When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?

Galatians 2:14

For Meditation

Hypocrisy is poisonous and dangerous. Allowed to flow freely among any group, it will saturate and destroy the very fabric of that community.

It must be openly confronted with all fervor and rooted out by insisting on truth. That’s the only way of dealing with it – stopping it in its tracks. God demands it. Jesus demonstrated it with the Pharisees, and here, Paul affirms it with Peter (Gal. 2:11-16).

Peter, Paul, and Barnabas ate with the Gentiles freely before some friends of James visited from Jerusalem. But Peter “began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy so that by their hypocrisy, even Barnabas was led astray” (Gal. 2:12-13). Thank God, Paul confronted him right before everybody (14).

“When I saw that they were not following the truth of the gospel message, I said to Peter in front of all the others, “Since you, a Jew by birth, have discarded the Jewish laws and are living like a Gentile, why are you now trying to make these Gentiles follow the Jewish traditions?” (14).

No one is too big to be confronted when they show their double-face on any issue in Christian fellowship. The honor of God and the purity of His church must always be held highest above human recognition and all courtesies.

Peter knew better. God had spoken to him directly in a vision that he should call nothing unclean that He has cleansed (Acts 10:15). But that’s the danger of self-preservation or face-saving before humans. It will always cause you to honor humans above God. The friends of James did that number on Peter, and he lost his alignment with Christ in that situation. But for Paul’s firm rebuke, the Galatians believers would have been bruised by Jewish superiority and relegated to second class Christians (Gal. 2:13).

Such hypocritical behavior permeates Christianity today in many forms. They must be confronted and deliberately rooted out before its poison does the ultimate damage – the destruction of the unity of the body and our Christian fellowship.