2. The bloodthirsty persecutor (Act_7:58; Act_8:1; Act_9:1; Act_22:4; Act_26:10-11).
3. The inveterate unbeliever (Act_26:14; 1Ti_1:13).
Conclusion:
1. Who then can despair of any one?
2. Who then need despair? (1Ti_1:14-16). (J. Lyth, D.D.)
Christ’s last appearance
I. Granted to paul.
1. It was real.
2. Necessary as a seal of apostleship.
3. Supplies additional and valuable evidence of the resurrection.
II. Granted under special circumstances.
1. As to one born out of due time, after the other apostles.
2. Under unexpected circumstances.
3. Before his religious character was fully developed.
III. Granted for our instruction.
1. As an example of special grace.
2. Requiring special gratitude and humility. (J. Lyth, D.D.)
The Epiphany to Saul of Tarsus
This was the occasion of his conversion. The apostle has left on record a statement of the magnitude of the revolution (Php_3:1-21). How shall we account for it? The answers may all be reduced to three. That Paul’s assertion that he had seen the risen Lord was--
I. A falsehood. This was the position taken by the Deists of the last century. But what motive could Paul have for asserting it? For even men of the feeblest intellects do not act without motives. But here is a man of powerful intellect persisting for thirty years in maintaining what he knew all the time to be an absolute lie. What was his motive then?
1. Was it hope of advancement? But to confess the Nazarene was the surest way to be defeated in every worldly ambition.
2. Was it love of rank, or wealth, or power, or ease? But to be a follower of the Galilean was to make morally certain toil, poverty, persecution, and death (1Co_4:9-13; 2Co_11:23-27). Thus on this theory of imposture we see a man of marvellous mental breadth and moral height deliberately inventing a useless, monstrous lie, and persistently adhering to it for a quarter of a century, conscious that his only reward was pauperism, disgrace, torture, martyrdom, everlasting damnation.
II. An hallucination. This is the position of the modern philosophical sceptic, driven from the theory of imposture by its unspeakable absurdity. “Paul,” it is said, “was a man of nervous, excitable organisation, and conscientious to the last degree. Coming into contact with the Christians, their arguments, their self-sacrifice, their patient behaviour under persecution, made a profound impression on his susceptible nature. Doubts began to arise, and being a Pharisee, he would have no difficulty with the doctrine of the resurrection. Then the thrilling question came, May not Jesus really have risen? The more he pondered it, the more it distressed him: the very conscientiousness which had made him a persecutor began to torture him with the thought that he might be fighting against God. Agonised by the possibility, in his inflamed imagination he fancied he saw in the heavens the form of the risen Jesus,” etc. But survey the character of Paul. Susceptible, imaginative, impetuous, he certainly was, yet the man never lived who had his faculties more completely under control or used them with more sagacity. Mark the characteristics of a fanatic.
1. Looseness of reasoning and wildness of statement. But the man never lived who reasoned more accurately than Paul (Romans; Galatians, e.g.).
2. Utopian dreaming. But no man ever took broader, deeper, more sensible views of the problems of society, or discussed them with finer acumen than Paul: witness his exposition of the great law of edification (Rom_12:1-21; Rom_13:1-14; Rom_14:1-23; Rom_15:1-33), and his discussion of cases of conscience (chaps. 6-14).
3. Impatience, intolerance, obstinacy, recklessness. Paul was the antithesis of all this--witness his gentleness, patience, tolerance, magnanimity, humility, dignity, courtesy, deference to authority, repudiation of outward form, self-forgetfulness in his devotion to others.
4. Destructiveness. But the man never lived who was more absolutely a constructor of society than Paul. Next his Divine Master Himself, the apostle is the most controlling force of Christendom. If hallucination is capable of producing such characters as St. Paul, would God all men were flighty, all earth a Bedlam.
III. A fact. This is the position of the Christian Church, and explains everything. It explains--
1. His sudden, radical revolution of character; the risen Lord hadappeared to him and beckoned him up to a diviner life.
2. His cosmopolitan ministration (Act_26:16-18).
3. His claim to be an apostle (chap. 9:1).
4. His passionate sense of fellowship with the slain and risen Lord (Gal_2:20).
5. His career of self-sacrifice (2Co_4:5; 2Co_4:10).
6. His being persecuted in turn by those who had been his fellow-persecutors. Deny that Epiphany, and you have in the career of Paul the most inexplicable of character-problems. Admit that Epiphany, and all is clear. (W. E. Boardman, D.D.)
St. Paul
Combining this opinion of himself with the story of his conversion (Act_9:1-43.) we may learn--
I. Not to be astonished if we have to change our opinions as we grow older. When we are young we are very positive about this thing and that, and ready to quarrel with any who differs from us, as St. Paul was. But let ten, twenty years roll over us, and we may find our opinions utterly changed, and look back on ourselves with astonishment and shame as St. Paul did.
II. Not to be ashamed of changing our minds: but if we find ourselves to be in the wrong, to confess it honestly, as St. Paul did. What a fearful wrench and humiliation to have to change his mind on all matters in heaven and earth! What must it not have cost him to throw up all his friends and to feel that henceforth they must look upon him as a madman, an infidel, an enemy! But he faced the struggle and conquered, and the consequence was that he had, in time, many Christian friends for each Jewish friend that he had lost.
III. That God will not impute to us our early follies and mistakes, if only there be in us, as there was in St. Paul, the heart which longs to know what is true and right, and bravely acts up to what it knows. In all things, whether right or wrong, St. Paul was an honest, earnest seeker after truth and righteousness. He had not yet the grace of Christ, which is love to his fellow-men; and therefore his works were not pleasing to God. His empty forms and ceremonies could not please God. His persecuting the Church had plainly the nature of sin. But there was something which God had put in him, and that was, the honest and good heart. In that Christ sowed the word of God, and, behold, it sprang up and bore fruit over all Christian nations to this day. Keep, therefore, if you have it, the honest and good heart. If you have it not, pray for it earnestly.
IV. That though God has forgiven a man, that is no reason that he should forgive himself.
1. The common teaching now is, that if a man finds, or fancies, that God has forgiven him, he may forgive himself at once, and go boasting about the world as if he had never sinned at all. That is one extreme.
2. The opposite extreme is that of many old saints who could not forgive themselves at all, but passed their whole lives in misery, bewailing their sins till their dying day. That was a mistake.
3. Run into neither extreme. Look at your past lives as St. Paul looked at his. There is no sentimental melancholy in him. He is saved, and he knows it. He is hopeful, joyful; but whenever he speaks of his past life it is with noble shame and sorrow. So let us do. Let us thank God cheerfully for the present. Let us look on hopefully to the future; let us not look back too much at the past, or rake up old follies which have been pardoned and done away. But let us thank God whenever He thinks fit to show us the past, and bring our sin to our remembrance; and learn as St. Paul learnt, to be charitable to all who have not yet learnt the wisdom which God has taught to us. (C. Kingsley, M.A.)
For I am the least of the apostles, … I persecuted the Church of God.--
Paul an example
I. Of special grace. A persecutor--
1. Saved by extraordinary interposition.
2. Called to be an apostle.
3. Specially privileged.
II. Of special gratitude.
1. He attributes all to the grace of God.
2. Labours more abundantly.
3. Maintains a spirit of profound humility before God and his brethren. (J. Lyth, D.D.)
The conversion of Paul viewed in reference to his office
I. It was a triumph over the enemy. When God would convert the world, opening the door of faith to the Gentiles, who was the chosen instrument? Not one of Christ’s first followers. He put forth His hand into the very midst of the persecutors of His Son, and seized upon the most strenuous among them.
II. It was a suitable introduction to his office. It was an expressive emblem of the nature of God’s general dealings with the race of man. What are we all but rebels against God and enemies of the truth? (Col_1:21). Who then could so appropriately fulfil the purpose of Him who came to call sinners to repentance as one who had persecuted the Church of God? (1Ti_1:16).
III. His previous course of life rendered him, perhaps, after his conversion, more fit an instrument of God’s purposes towards the Gentiles, as well as a more striking specimen of it. We know that St. Paul’s successes were not his, but through “the grace of God which was with him.” Still, God makes use of human means, and it is allowable to inquire what these were, and why St. Paul was employed to convert the heathen world rather than St. James or St. John. Doubtless his intellectual endowments and acquirements fitted him for his office. Yet there was something in his previous religious history which especially disciplined him to be “all things to all men.” His awful rashness and blindness, his rage against the worshippers of Christ, then his strange conversion, then the three years during which he was left to meditate in private on all that had happened, and to anticipate the future--all this constituted a peculiar preparation for the office of preaching to a lost world dead in sin. It gave him an extended insight, on the one hand, into the ways and designs of Providence, and, on the other, into the workings of sin in the human heart, and the various modes of thinking in which the mind is actually trained. It taught him not to despair of the worst sinners, and to enter into the various temptations to which human nature is exposed. It wrought in him a profound humility, which disposed him to bear meekly the abundance of the revelations given him; and it imparted to him a practical wisdom how to apply them to the conversion of others, so as to be the comforter, help, and guide of his brethren.
1. Now I do not allege that St. Paul’s previous sins made him a more spiritual Christian afterwards, but rendered him more fitted, when converted, to reclaim others, just as a knowledge of languages fits a man for the office of missionary, without tending in any degree to make him a better man. If we take two men equally advanced in grace, one of the two would preach to a variety of men with the greater success who had the greater experience of temptation, the war of flesh and spirit, sin, and victory over sin.
2. But St. Paul’s conversion is very far from holding out any encouragement to those who live in sin, or any self-satisfaction to those who have lived in it; as if their present or former disobedience could be a gain to them. Why was mercy shown to Saul? “Because he did it ignorantly in unbelief.” And why was he “enabled” to preach the gospel? “Because Christ counted him faithful.” He differed from other enemies of Christ in this, that he kept a clear conscience, and habitually obeyed God according to his knowledge. Hear his own account of himself (Act_26:1; Act_23:19; Act_26:5). Here is no ease, no self-indulgent habits, no wilful sin against the light. The Holy Spirit is quenched by open transgressions of conscience and by contempt of His authority. But, when men err in ignorance, they are not left by the God of all grace. God leads them on to the light, in spite of their errors in faith, if they continue strictly to obey what they believe to be His will. (J. H. Newman, D.D.)
Self depreciation must not hinder duty
There are people who appreciate themselves intellectually who are constantly depreciating themselves religiously. “I am not worthy to be a Church member--a Christian disciple.” What pastor does not have to encounter that again and again ad nauseam? What preacher who does not at times, and sincerely, say within himself, “I am only an abortion of a man, I am not worthy to be called a preacher.” But as Paul had to be an apostle, notwithstanding his self-depreciation, so you and I have to be that to which we are called, or deny the Christ of God as an all-sufficient Saviour. It would be an act of deliberate disobedience if I, feeling my utter unworthiness to be a preacher of the gospel, should yet refuse to do it when I am called, inasmuch as I believe, intellectually and heartily, that Jesus is God’s Christ, and came to be man’s Redeemer and Saviour. But is it not equally an act of deliberate disobedience on the part of some of you to refuse to confess Christ before men, simply because you feel that you are not worthy to do it? (Reuen Thomas, D.D.)
