"What Changed Saul of Tarsus?"

Acts 9:1-19

April 15, 2001, Easter

Text Comment

v.1 We have already been introduced to this man earlier in the Book of Acts as a leader of the persecution of the fledgling Christian church. Indeed, at the end of chapter 7 we learn that Saul was involved in some important way in the mob murder of Stephen, one of the early Christian preachers. Saul was a bright young man, a rising star in the Jewish firmament. He had studied under the most prestigious theologian of that day and had, apparently, graduated summa cum laude!

v.2 The nearest analogy, and one that I think captures the point, is the many instances in the 20th century in which secret police forces - the Gestapo, the KGB, the Stasi, and the like - targeted people for arrest, for imprisonment, even for death. Saul was such an agent. And he had the same cruelty, the same implacable determination to do these simple people harm in the name of his principles that the 20th century witnessed with such dismal frequency. Jesus had told his disciples, before his crucifixion, that "the day is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God [John 16:2]." Well that is exactly what Paul thought he was doing in his determination to stamp out what he saw as a new and dangerous sect.

v.17 That is a wonderful greeting, "Brother," to be offered by a Christian to a man who had done such harm to Christians. Its use is a testimony to the power to reconcile enemies that lies in the Christian faith.

v.19 Saul was his Jewish name. But he was raised in a Jewish/Roman family. His father was a citizen of the empire and, accordingly, Saul also had a Roman name, Paul. Because he was to make his life's work primarily among the Gentiles, not the Jews, soon he was known primarily by his Roman name and it is by his name Paul that he is known to the world.

Now, I wish that I had the time to tell what Paul Harvey would call "the rest of the story." For this is just the beginning. The life of the Apostle Paul after his conversion, after his becoming a follower of Jesus Christ, was one of the great adventures in the history of the world. He traveled the world with the good news that sinful men could find peace with God and obtain eternal life by faith in Jesus. It was a message that transformed the lives of great multitudes of people and Christian churches were established by Paul in many cities of the imperial world. By the time Paul died, Christianity - which no one had heard of a few years before - was a force to reckoned with in the world of that day. But, it was also a controversial message. Paul had hated it at one time in his life and had despised all who embraced it. And there were many, after Paul became a Christian, who felt about Christianity the way Paul had before he became a Christian. They greeted his ministry with disgust, with active opposition, and with open hatred. On a number of occasions he was whipped, once he was stoned, he was arrested and imprisoned a number of times, flogged by Roman authorities several times, all because of the message he preached. The Lord never spoke truer words than those in v. 16: "I will show him how much he must suffer for my name."

And it wasn't just persecution by his enemies. A man who traveled as much as Paul was to travel through the remaining years of his life was bound to face dangers of every kind. It was a dangerous world. He was shipwrecked three times. Once he spent a night and day in the open sea. He was often in danger from the bandits that plied their trade along Roman roads. His life from this point was high adventure right up until he was put to death in Rome, executed for his loyalty to Jesus Christ whom he had met 30 years before on the road to Damascus.

Now, why this history of Saul or Paul on Easter Sunday? Well, for this reason. There is hardly any better evidence, any more persuasive proof of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead than the transformation of the life of Saul of Tarsus. This has long been understood both by the friends and the enemies of the Christian faith. The enemies have known that they had somehow to explain the Apostle Paul and the remarkable transformation of his life and the ministry that followed. No serious historian of that period doubts the historicity of Paul or his ministry or that we have his message in his letters. No one doubts that there was a remarkable transformation, that the persecutor of Christians became their champion or that Paul himself explained the change as a result of his having encountered the risen Christ himself. So the enemies of the Christian faith have proposed counter explanations just as they have proposed counter explanations for the accounts of the resurrection itself.

How successful they have been you will have to judge for yourself. But, the fact is, not a one of those explanations - he suffered an epileptic fit, had a hallucination, suffered sunstroke and all of these acted upon a highly fervid religious mind - is seriously regarded as a really plausible explanation for the stupendous consequences that ensued from what Paul himself always claimed was an encounter between himself and Jesus on the Damascus Road. For what we must explain is the Christian Paul, his extraordinary life and teaching, all offered by him in the service of Jesus Christ whom he claimed had himself met so wonderfully, so unexpectedly on the road to Damascus.

To the notion that Paul's experience was somehow to be explained as some natural event in his brain, the German scholar, Beyschlag, offered this riposte: "O blessed drop of blood...which by pressing at the right moment upon the brain of Paul, produced such a moral wonder." [Cited in Machen, The Origin of Paul's Religion, 60] Paul was no closet friend of Christianity. He was on his high horse to destroy it. He had, himself, arrested these people, seen to their punishment, even been involved in their execution. And, then, on his way to do more of the same, determined to do more of the same, he found himself utterly overcome by Jesus Christ - who didn't ask him whether he would like to become his follower, but told him that he would and that the life he must now live would be a punishingly difficult one. Paul left Jerusalem for Damascus believing that the Christian message was a fraud, a deceit being foisted upon the gullible, and dangerous to true religious thought and feeling. He arrived in Damascus having utterly forsaken those views and convinced, instead, that Jesus Christ was both the Son of God and the only way of salvation for sinful human beings. He explained that revolution in viewpoint as the result of an encounter that he had had himself with the risen Christ on the Damascus Road. In all his letters he spoke of his conversion to Christ in these same terms - the sudden reversal of his fortunes as a result of meeting King Jesus. Is there a plausible alternative explanation? Has one ever been concocted? As the modern German NT scholar, W.G. Kümmel observed, given the inadequacies of the other alternative explanations "we must take Paul's [own] statements seriously." [Cited in Longenecker, Paul, Apostle of Liberty, 144n] We must indeed and all the more given the fact that Paul's conversion obviously involved "the intelligent and deliberate surrender of his will to Jesus Christ," [Bruce, Apostle of the Heart Set Free, 75] and produced in Paul such extraordinary goodness, Beyschlag's "moral wonder," teaching and living that is far from fraud, deceit, or confusion as can be!

And what are those statements of Paul? They are scattered everywhere in his letters. "Last of all...he appeared to me" he writes, speaking of the appearances of the Lord Jesus after his resurrection. "Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" he asks some who were doubting his credentials to teach the Christian faith. Twice later in the Book of Acts Paul gives his own account of what happened that day on the Damascus Road and how he both saw the Lord and heard him speak to him. An enemy of Christianity, Saul was compelled to admit in a moment that Jesus of Nazareth was all that the Christians were claiming that he was, that he had indeed risen from the dead, and been vindicated and exalted by God, and that this King and Savior was now entirely within his rights to conscript Saul into his service. [Bruce, 75]

In the middle of the 18th century there was a bright young man named George Lyttelton. A graduate first of Eton and then of Cambridge, he eventually made a life for himself in politics. At one point he became the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the British equivalent of our Secretary of the Treasury. He was later made a Baron and so is referred to in English history as Lord Lyttelton. He was also a poet and writer of some note. In fact, he warrants a short biography in Samuel Johnson's, Lives of the English Poets. Lyttelton was the son of a devout Christian father, but as a young man, educated in the rationalism of his day and running with the friends he ran with, he became himself doubtful of the truth of Christianity. But, at age 38 he set out to examine the evidence for the Christian faith and did so, largely by examining the evidence for the conversion of the Apostle Paul. The result of his examination was not only that he became a convinced and out and out Christian, but that he wrote a book, published in 1747, entitled, Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul.

Lyttelton concluded that "the conversion and apostleship of St. Paul alone, duly considered, was of itself a demonstration sufficient to prove Christianity to be a divine revelation." [Cited in Bruce, 75] In Samuel Johnson's brief biography of Lyttelton, the great man of British letters, writes that the book was "a treatise to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate [an apparently plausible] answer." Among many other arguments, Lyttelton concluded that Saul's own nature and his upbringing could no more produce the Christian Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, than charcoal could produce snow or a river carry a boat upstream against its own current.

The life and ministry and teaching of the Great Apostle, one of the titans of human history and human philosophy, perhaps the most influential merely human being who ever lived in this world, cannot be explained satisfactorily in any other way than in that way that great, good, honest, wise, intelligent man explained it himself. He had seen and had heard the very Jesus Christ whose movement he was hoping to exterminate and, as a result, he became Christ's champion in the world.

What is remarkable about the conversion of the Apostle Paul is not only that it is a grand demonstration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is also a beautiful picture of what Jesus Christ does in and to a man or a woman who comes to know him. The account of Paul's conversion is given so often in the NT because we learn from it so clearly what happens when a person becomes a Christian.

Now, remember, Paul was an honored man among family, his peers, his friends, his professors from his student days, and the members of his religious sect. He had, as we say, his whole life in front of him. And as a result of his encounter with Jesus Christ, he would later say, "I suffered the loss of all things." His former friends not only ostracized him, they tried to kill him. Instead of being the honored representative of an established religion in the imperial world, he became the bearer of a message no one had ever heard of; a message that struck Jewish ears as blasphemy (the idea that the man Jesus Christ was also God the Son) and struck the Gentiles as simply ridiculous (that the salvation of the world should depend upon the death of an obscure Jewish rabbi, who hailed from a jerkwater town on the edge of the empire, and who was executed as an afterthought by the Roman authorities. That was no religion for a self-respecting, educated Roman. This was the message that Paul was now committed to giving his life to spread.

You sometimes hear people say that Christianity is the notion that if you believe in Jesus Christ all your problems will disappear. Hardly. Paul's problems multiplied when he became a follower of Jesus Christ. He had gone to Damascus as the hunter, he fled Damascus as a hunted man. You will discover if you read the rest of chapter 9 that, to save him from those trying to kill him because of his change of heart, his new friends had to let him down in a basket through an opening in the city wall so that he could make his escape unobserved. And it got worse after that!

But, you see, he didn't care, because he had met Jesus of Nazareth, risen from the dead, whom he now knew for a certainty was his Savior and the King of Kings. He was willing to suffer loss, to spend his life in great difficulty, if he could serve the one who loved him and gave himself for him. He was willing to suffer for the one who had suffered so terribly for him. He was willing even to die for the one who had died for him that he might live forever. Troubles, yes; persecutions, of course; the loss of friends; to be sure. But, now he knew God and he had eternal life coursing in his veins. Anything was worth giving up, was worth suffering for that! He had seen the Lord Christ. That fact now defined his life and determined its meaning.

But, of course, there was much more than suffering. Already here, with Ananias, Saul had found a new brotherhood. And he would spend the rest of his days in the company of this wonderful extended family, his Christian brothers and sisters. As the years past he came to know thousands of them, scattered in churches all over the Mediterranean world. He loved them, prayed for them, was often exasperated by them, received all manner of help from them, and gave his life for them in the expectation that both he and they would meet again and live forever in the Heavenly Country.

And, then, there was for him an entirely new life to live. To give himself, his heart, his thoughts, his words and deeds more completely to the Lord Jesus who had given himself for Saul and Saul's salvation. And, in this, Saul was like any other Christian. He carried with him, out of his old life and into his new, the old sinful tendencies, attitudes, habits: the self-centeredness, the temper, the lust, the greed, the self-indulgence, laziness, and, above all, the pride. And, now, all of this he saw as sin in himself, ugliness. He had never seen that so clearly until he saw Jesus Christ and suddenly the contrast between his divine glory and Saul's own heart made everything clear. This was why Christ had to die. This is what had to be paid for, that it might be eventually taken away. And for the sake of love and gratitude, Saul began to change, to put to death his sins and to bring more and more to life the new creation that Christ had, in that wonderful moment on the Damascus Road, planted in his heart. Years later we hear him say in his letter to the Romans that he was still hard at work on his own heart and his own behavior, that there was still so much that had to be cut out and so much that had to be put in its place. But it was a struggle that he did not resent. He knew since the Damascus Road not only that Jesus Christ had a perfect right to command his life, but, as well, that the life Christ demands of his followers is the truly good life, worth to be lived no matter what the cost, the struggle required.

In all of that Saul was not simply a great figure of early Christian history with a marvelous story to tell about his own encounter with Jesus Christ. He is "every Christian," a model of every believer in Christ. And through the years it has always been the case that Christians, who certainly never had an experience of Christ such as Saul had on the Damascus Road, nevertheless have found themselves in Saul. They see themselves in Saul before he was a Christian because they know that their natural, native sinfulness and rebellion against God made them just what he was. Had they been given the same conditions, the same opportunities, the same talents, had their lives been lived in similar circumstances, they know they would have been just as violently the enemies of Christ as he was. But, in the same way, they also find themselves in Saul after he became a Christian. Realizing that Christ met them, gave them eternal life, overcame their indifference and positive dislike, and summoned them to live for him. At bottom they realize that Saul's life was their life, only the outward circumstances were different.

How does someone know that he or she is a Christian? Well, one good way is to look at yourself in the mirror of the Apostle Paul. Can you find yourself in his image? Do you feel as deeply as he did the wonder of Christ's kindness to you, the amazing discovery of this so unlikely and unexpected salvation? Do you feel as Paul did that the meaning of your life, its purpose, its dignity, its value is all bound up with the fact that you now know that Jesus of Nazareth really is the Son of God. Do you feel, whether or not you always live up to this feeling, do you feel, as Paul did, that if you had a thousand gallons of blood in your veins you could spill it all for the name and the sake of Jesus Christ, who loved you while you were his enemy and gave himself for you that you might live forever with him? So you find yourself seeing Paul not as a figure of ancient history, but as your brother, a member of your own family, and do you aspire to be like him, only wishing that you could live for Christ your Savior as zealously, as faithfully, as fruitfully as he did?

Paul was by no means the last of Christ's outspoken and bitter enemies who would find themselves brought to heel by the Savior. I think of William Hone, known as the "arch-blasphemer" of England in the first half of the 19th century. Hone was such an outspoken critic of Christianity and so harsh in what he said against it and against contemporary Christians he was actually arrested! He wrote scurrilous parodies of the Christian creeds and some of the prayers of the Church of England. You could be arrested for such things in those days. He hated Christianity and he hated Christians and did what he could to mock both.

But in the most surprising and unexpected way William Hone was suddenly and powerfully transformed by Christ's encounter with him. It was less miraculous, to be sure, than that granted to Saul on the Damascus Road, but it was just as real and the very same Jesus Christ. And the man who had spent his life doing what harm he could to the Christian faith, devoted his remaining years to preaching the message he had once sought to destroy. He wrote these lines in commemoration of his coming to believe in Jesus and being transformed by him.

The proudest heart that ever beat

    Has been subdued in me:

The wildest will that ever rose

To scorn Thy cause or aid Thy foes,

    Is quelled, my God, by Thee.

 

Most glorious Saviour, here I see

    A trophy of Thy grace,

Such as should ever silence those

Who would Thy Majesty oppose,

    And dare Thee to Thy face.

 

Thy will and not my will be done!

    I'd be for ever Thine;

Confessing Thee, the living Word,

My Saviour Christ, my God, my Lord,

    Thy cross shall be my sign.

Dramatic conversions like these, sudden and powerful and profound transformations of heart and life by encounter with Jesus Christ are not only great evidences of his resurrection, but also of the nature of that new life that comes to all who trust in him, who turn from themselves to Christ for hope of true life here and eternal life yet to come. And how many more such stories I could tell. Stories from our own time.

When I was doing graduate work in NT, Eta Linnemann was an honored name in the world of international NT scholarship. She was the first woman to have gained the rank of professor in a German university divinity school and her books were typical of the German university, belittling the historicity of the New Testament. But in a wonderful and surprising turn of events she met Jesus Christ. Paul said he suffered the loss of all things when he became a Christian. Eta Linnemann surrendered the prestigious post, told all she met to burn her books. She is now a Christian missionary in Indonesia seeking to advance the cause of the same Jesus Christ she once sought to undermine.

But, finally, it is not what happened to Saul or to William Hone or to Eta Linnemann that matters right now: but what happens, has happened, or has not yet happened to you, to me.

Can you not see that Saul was dead going to Damascus - morally, spiritually dead; no matter the reputation, no matter his success in life, no matter his rising star; he was separated from God, this theologian, this churchman; he did not know the true and living God - and can you not see that he was alive, for the first time he was alive, as he stumbled blindly into Damascus. And what made the difference? He found Jesus Christ or, better, Christ found him!

And Christ will make the same difference today as he made in Saul's life long ago. The very same difference. And can Christ be found? Oh, yes. He promises that he can always be found, if only a man or woman will look for him with an honest heart. You, sitting here this morning, can meet Christ as surely as Paul did. If not so spectacularly, just as really! And it will mean as wonderful things for you as it meant for him and, then, through you, it will mean wonderful things for others, just as it did through him. Don't you want to know what Paul discovered? To experience what he experienced? Don't you want to live the adventure he lived?

My message to you is exactly what Paul's message was for the rest of his life, the message he traveled the world to proclaim: "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst." and "Believe in the Lord Christ and you will be saved!"