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This morning our first scripture reading comes from the book of Acts, chapter 9, beginning in the first verse. If you join me in your Bibles:
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.
Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. Falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’
The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul rose from the ground, and although his eyes were opened, he saw nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.
And for three days he was without sight and neither ate nor drank.
Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, ‘Ananias,’ and he said, ‘Here I am, Lord.’ And the Lord said to him, ‘Rise and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul, for behold, he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.’
But Ananias answered, ‘Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem, and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call upon your name.’
But the Lord said to him, ‘Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel, for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.’
So Ananias departed and entered the house, and laying his hands on him he said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’
And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized, and taking food he was strengthened.
For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus, and immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’
From the book of Acts, we turn to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, beginning in the first chapter and the first verse. Paul writes:
‘Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead—and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray:
Lord Jesus, you have appeared in the flesh. You have come to us and given us your Spirit, and you stand before the Father interceding before us. We ask that you join us, that you open our hearts and open our ears and illuminate our minds to understand and receive the words that you have for us. Teach us, help us, open us to live in your ways and to know you better and more truly forever and ever and for your glory. Amen.
So as we begin this year of 2022, we are going to study and explore scripture together through something called Lectio Continua, considering portions of scripture in a manner that continues verse by verse, week by week, and section by section.
This is a very old practice and is used to help us remain focused upon what the biblical writers meant and intended for their original audience to understand, and then better apply that same understanding to our lives today.
Throughout this time, we’re going to remain steeped in the context of God’s Word with both the addresser and addressee. So it seems appropriate that we begin now with Paul’s letter to the Galatians— to the churches in the Roman province of Galatia.
What was once Galatia is today parts of northern and central Turkey. But the question remains: to whom exactly was Paul writing? Unlike his other epistles, which were either addressed directly to individuals like Timothy and Titus and Philemon, or happy new year! They were addressed to individuals like Titus and Philemon and Timothy, the other letters were written to the church of Christ in a particular given city, whether Corinth or Ephesus.
But his letter to the Galatians is addressed rather broadly with an apparent intent for widespread distribution. His intended audience depends greatly just upon when this letter was written. For a while, it is certain that Paul established certain churches within the Galatian province during the first missionary journey, as described in Acts chapters 13 and 14.
There is also an assumption that he established churches in northern Galatia during his third missionary journey, but was not recorded in the book of Acts. Regardless, the most likely and reasonable intended audience were those four initial churches at Poseidon, Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derby, as recorded in Acts. Now the text of Galatians is likely the first document written of the New Testament, sometime around 49 A.D.
Now while some scholars will suggest a later date that might fit better with the chronology of Acts, they are a small minority opinion because it does fit rather well. Galatians has frequently been called the Magna Carta of spiritual emancipation, the declaration of our Christian liberty.
Simply put, Galatians is the letter of the gospel of Christ—the first, most concise, and clearest expression of the evangelion, which we followers of the Way are to proclaim as we make disciples of all the nations. Galatians was where Martin Luther rediscovered the doctrine of justification by faith in Jesus Christ alone and where he finally understood the benefit of faith against the works of religion.
Studying Paul’s epistles to the Galatians together, we will experience the earliest and most raw understanding of just what the Christian faith means for us from the pen of the man who wrote half the New Testament and who faithfully lived out the Christian mission of preaching the good news about Jesus to the furthest ends of the known world—Paul of Tarsus, an apostle called by Jesus Christ.
Now today, the three things we’re going to focus on are Paul the man, Paul’s apostolic calling by Jesus to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, and the gospel message that he proclaimed.
Paul, or Paolos as he was called by the Greek and Latin-speaking world, also called Saul or Sha’ul by his Jewish brethren, was from the city of Tarsus—the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia and also in modern-day Turkey. Tarsus was an important center for trade, agriculture, and education, and was a city that had been so long under Roman control that its residents had become eligible for Roman citizenship.
Scripture plainly teaches us that Paul grew up with a trade, working as a tent maker, while his recorded preaching, teaching, and writings clearly demonstrate his knowledge and understanding of the Hellenistic or Greek classics. Thus, he is a product of a cosmopolitan education, having what we would have once called a true liberal arts education.
However, the best modern worldly or secular education was not good enough for him, because he was also a devout Jew and had the richness of that heritage to explore. He studied Torah and learned the Jewish religion under the tutelage of Gamaliel the Elder, who was the grandson of the great Talmudic rabbi Hillel and who was in turn the grandfather of Gamaliel of Yavny, the first leader of the Jewish Sanhedrin after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D.
So Paul, or Saul, was an heir to the most knowledge about and the best human understanding concerning God’s holy Word to his people in the first century. Paul was ideally trained and qualified to teach both Torah and later the gospel of Christ to all different kinds of people. He was the result of a strange educational fusion as the best of both the Hellenistic and Jewish traditions were united and interpreted through the unique facets of the lens of his understanding.
However, while scripture does not ever suggest that Saul knew Jesus during his earthly ministry or participated in the plot twisted by the Jewish leaders or was even a part of the crowd who condemned Christ, it is unlikely that Saul was totally unaware of Jesus’s teaching—Jesus’s heretical and blasphemous teaching from his perspective as a Pharisee.
During the time of Jesus’s life, being such a devout Jew and an accomplished rabbinical student, he was very likely in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus’s last Passover, which is one of the three annual feasts where attendance was required of all Jewish men. Yet his part in the story of the Christian faith did not begin at that point.
Tradition and the generally accepted New Testament chronology hold that Saul became converted somewhere around 33 A.D., sometime within about three years of Jesus’s death and resurrection, and that he was of an approximate age of Jesus, being in his 60s at the time of his beheading around 64 A.D.
Prior to his conversion, Saul was incredibly zealous for the purity of the Jewish religion and did whatever he believed was necessary to preserve the holiness of God. The book of Acts records for us the stoning of Stephen, one of the first deacons, and there we find the first biblical mention of the future apostle to the Gentiles, Saul.
Not only was he standing and guarding the cloaks of the men who stoned this martyr, but he was also standing and approving of it. After this, Saul began a program of persecution, imprisoning all of those in and around Jerusalem whom he could find that proclaimed Jesus as Lord. This leads us to our Acts 9 text and Christ’s call upon the heart and life of the Pharisee Saul.
Now each of the scriptural letters which Paul wrote to the many churches that he had a relationship with were written for a particular purpose and an individual and very specific reason. We call these occasional documents because they were written for a certain occasion and circumstance, even as they continue to exert divine authority and contemporary relevance.
Unfortunately, we will never know the exact cause and reason for any of his letters, but we do have a broad understanding of what they were based upon these preserved written responses in the New Testament. Paul began his letter to the Galatian churches with a reintroduction of himself and his credentials: ‘Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father.’
Paul is an apostle, apostolos. He is someone who is sent by someone else; a person does not and cannot just simply choose to become an apostle. They are a messenger sent for a specific purpose with a specific and defined mission. Not only are they sent out on a mission with a message, they are also sent out with a degree of authority and weight to accomplish their mission.
Apostles are, in effect, extensions of the one who sent them, acting with the full authority and voice of their sender. They are ambassadors sent with the ability and expectation to act and make binding decisions on behalf of their master—they were to be treated as if they were their commander.
In fact, in time we will come to understand that part of the reason Paul writes this first letter is to address concerns about himself, his apostolic authority, his doctrine and teaching, and his credibility as a believer in Jesus Christ. Therefore, he continues his introduction by reaffirming the divine origin of his calling by Jesus.
Saul, the devout and zealous Pharisee, received permission and authority from the Jerusalem priesthood—the high priest himself. Saul chose his own mission and purpose; then he was endorsed and commissioned to go. He was not sent off to hunt down Christians; he became a volunteer in Satan’s service and not some unwilling draftee.
He was set on establishing himself as the arch enemy of the Christian faith, literally in every sense of the word as antichrist. Thus it was that Saul, with his boots on the ground, his belt fastened tight, with his orders and commission clenched in his fist, was stopped dead in his tracks and confronted by the superior force and overwhelming power of God.
Saul was knocked to the ground, blinded by the light of the world, and he heard, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ He did not hear a voice in his head or just a sound of a voice coming out from heaven, but a voice coming from the very real and very present Lord Jesus. He did not hear this voice alone; the men who were with him also heard the voice, even though they did not see Jesus.
The men who shared in Paul’s mission of violence and were committed to the same cause as he was could testify to that day’s events.
So Paul asked the speaker, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Now whether Saul was personally familiar with the man Jesus before that day is really irrelevant, for to his mind and understanding, Jesus bar Joseph was deceased and not a person he was looking to recognize on the street. He would also be excused as many of the disciples did not recognize Jesus following his miraculous resurrection either, and they were intimately familiar with him and invested in seeing him.
So as Saul began to be set out upon the path for his entire future, Jesus replied: ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’
Struck blind somewhere on the road between Jerusalem and Damascus, fully dependent upon everybody else but himself, Saul faced the greatest decision of his life: either trust God or trust in himself. Saul had received his first orders from the Lord, and he actually obeyed them, trusting that the Lord was in control and would provide for him. Thus, he was taken to the city where he fasted for three days as he awaited further instruction.
Finally, one of the persecuted faithful in Damascus, a man named Ananias, came to visit Saul on Christ’s behalf, having also been sent by Jesus. Ananias spoke to Saul, saying, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’
Then Saul’s sight was restored to him. Then he was baptized, and then he began immediately to proclaim that Jesus is the Son of God in the synagogues, becoming the very same theological criminal whom he had come to Damascus to imprison.
Again I ask you, are not the ways of the Lord just so simply amazing? The way he will use our own desires and freedom of will for his own purposes to further his great plan of redemption. Saul, a man who hated Jesus and all who trusted in him, a man who went out to find the followers of Jesus desiring to wipe them out and destroy them—a man who found himself becoming a follower of Jesus against all reason and against personal preference and desire, a man who experienced a total about face, a complete reversal of all his beliefs—a man whose object of faith was changed from the works of the law, being the religion of the Jews, to faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and his Savior.
Antichrist became an apostle of Christ. Saul was now given a new mission. He was being sent out upon the word of Christ, who told Ananias that he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel.
Elsewhere, Paul relays just what it was that Ananias shared with him from Jesus, saying, ‘The God of our fathers appointed you to know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear a voice from his mouth. For you will be a witness for him to everyone of what you have seen and heard.’
It was soon after this event that Saul returned to Jerusalem where he was avoided by the apostles until he was brought to them by Barnabas, who testified on his behalf. He was not prohibited from continuing his ministry as an evangelist or apostle chosen and sent by Jesus Christ.
Saul, the man who had assumed the personal mission of finding Christians in order to destroy them, was instead given the mission—he was assigned the personal mission—to lead the people of all nations to Jesus, to make them Christians. He was neither commissioned nor sent by those apostles who had walked the streets of Jerusalem with Jesus; like them, he was sent by Jesus himself, and they did not contest his authority.
Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father. Saul, Paul, was now an apostle called by Jesus Christ himself. His heart was transformed; he was a completely new man, changed from a persecutor into one of the persecuted. He was transformed from being a faithful Jew, faithful and dedicated to a religion, into a man faithful to the Lord, faithful and dedicated to a person—the King of the Universe, Jesus Christ.
A radical change. An improbable change. Inconceivable! This change of heart and faith was not accomplished by the will of man, nor by reason or logic, or even the persuasion of evidence, but only by the monarchistic regenerative power of the Holy Spirit according to the will of God the Father.
Unlooked for and undesired by his sinful nature, Paul was born again. Paul, a sinful man numbered among the worst of the anti-Christian world, was saved. He was rescued and redeemed solely by the grace of God— a sinful man who by his own admission and the evidence of history was undeserving of mercy or forgiveness.
He was belligerent in his hatred, endeavoring to do great harm to the body of Christ. He was an enemy of God, yet Jesus loved him. Jesus chose him. Jesus called him, Jesus forgave him, redeemed him, and justified him before the Father, and then Jesus sent him out to share the same good news which he had once tried to suppress and erase.
Paul was brought out of the dominion of Satan into the kingdom of God. He was delivered from the oppression of this evil age, even though he was still subjected to its predations for the rest of his life. Everything that he suffered and endured after that day was because of this gracious deliverance—and this should give us such comfort and hope, because since the Lord did this for the foremost of sinners, then he surely will and has done this and even more for sinners like us.
The apostle Paul had received the good news—the greatest news—and he was sent out into the world to share it. Although the days of the apostles are over, we have also received the same good news as Paul, the very same gospel.
And although our moment of conversion, the time of our regeneration, is often not as outwardly dramatic as Saul’s, it is still just as traumatic and drastic to us for our present lives and our eternal future. Saul was an antichrist, but now he is an apostle of Christ. He is not what he once was, because of the gospel message and the power of God.
He was changed, washed, sanctified, and justified by Jesus and is now a new creation. The old is gone, for the new has come. The story of Paul gives us hope for even the worst of us because of the transformative power of the gospel. The simple gospel message, which so affected Paul and countless individuals over the past millennia, has not changed one iota and is still as powerful as it has ever been.
That gospel message is that the Lord Jesus Christ gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
This is the blessed evangel which has changed the course of history and continues to transform lives every day, every hour, and every moment. We have received and been changed by the gospel, and although we are not apostles, Jesus has also sent us out to share this gospel.
Christ’s church is on mission, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. The gospel is powerful, transformative, and all the world needs to hear it. Even we in the church need to hear it, because it builds us up, it strengthens us for this our angelic task.
And although we are not apostles like Paul, we are fellow messengers with him, and we have that same and greatest gospel message to share everywhere. Jesus Christ has given himself for our sins: the gift of sovereign grace. Repent, trust in Jesus Christ alone for your eternal salvation, and you will be justified in your faith for the Father’s glory.
So repent, believe, and glorify him forever and ever. Amen.