Meet the Apostle Paul—Part Six
I have been compiling my notes to preach on the life and letters of the Apostle Paul at Christ’s Community Church. I will be uploading some of them in preparation.
Saul/Paul experienced a seismic shift in his worldview on the Damascus Road (Acts 9). As a Pharisee, he had been raised to believe that God would send a Messiah (“anointed one”), who would restore the 12 Tribes of Israel, liberate the nation and, essentially, rule over the world. The Pharisees were one among several groups in first century ancient Judea that had, in the words of my former Greek professor Carroll Osburn, “Messiah Fever.”
Paul had certainly heard talk throughout Jerusalem about a teacher and miracle worker named Joshua ben Joseph (or “Jesus”). Yet, this man had been arrested, beaten and crucified by the uncircumcised Romans. Such a person was no messiah in the eyes of a zealous Pharisee like Paul.
The followers of the crucified one had claimed He had been raised from the dead and ascended to heaven at the right hand of God. Pharisees certainly believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead but that would come at the end of history not in the middle of it!
Paul believed these delusional people, who called themselves “The Way” (Acts 9:2), were a threat to proper Jewish theology. He sought and received permission from the Temple High Priest to arrest any Jew who dared call the crucified one the hope of Israel.
But then the crucified one AND risen one appeared to Paul and the Pharisee was forced to conclude that he had been very wrong. God had raised Jesus from the realm of the dead and to His right hand, which means He was and is the Messiah, which means He is the true king of the cosmos.[1]
Paul attempted to preach the coronation of Jesus in Damascus—it didn’t go well (Acts 9:19-25). Paul then went into “Arabia,” (Gal 1:17) which was a territory a bit different than the area we call “Arabia” today but still was not exactly a vacation spot. Why did Paul go there? What did he do there?
As I often tell my congregation about the things that I have thought about and studied but of which the Bible does not clearly lay out— (1) I don’t know but (2) I think I know. In short, Paul needed time to pray and think and…pray.
Paul demonstrated in his letters we possess that if he had not memorized all the Hebrew Bible, he had at least committed large swaths of it to memory. Paul had to rethink through the narrative of Scripture and question the traditions he had inherited from his fellow Pharisees. Now that the Messiah had come, what would that mean for the world? What would that mean for the assembly of God’s people? What would it mean to be in right relationship with God now? Jesus had said to Paul that the Pharisee’s persecution of “The Way” was a persecution of Jesus Himself (Acts 9:4-5)…what did that mean?
We begin to turn to that tomorrow, so tune back in.
[1] See Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016).