything else. “It was something very strange.
He told me that He loves me. And, Mother, somehow I know that He does! I could see it
in His eyes. And it wasn’t just a dream.”
A shiver goes up Dori’s back. “Sweetheart, I had the same dream!”
Being Muslims, the family believed that Jesus the prophet had appeared to them.
Through the witness of another Muslim-turned-Christian, the family gradually
came to believe who Jesus really is and gave their lives to him.
Events like these don’t appear in the news, so most of us are completely unaware of what God is doing “beneath the radar”. Consequently, unbelievers dismiss as crazy talk of God intervening by dreams and visions into the world’s darkest, most violent places. If God’s to be anywhere, let’s keep him inside the church building! But God isn’t subject to our small-minded, unbelieving attempts to box him in and shut him up. In fact, these are the very days we are to expect such wonders . . .
“And in the last days,” God declares,
I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
even on my male servants and female servants
in those days I will pout out my Spirit and they shall prophecy.
And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;
the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood,
before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.
And it shall come to pass
that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord
shall be saved.”
(Acts 2:17-21)
Be encouraged, Christian! God is at work in the world—
in ways that are beneath-the-radar extraordinary!
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