Happy Sunday,
We all know and love the Apostle Paul. He’s the guy who wrote so many of the books of the New Testament. He’s the hero that explained salvation and how we are to be the church.
Quite the guy.
But his back story is surprising considering how high regard we hold him.
Firstly he wasn’t born as Paul. That’s probably a Roman-style name that he took on later in life. No, he was born Saul. A good Jewish name, the name of the first king of Israel.
Despite what you might expect, he wasn’t born in Jerusalem or any other super-prestigious Jewish location. He wasn’t even born in what we would consider Israel. His home town was Tarsus, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, in what is now modern-day Turkey. In his day, it would have been the Roman Province of Cilicia.
It’s possible that he moved to Israel or more specifically Jerusalem as a youth or a young man. We don’t know. But in the book of Acts, he reports that he was a Roman Citizen (once the city officials who violated his rights by punishing and imprisoning him without due cause and once to the soldiers in Jerusalem who rescued him from a mob).
Indeed, he was a man with a foot in two worlds. As a Roman citizen, he had rights all over the known world. But he described himself as a “hebrew of the hebrews” – in other words, he maxed out the Jewish scale.
We first meet Saul of Tarsus in Acts 8 where we get but a single statement:
“And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.”
The witnesses were there at the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr.
It seems odd that they would lay their garments at Saul’s feet. Was he nothing more than the Coat-Check at the stoning party?
It’s actually more likely that Saul was the supervising authority endorsing the entire spectacle. By laying their garments (think: outer cloaks) at his feet, they were marking their submission to him. He was in charge and they were doing his will.
“But Saul was just a young man!” I hear you shout.
When we think “young man” we think of a teenager or maybe someone in their twenties. But the Greek word for “young man” has a slightly different meaning. It’s a man generally between the ages of 24 and 40. So in this case YOUNG isn’t necessarily an objective measure, it’s a comparative measure. It means he wasn’t an OLD man.
Think of it this way. If the Pharisees had a 30 Under 30 list, Saul of Tarsus would have been on it. He was early in his career as a Pharisee. But he was showing everyone that he was going places.
If you think it’s a little bloodthirsty for Saul to be overseeing a mob execution of an innocent man, read on a couple chapters later in Acts.
Acts 9 begins with this statement:
“But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.”
Still breathing threats and murder… That was his attitude at this point in time. It seems like he was much more than a dispassionate observer and cloak-holder at Stephen’s murder. He was really angry and wanted to stomp out this new perversion of the Jewish faith called “the Way”. He asked for and received legal authority to travel to Damascus and arrest anyone he found who was a Jew and believed in this new thing.
I think a word we might use today to describe Saul is “Hardcore”. He was 100% engaged, 100% of the time. He wouldn’t use half measures when he could take it all the way to the max limit. Maybe even a little bit beyond that.
He was a mover and a shaker and knew what to do with that kind of authority. He got results, and the Jewish leaders knew just how to use a man like that. They cut him loose and pointed him at the Christians and told him to go hog wild and bring them in.
And this is the same guy who wrote 13 books in the New Testament?
Doesn’t sound like the resume you’d expect from a church planting super-christian, does it?
Stay tuned for the next installment to look at how this kind of man could be molded into the man that we read so much about.
Of course, all of this is building up to look at a new study in the book of Colossians. Later this quarter I’ll be releasing it. And I suggest you think about dipping into that study to see what you can learn from this man (actually the Holy Spirit working through him).
Let me know you’re interested by clicking here and signing up to get notified when the study comes out. I promise you’ll be the first to know.
Until next time,
Dennis
