Conversion and Call

For some men life unfolds in a simple and direct progress from beginning to end. These have been called the once-born men. There are others whose life is marked by a great break, a revolution through which at last they find their true selves. These are the twice-born men, and such was Paul. His whole life falls into two distinct parts, divided by his conversion. Neither his thought nor his work can be understood without reference to that experience. Through that experience Paul won his message, for his burning message is, first of all, something that he himself lived and achieved; and in that same experience he obtained his call.

Paul was a young man at the time of Stephen's death. It seems that his residence was then in Jerusalem, and that he had remained there after finishing his course under Gamaliel. If so, he was in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus' public ministry. In any case, so devoted a Jew would have been at the passover, whether living in Jerusalem or at Tarsus. All this makes it probable that Paul had seen Jesus and was in the city at the time of his death. He knew the first Christian community and its teachings. So strong a nature as his could not take a passive attitude. He opposed the new movement with all his might, and for two reasons. In the first place, it was a delusion. It believed in a dead Messiah. Its Messiah was one that the law called accursed because he had been put to death upon a tree (Deut 21:22, 23). In the second place, these Nazarenes were setting up something beside the law and above it. Stephen's teaching made that clear, and Paul consented to his death.

How did the change come in Paul's faith? That it was sudden does not imply that there was no preparation for it. There was, first of all, a negative preparation. Paul had found out that his religion of the law was a failure. It is true he was very zealous: "I advanced in the Jews' religion beyond many of mine age among my countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers" (Gal 1:14). But it has often been noted that men may be most intolerant of others when they have become uncertain of their own position. They are fighting enemies both within and without. Of this fight in Paul's case we have a picture from his own hand in Rom 7. It is hard to put ourselves back into this chapter. The law was for this young man the special gift with which God had distinguished his people, raising them by its possession far above the nations. That law was his religion. To keep it was the way of life. Because of such obedience the Messiah and the new kingdom were to come. In sober fact, however, the law had brought him not life but death. Paul was too honest and too deeply in earnest to deceive himself. The law, in the first place, stirred up his evil desires. The very commandments became simply occasions for his sinning, just as too many rules in a schoolroom will provoke boys to the opposite (Rom 7:7-11). In the second place, the law served to make plain his hopelessness. It showed him that there was another law in him, a law of selfishness and impurity and sin. His conscience told him that the law was right and good, but his own life followed another law. "I consent unto the law that it is good. But I am carnal, sold under sin. The good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practice" (Rom 7:14-23). And this brought him face to face with the third fact: the law is good, but it has no power. It can stand above me commanding and condemning, but it cannot help me. What I need is a new law within me, such as that of which Jeremiah spoke. "Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?" (Rom 7:24). This is Paul's interpretation of his old life. Paul is not merely theorizing here. There are years of earnest effort and bitter disappointment back of these words.

The second preparation for the change was positive. Paul probably knew Jesus and certainly knew the first disciples. Paul was not the kind of man to carry on such a campaign of persecution without a study of this movement which he opposed, and without adjusting himself to its claims. Further, he had seen these men. Earnest, but restless and dissatisfied, he saw the enthusiasm and joy and peace of these disciples. He saw Stephen full of joy and peace in the very moment of his death. With a man of his deep religious nature such impressions would register themselves deeply. These men possessed what he had been striving for in vain.

With all the preparation, the change came not gradually but with a sudden crisis. There are five notable references to this event in his letters—Gal 1:15-17; 1 Cor 9:1; 15:8; 2 Cor 4:6. And three accounts are given in the book of Acts: 9:1-19; 22:4-21; 26:9-18. These accounts differ in details. They agree in the main. In his persecution of these. Nazarenes he had taken a commission from the Sanhedrin and was on his way to Damascus. On the road he had a vision of the risen Christ. Luke speaks of a voice, but the vision is the central fact and the one to which he himself refers. He saw the Lord. Luke says that Paul began at once to preach Christ in Damascus (Acts 9:20). Paul declares that he first went away into Arabia. The latter was undoubtedly the case. A new experience had come to him that was to change his faith and his life. It was like Paul, both as man of thought and man of action, that he should look its meaning full in the face and shape his life accordingly. For such thought he goes into Arabia.

The vision of the risen Christ meant even more to Paul than it did to the disciples at Jerusalem. Jesus is not dead but living. He is not the deluded and defeated leader; he is the Messiah, "declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead" (Rom I. 4). The vision thus removed from Paul's path his first stumbling-block. The cross was the second stone of stumbling, as Paul found it later with his countrymen when he preached to them. He who died upon the tree was accursed. Now, however, he saw that the curse was borne for men. The death was not God's condemnation of this man, but God's love for all men, that men might be saved from their sins. Hence the death on the cross, which had been his stumbling-block, was to become the center of his message. For him it was to be the unsurpassed measure of God's love, the supreme deed by which God sought to win men to himself.

But all this had a decisive meaning for Paul's own religious life. It was not simply that he had been mistaken in persecuting the Messiah. His whole life and effort had been wrong. No wonder he spent his three days at Damascus without food and drink. He saw his whole life as a failure. He had thought of religion simply as something to be done. With all his heart he wanted to be righteous, but the righteousness was to be his own doing. And he had thought that by such doing and such righteousness his people might bring in the Kingdom and cause the Messiah to come. All that was changed. The Messiah was already here. God had sent his Son, not because they had earned it, but just because of his own love and mercy. That was the great difference—the changed thought of God. Paul had come here to Jesus' thought of God as the loving Father. What had been for Jesus the simple expression of direct faith, Paul had gained through this struggle and by the vision of the cross: God is not the giver of laws justifying men only as they have kept all his commands. He is the God of mercy, the Father. He sent his Son into the world that he. might reconcile men to himself. The righteousness that men cannot earn he gives.

No man knew better than Paul himself how decisive that change was. What he had prized before, he now put aside: his Hebrew lineage, his zeal for the law, his strict Pharisaic life. In place of the old pride is a new spirit. There is the humility and reverence of one who takes the great gift of God's forgiveness and love, which no effort of his had been able to earn. And there is the joy and confidence of one who has found the meaning of life, its treasure and its strength. He sets forth the contrast and the change in his life in a fine passage: "We are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God, and glory in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil 3:3-14).

In this experience Paul found not only the answer to his own needs, but his lifework as well. He was not a man. who did anything by halves. His religion had been his chief interest up to this time, despite the struggle and dissatisfaction of his life. There was far greater reason why he should give himself absolutely to the cause of this new faith. Here was the answer to his own needs, and he wanted others to have it. But his call was not simply to preach; it was to preach to the Gentiles. The twelve were at Jerusalem; that was not his place. He saw what they had not discerned: this faith was a world faith, not a Jewish faith. Judaism with its laws and ceremonies belonged to the past. This was a message of the God and Father who loved all men, and who asked of men only that they should put their trust in him. He had found not simply the Messiah to whom the Jews had looked forward, but the Saviour who belonged to the world. They at Jerusalem had not seen it; let them preach to the Jews. It was his task, laid on him by direct command of God himself, to take this message into the world. No one among all his fellows had been a more zealous and devoted Jew than he. Now, however, he says, "It was the good pleasure of God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles" (Gal 1:14, 15). That did not mean that he was not to preach to Jews. It did mean that he was to go out into the Roman world and not to stay in the land of his fathers.

The work of the great apostle cannot be understood until we appreciate his profound conviction as to the direct commission that he had from God. To this call he goes back again and again. When some of the Jewish Christians from Jerusalem attack his authority, and insinuate that he is an upstart and an innovator without credentials from the mother church or recognition from the real apostles, he begins his letter of defense by writing himself as "Paul, an apostle (not from men, neither through man, but through Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead)" (Gal 1:1). He tells the story of that call before King Agrippa in defense of his life, and sums up the passion and devotion of his whole life in the phrase: "Wherefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision" (Acts 26:16-20). The call was like a compelling power, not a choice of his own: "Necessity is laid upon me; for woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel" (1 Cor 9:16). And this was his strength in the midst of terrible obstacles and persecutions which were a constant accompaniment of his work. Back of all these was the consciousness that he was an apostle sent forth of God (1 Cor 4:9-13). An apostle was one who had seen Christ, and who had received from him the commission to bear his gospel. The vision and the commission had come to him, and with all his personal humility he set that commission proudly side by side with those of Peter and James and John (Gal 2:7-9).

Directions for Reading and Study

Paul's life as a Jew under the law: Rom 7.

The three accounts of the conversion in Acts: 9:1-19; 22:4-21; 26:9-18.

Paul's own references to the same: Gal 1:15-17; 1 Cor 9:1; 15:8; 2 Cor 4:6; Phil 3:3-14.

Compare the four accounts of the conversion and Paul's course immediately thereafter as given in Acts and Galatians. Note the agreement and the differences. The preference naturally is to be given to Paul's own account in Galatians.

Read Gal 1:1-17; 1 Cor 4:9-13.