<p>15:28 <em>For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us</em><i>, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things</i>- There is such a thing as compromise in spiritual life. The compromise of Acts 15 about the demands placed upon the Gentile believers was an example. The Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write that the Mosaic food laws had no binding at all upon Christian converts; and yet &quot;it seemed good to the Holy Spirit&quot; to endorse the compromise reached in Acts 15:28. The laws agreed there as binding upon the Gentile converts in Acts 15:29 are in fact the so-called Noachic or Primeval Laws, considered by some orthodox Jews to be binding upon all the sons of Noah. That interpretation of what God said to Noah is itself stretched and hardly on a solid Biblical foundation- but God was willing to go along with it in order to make concessions required so that there would at least be some human chance of unity in the early church.</p><p><em>&ldquo;It seemed good to the Holy Spirit&rdquo;</em> suggests that their conclusions were somehow confirmed by the Spirit. How exactly this happened isn't stated. But we note that in :32, Judas and Silas used the Spirit gift of prophecy to tell the Gentile converts the same message. It could be of course that as with Nathan initially assuming that his message to David about the temple was inspired from God when it wasn't, so these brethren may have assumed their conclusions were supported by the Holy Spirit. The way that Paul later contradicts the ruling about food offered to idols might suggest that in fact, they were simply assuming as too many folk do today that their own process of reasoning was correct and was therefore confirmed by the Holy Spirit. At best we can observe that no mechanism for that confirmation is recorded here.</p>