Joppa

Joppa is a harbor town, and every biblical scene set here turns on someone or something passing through it. Cedar logs from Lebanon were floated down to Joppa twice, once for Solomon's temple and once for the temple the returned exiles rebuilt. Jonah went down to this same port to buy passage away from Nineveh, away from the mission God had given him. The town's largest weight falls in Acts. A disciple named Tabitha, known across Joppa for her works of charity, died and was laid in an upper room. The believers sent for Peter, who was nearby at Lydda. He knelt, prayed, and told her to get up, and she opened her eyes and sat up. The whole town heard of it, and many believed. Peter stayed on in Joppa in the house of a man named Simon, a tanner. Tanning handled the hides and carcasses of dead animals, work that Jewish custom treated as ritually unclean, and Peter's willingness to lodge there already shows an openness that what happened next would confirm and enlarge. A Roman centurion named Cornelius, at Caesarea up the coast, was told in a vision to send for Peter at that very house. While his messengers were on the road, Peter went up on the roof to pray and fell into a trance. He saw heaven open and a large sheet let down with every kind of animal in it, and a voice told him to kill and eat. He refused three times, calling the food unclean, and was told not to call anything impure that God had made clean. The men from Caesarea arrived at the gate as Peter was still turning the vision over in his mind, and the Spirit told him to go with them without hesitation. What Peter had just seen on a rooftop in Joppa is what made him willing to enter a Gentile's house at all. At Caesarea he preached, the Holy Spirit fell on everyone listening, and Peter had them baptized, the first time in Acts that Gentiles received the Spirit the same way Jewish believers had.