What Does Acts 15:9 Mean?

(9) **And put no difference between us and them.**—It is obvious that this implies the most entire acceptance of the teaching which St. Paul had privately communicated to the three who were as the pillars of the Church (Galatians 2:9). In Romans 10:12 we have almost the very words of St. Peter reproduced. **Purifying their hearts by faith.**—The addition of these words is very suggestive. It was not only in the “gifts” of the Spirit, the tongues and prophecy, that the Apostle saw the witness which God had borne to the acceptance of the Gentiles, but even more than this, in the new purity growing out of a new faith in God and a new hope. Underlying the words we trace the assertion of a higher ideal of purity than that on which the Pharisees were insisting. They looked on the Gentiles as impure because they did not observe the ceremonial law and the traditions of the elders as to purity. He had learnt to call no man common or unclean (Acts 10:28) and to see that it was in the heart, and not in the flesh, that the work of purifying was to be accomplished. Comp. in connection with the thought suggested in the Note on Acts 15:5, the teaching as to purity in Titus 1:15.