Instructions to both weak and strong
Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. 2 One man’s faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3 The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. 4 Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
A notable feature of Paul’s letter to the Romans is the attention he gives to Jews and Gentiles as individually identifiable groups within the Christian community of Rome. Blending these two together into one harmonious group was a significant undertaking. The great common feature, of course, was their joint faith in Christ. Both Christian Jews and Christian Gentiles looked to him as their sole hope of salvation, without adding any merit or contribution of their own. Hence in reality, they were perfectly united before God.
But outside of this all-important doctrinal base that served as the core of their unity, there continued to exist a host of cultural and ethnic differences. True, these differences were no barrier to the true spiritual unity among them, but in the matter of ordinary, day-to-day congregational life, these differences had to be addressed and dealt with. Paul does that when he gives to the strong Christian the following encouragement: “Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters.”
Note that Paul is specifically limiting the area under discussion to what the NIV translates as “disputable matters.” The term in question refers to matters where two parties may legitimately hold a difference of opinion. Paul immediately identifies such an area by giving a practical example: choice of foods.
For centuries the Jews had been living under God’s Old Testament ceremonial regulations, which clearly distinguished between clean and unclean foods. Eating pork, for example, was forbidden. These Old Testament ceremonies, however, were a teaching device imposed by God on the Jewish nation only until the promised Messiah came (Colossians 2:16,17). With the coming of the New Testament, these regulations were no longer binding. But even though Christian Jews knew and understood the full spiritual implications of the new covenant, changing their eating habits wasn’t so easy, and making the change took some time.
The Gentiles had never been under the ceremonial laws. They had been eating pork all along, but for them now to do that in the presence of Jewish Christians or to put pressure on Jews to join them in a meal including “unclean” foods would have strained their congregational ties. In cases such as these, the Gentile, comfortably making full use of Christian liberty by eating anything and everything, was in a manner of speaking more mature than the Jewish Christians who still had reservations. Hence the Gentile was the strong brother who needed to be considerate of his weaker brother. The difference was one of degree of maturity, not presence or absence of saving faith.