Acts 15 recounts the issue of Gentiles being accepted as Christians. One should read the entire chapter and probably the chapter or two preceding to get the full flavor of the issue.
In Acts 15:22 to 29, Luke (presumably) recorded the instructions given by the 'council'. (The 'council' was comprised, according to Acts 15:6, of the "... apostles and the elders ..." - without further details.) Those instructions quoted were "...telling them to abstain from things defiled by idols and from sexual immorality and from what has been strangled and from blood."
That's it. Four guidelines for Gentiles (not ethnic Jews) who became Christ followers.
Reading the passage, one notes the council meeting was held and the instructions were issued resulting from ethnic Jewish believers who felt only Jews could become Christians. It should be clear this is not so.
There are 1,050 commands in the NT, so if Gentiles are required to follow only those four laws, then that would exclude over 99% of the commands in the NT, many of of which are clearly given to Gentiles, and also exclude the commands of Messiah. The truth is that Acts 15 had nothing to do with whether Gentiles should obey God's commands, but rather the topic in Acts 15:1 is whether Gentiles should be required to keep the man-made customs of Moses in order to be saved. God's law does not require all Gentiles everywhere to become circumcised and it does not require anyone to become circumcised in order to become saved. So by rejecting this man-made requirement, the Jerusalem Council was upholding God's law. According to Deuteronomy 4:2, it is a sin to add to or subtract from God's law, so if the Jerusalem Council had tried to subtract all but four of God's laws, then they would have been sinning. Furthermore, according to Deuteronomy 13:4-6, the way to tell that someone is a false messenger of God is if they teach God's people against following His commands, so if you believe that the Jerusalem Council did that, then you should consider them to be false prophets and you should obey God instead. We must obey God rather than man and the Jerusalem Council was no authority to countermand God or to tell anyone not to obey any His commands.
In regard to the second half of Acts 15, to use an analogy, when an employer hires a new employee they don't want to overburden them by requiring them to memorize everything that they will ever need to know about how to do their job up front, but rather they start with the basics with the understanding that they would learn how to do the rest on the job. In the same way, the Jerusalem Council did want to make things to difficult for new Gentile believers coming to faith, so they started them off with just the basics, which they excused by saying that Gentiles would continue to learn how to do the rest from hearing Moses taught every Sabbath in the synagogues, which at the very least implies that they were already keeping the Sabbath in obedience to God's commands.
By the way, the 'Judaizers' still exist to this day, seeking to add any number of 'works' to faith in God through Jesus Christ.
"Judaizers" was a term first coined and used by the heretic Marcion. It did not refer to those who were trying to get Gentiles to obey God's law, nor did Paul mean that when he used the word, but rather means "to adopt Jewish customs and rights, one who observes the ritual law of the Jews". It has to with someone who was trying to make Gentiles live as a Jew and become a Jew, and having him keep all of the customs of the Jewish people. They wanted the perspective person to live exactly as they do, keeping God's law in the same manner as they do in order to be saved. It has nothing to do with God's law except for the fact that Jewish customs were bound up in decisions made about God's law, also known as their yoke of the Torah.
Do you consider the four laws mentioned in Acts 15:19-21 to be adding a number of works to faith in God through Jesus Christ? If not, then I don't consider the other laws to be doing that for likely a similar reason.
