Are there particular smells or sights that make you want to vomit? How about ideas or behaviors that make you want to throw up when you hear about them? For example, how do you feel in your gut when you hear about a new case of some child being abused?

This the known as “the disgust response.” One web site offered this definition: “Disgust, in its essence, is an emotional response characterized by a strong aversion or revulsion towards an object, situation, or idea perceived as offensive, unpleasant, or potentially harmful. It’s a feeling that can make our stomachs churn, our faces contort, and our bodies recoil.” (neurolaunch.com) That’s disgust.

God only knows how many times your mother’s disgust response kept you healthy or alive. The disgust response is a good thing… well, usually. When a few dozen or a few hundred people have their disgust response engaged intensely at the same time, lynchings happen. People are stoned to death. Entire towns are burned down. The disgust response can be a terrifying thing.

What we’re talking about this morning is the necessary connection between disgust and holiness. Here in Acts 22 we’re going to look at an extreme disgust reaction that people have to a word spoken about the Apostle Paul, and one spoken by him, quoting the Lord Jesus Christ. We ask ourselves a couple of key questions:

1. What was going on in those people’s minds?
2. Is it possible that, somewhere deep at the roots of these people’s worldview, there’s a basic instinct that was planted there by God himself?
3. If that’s so, what does that mean for us today?

We are still looking at the traumatic experience Paul had in the temple in Jerusalem. He was violently attacked and badly beaten by a fanatical mob. One thing we haven’t thought much about with regard to this story is the motivation of the mob. Why were they so angry, outraged, and violent? It was because of the disgust response. They believed that Gentiles (non-Jews) were unclean, and the presence of Gentiles within the holy precincts of the sacred Temple of God was an offense and a sacrilege that called for an extreme response. And more than believing it, they felt it at the deepest level, so that they did not have to think about how they were going to react. Their reaction was instantaneous, unp[remeditated, and volcanic.

Perhaps As we have read this story you have thought to yourself that this mob were just horribly racist. However that is not at all what was happening in this situation. We have already seen, back in chapter 5 of this book, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, who would have been a deep black in color. That racial difference didn’t matter to these Jews at all. They knew good and well that there had been Jews in Ethiopia since the time of Solomon. No, this was a religiously-based disgust.

Do you believe that some trespasses are so extreme, some violations are so egregious, that they call for an extreme response? I do. These guys did. That’s why Paul got beat half to death. Let’s think about it for a minute.

Among the things that most of us believe are holy is this: the holy Bible. Around here we stand when it is read, precisely to show by the posture of our bodies that we believe it is holy. Will you stand with me?

READ Acts 22:21-24

What was the word that triggered them? “Gentiles.” Why were they losing their minds over the word “gentiles”? And why, just a few minutes earlier, have they broken out into extreme violence and nearly beaten Paul to death when they fought he had brought a gentile into the Temple?

They thought something unspeakably outrageous had happened or been spoken, a sacrilege so extreme, an event so utterly disgusting that there was simply no way to give a calm measured polite response. Their reaction was unhinged.

It is the things that I cannot understand when I first read them in the Bible that end up opening my eyes the widest to see and grasp what God’s trying to get across in his book. So let’s poke around under this rock for a little while.

what they need to listen for

3 vital truths

ONE Divine disgust drives separation from whatever is contaminated and corrupted by sin

Before we can understand anything about why those people in the temple reacted the way they did, we have to be sure we’ve got the basics of holiness. The word “holy” means “separate” or “set “apart” or “different.” To say that God is holy is to say that he is unlike anything else. Nothing can touch him, nothing can approximate him, nothing can stand alongside him. He is set apart. He is holy.

When God says he wants his people to be holy because he is holy, he means that he wants them to be set apart from anything and everything in the world that is contaminated or corrupted by sin. I use the words “contaminated” and “corrupted” deliberately, to evoke images of something disgusting, revolting, unclean, nauseous. The prophet Habakkuk addresses God as “you who are of purer eyes than to look on evil.” In other words, sin is so disgusting to God that just looking at it would spread putrid filth on his eyes—so he refuses to look. He wants us thinking about sin like that, and feeling that way in our gut.

This is a fundamental principle that lies at the base of everything that is holiness: God’s sense of disgust drives his separation from whatever is contaminated and corrupted by sin, and his people’s holiness, too. Everything starts here.

Now I am perfectly aware that this idea seems antiquated, obsolete, and even barbaric to many Enlightenment-shaped minds in America today. In fact, it is ancient. It is as old as humanity itself. The idea that there is a profound difference between the right and the wrong, and that the wrong is filthy, unclean, revolting to all right-thinking people, has existed in every culture at every stage of human history. There are some matters of right and wrong that cultures disagree on, such as holy days or marriage customs. Yet there are many that there seems to be virtual unanimity on among cultures throughout history, such as murder or theft or betrayal or adultery. The basic moral code that our society is founded on is the 10 commandments that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai 3400 years ago and that Jesus reaffirmed and refreshed 2000 years ago. It is only since I have been alive that any significant numbers of people began to seriously question the customs and taboos that enforced that moral code. Very often it was the disgust response that was the operative tool for society’s policing of those customary detestations. We don’t want to be around violent people. We don’t trust liars. Sexual deviants make our skin crawl.

Yet many of the most highly regarded and sophisticated voices in our society for the last few decades have been insisting that it was unkind, unchristian, un-American, and inhuman to respond with alarm and disgust like this. And those voices have convinced large chunks of American culture to see things their way. It is no longer acceptable to be disgusted by thievery or repelled by adultery. These days, decent people are expected to be more tolerant of such things.

Do you see why biblical holiness seems so backward and red-necky to so many people in our neighborhoods and businesses and churches and families? And do you see why there is so much disintegration in all of those relationships in America today? The basic standards and expectations and judgments and taboos that formed much of the glue that held society together have been eaten away. People have taken our Lord’s warnings about judgmentalism and used them to create a world in which there is no judgment, no discernment, no discrimination between right and wrong, true and false. You can judge for yourself whether that is serving American families, American churches, and America herself—or destroying them.

Regardless, divine disgust drives separation from sin and from whatever is corrupted or contaminated by sin. That has always been true, and it will remain true when every person in this room is mouldering in the grave, and when America itself has gone the way of all great empires into the dustbin of history. God is holy. Sin is nasty. That is all.

TWO God tells Abraham’s family to be separate from the nations in order to be a blessing to the nations

Do you remember what we were trying to discover here? We wanted to know, why did these Jews in the temple hate gentiles so much? I have suggested it was what sociologists call the disgust response.  But that doesn’t really answer the question of why. It just gives a fancy-sounding name to their bizarre behavior.

The Jews in the Temple that day were so disgusted by gentiles at least partly because they believed God wanted them to be—kind of like a divinely- sanctioned bigotry. And if you read the Old Testament, you’ll see they had some pretty good reasons for thinking that God did want them to hate gentiles like that. I’m not saying they were right. They weren’t. In point of fact they were taking a valid principle too far.

Think with me about a few basic facts:

1. God chose Abraham from among the Nations to create for himself a people who would not be enraptured with and enslaved to the gods of the Nations.
2. Because of their worship of those false gods, idolatry, sexual immorality, abuse of the vulnerable by the powerful, and numerous other sinful realities that God considered disgusting were at the root of every ancient society. (Which is true about modern societies, by the way.) But God wanted Abraham and his seed to love what he loved (which was therefore truly lovely) and hate what he hated (which was therefore truly hateful).
3. That’s why God gave circumcision to Abraham and the Law of Moses to Israel—to set them apart from the nations, to be his own special people, shaped by his truth and beauty and mercy and justice.
4. Beginning with Abraham, God commanded his people over and over again in the Old Testament not to make any friendships or conclude any covenants or enter any marriages with Gentiles
5. At the same time and on the other hand, God stated at the very beginning of his covenant with Abraham that his ultimate goal in choosing him and his seed was to bless all the families of the earth. This was because his plan was always to set them free from the gods and bring them home into his own family.
6. The horrific tragedy was that Israel never could figure out how to stay separate from the nations the way God wanted them to. They loved the world, and the things of the world. Their hearts were idolatrous, and therefore adulterous. Instead of staying separate from the nations, they went to bed with them. That is a sizable chunk of what the whole Old Testament is about. So how could God have possibly used them to win the Nations back to himself?
7. The NT makes it clear that Jesus is the promised seed that the covenant was talking about, and that the Father had sent him into the world to reclaim the nations that God had chosen Abraham and his family out of. Jesus himself sent his disciples to the Nations to reclaim them.
8. That’s why we have a double-sided calling from our Lord: We are called to be separate from the world, and we are called to be a blessing to the world.

Israel as a nation never could do it, because their sins had not yet been washed away by the blood of their Messiah, and they themselves had not yet been filled with his Holy Spirit.

But we’ve been studying the book of the Acts of the she Holy Spirit All these months. We watched the Holy Spirit come back in chapter 2 of this book and we’ve worked watched him work on every page since then. He’s working right now as Paul is speaking in the temple. You can be sure that the very reason so many of those people were in such upheaval is that they were feeling the conviction of the Spirit of God and they didn’t know how to handle it.

THREE Jesus is separate from sinners so he can be the friend of sinners

We learn it best from our Lord himself. His enemies accused him of being a friend of sinners, and he gave them plenty of fodder for their cannons. He ate with tax collectors and other sinners openly. He conversed freely with loose women, Showing them compassion and respect in a day when those things were hard to find for people like that. Sinners seems to like him. They wanted to be close to him because he seemed to want to be close to them. Yet Listen to how the book of Hebrews describes him:

Hebrews 7 ²⁶ For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. ²⁷ He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.

Do you get it? Jesus never sinned once. Sin was not in his nature and was not something he desired to do. He was unstained and untouched by sin. He had no sin, did no sin, and loved no sin.

But because he loved sinners, he was touched by them. Yet when he touched them, their sin and stain was not passed to him. Rather his love and grace was passed to them. That’s why you’re saved today, if you’re saved today.

We so desperately need to find this balance: to stay separate from sinners so that we can be a blessing to sinners. If we join them in their sin we can’t help them out of their sin. But if we don’t love them in their sin will never have any opportunity to help them at all.

Separation from sin really is fueled by disgust. But what we’re called to is the right kind of disgust, not the wrong kind. We need to disgust that makes us careful to keep ourselves clear of sin, but not a disgust that moves us to stay away from sinners. In other words, we need to be able to stay disgusted with sin without making sinners feel like we’re disgusted with them. Let’s call it the difference between holy disgust and unholy disgust.

Holy disgust leads to blessing and life

• 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1 T&R&E

Unholy disgust leads to cursing and death

• Acts 22… Never really understood that the purpose of separation was to bless the nations

what God wants you to do

• what makes Jesus want to vomit?
• Keep your love for the savior stoked and burning
• let your love for sinners be warmed by Jesus
• show kindness to, have respect for, and take genuine interest in to every person you meet,