Acts chapter 15 describes a critical decision point in the life of the New Testament church. Lately Gentiles had been flocking into the church. Did those Gentiles have to follow Jewish religious customs? What were the essential bits and what were the inessential bits? There was a whole body of Jewish ceremonial law that specified what was clean and what was unclean as far as food went, but Peter had just recently learnt that nothing was unclean if God declared it to be clean.
The question was a difficult one. Jesus himself had said, “Don’t think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfil. Until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter or one pen stroke will in any way pass away from the law, until everything is done.” At the same time he had quite happily disregarded traditions relating to the Sabbath. So, clearly some of the old Jewish law no longer applied and some of it still applied. The difficult question for the apostles was, which bits were which?
Jesus had himself been the sacrifice necessary for paying for people’s sins, so there was no longer any need for them to make animal sacrifices to pay for their sins. Christianity was a message of grace – the free gift of God with no strings attached – and the message of grace stood on its own; it was not just something which got added to the requirements of the Jewish law.