The Transformed Life, Part 1

Acts 9:1-9

     If you have your Bibles, turn to Acts, chapter 9.  Now, here we come to one of the great days in the history of the church, the conversion of Saul of Tarsus.  The importance of this conversion is indicated by the fact that it's mentioned three times in some detail in the Book of Acts:  chapter 9, chapter 22 and chapter 26.  Anything repeated that frequently has a great significance.  It also is alluded to many times by Paul himself in his writings in his epistles.

     Now, the conversion of this particular man became the pivot not only on which his life turned, but on which the history of the church turned.  And you and I, in tremendous measure, are indebted to this man for whatever we may know about God and about salvation, because he wrote those books which detail for us this great information. 

     It was fitting that his conversion be very unique, because he's such a unique person.  By birth, he was a Jew; by citizenship, a Roman; by education, a Greek; by conversion and grace, a Christian.  And he became the best of all those things in combination.  He was missionary, theologian, evangelist, pastor, organizer, leader, thinker, statesman, fighter for truth and, at the same time, lover of souls.  He was everything that a Christian could and should be, short of being what Jesus Christ is.  There never was a man like him, as far as I'm concerned.  There may have been, apart from my information, such a man, but it's hard to imagine him being any better.

     This is the story of the conversion of this man.  And it's a great evidence of the fact that God can take the crummiest of the crummy, the worst of the worst and make them the best.  God is in the business of doing that.  Nobody ever gets too low to be unredemptive.  Sometimes I think we wonder whether the grace of God can ever be extended in certain cases, and that's just exactly where the grace of God does its greatest and most glorious work.

     There are many things that come into my mind in thinking about this, and we're going to have to kind of get a running start before we really hit the outline this morning, but it's interesting, as I look at this man, Saul, to think that, prior to this occasion of his conversion, the one great dramatic event that must have plagued him was the execution of Stephen.  The first time we meet Saul significantly is as he stands at the place where Stephen is being stoned.  And he apparently was leading in this thing, because they laid their cloaks at his feet when they picked up the stones to stone Stephen.

     And it has been said that sometimes a rather inconsequential or apparently trivial event can plant within the mind of a man a kind of an idea time bomb that doesn't detonate for a long time.  And it just may have been that Stephen was kind of a time bomb in the brain of Saul, and it didn't really detonate until he hit the Damascus Road, flat on his face, when Jesus revealed Himself to him.

     Abraham Lincoln said that he remembered with very much clarity the horror which he felt when, having taken a flatboat trip down the Mississippi, he arrived in New Orleans and saw his first slave auction.  The year was 1831, and that was 32 years before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but he himself said the incident ignited his thinking.

     And so it is very likely that this thing which occurred in confrontation with Stephen, which also probably included some kind of an argument or disputation between Saul and Stephen, incidentally, which Saul lost, because it says in 6 that nobody could withstand Stephen, that this all had planted within his mind this whole problem of Christianity.  And he saw it at that point as heresy.  And he began from Stephen on to persecute Christians.  But I believe the bleeding Stephen's words and demeanor eventually had part in the end of the promising career of a young fire-breathing Pharisee.  And I also believe it had a great part in the beginning of the ministry of one of history's most capable and colorful men, the apostle Paul.

     Now, let me give you a little background about this man, Saul, so that we understand something of what happened in his life.  His home was in a town called Tarsus.  Tarsus is located at the corner where Asia Minor meets Syria, north of Israel.  It was a very distinguished city, distinguished for its cosmopolitan interests.  It was a place where many people gathered.  Its wharves on the Cydnus River were crowded with commerce.  It was also a city that was famous for its university.  And, along with Athens and Alexandria, Tarsus ranked with the three great universities.  Those three were kind of the Harvard, Yale and Princeton of their day.

     Saul's father was a Roman citizen.  And, of course, you remember that Saul inherited from him that right of Roman citizenry, which stood him in good stead in later years.  His father was also a Jew and a Pharisee, and so Saul could match zealous credentials with any Jew.

     In keeping with Jewish tradition, which I think is a great tradition, every boy had to know a trade, and in the city of Tarsus one of the very large industries was the industry of tent-making.  And so the young Saul apparently learned this trade.  He was able to weave cloth from the black hair of goats.  They would weave the cloth into strips, then tie the strips together to make tents.  And it really isn't any different today in the East.  You can see the very same kind of tents if you go there right now.

     At the age of approximately 13, no doubt, Saul was packed off to Jerusalem.  The Jewish heritage was motivation enough for him to have good Jewish training.  So he was off to Jerusalem, and he sat under a great teacher by the name of Gamaliel.  Gamaliel was called "the beauty of the law" because of his marvelous ability to teach.  Gamaliel was also so revered that when he died, the people said that the reverence for the law died with Gamaliel.  And so Saul studied under this brilliant man.

     The course of his study would involve memorization of great portions of the entire Old Testament.  So he became quite scholarly in terms of his knowledge of the Old Testament.  He also would sit in question and answer sessions with his tutor, and so he was a familiar man in terms of Jewish history and theology.

     It's interesting, too, that since it is never mentioned that he met Jesus, it is likely that he, having studied in Jerusalem, then went back to Tarsus, and perhaps was the master teacher in the synagogue at Tarsus.  Later on, however, he returns to Jerusalem, and on his return Jesus has already disappeared from the scene, and he confronts this man Stephen.  And Stephen was dynamic.  He was bold.  He was dramatic.  He was powerful.  Saul couldn't handle him in life.  The only thing he could do was get rid of him, so they killed him.  But, as I said, I think the death of Stephen planted a time bomb in the brain of Saul that exploded finally on the Damascus Road in conjunction with God's invasion of his life.

     Saul became, from Stephen on, the leader of the persecution movement.  He began to rip and tear the church.  Years later, he himself acknowledged this, as recorded in Acts 26:9-11.  "I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth.  And I did so in Jerusalem.  I not only shut up many of the saints in prison, by authority from the chief priests, but when they were put to death I cast my vote against them," which is an indication that he was in the Sanhedrin, the fact that he could vote.  

     "And I punished them often in all the synagogues and tried to make them blaspheme.  And in raging fury against them, I persecuted them even to foreign cities."  Jerusalem wasn't enough.  He chased them all over the place.  Luke tells us, as we read earlier in chapter 8, verse 3, that "he made havoc of the church."  He laid waste to the church, and the Greek word describing a wild boar raging through a garden or an army devastating a city is used there.

     Now, apparently, as we approach chapter 9...meanwhile, in chapter 8, of course, Philip and the Hellenist Christians who have been scattered by the ravaging Paul, have gone everywhere preaching Christ, so it's been great.  His persecution led to preaching, and preaching led to salvation and everything came out great.  So they've all been preaching, having a great time, through chapter 8.  Meanwhile, back at Jerusalem, Paul is still breathing fury. 

     And we go back to Jerusalem, we pick up the narrative with this man, who is at this point called Saul, and I'll find myself using either one all the way through because I can't very well restrict myself to Saul, too familiar is he to me as Paul.  But, nevertheless, he, back in Jerusalem, is still furiously pursuing the killing of Christians and their incarceration and jail.  However, he apparently has accomplished something of what he set out to do in the city of Jerusalem, because he's now bent on leaving town and finding little pockets of Christians anywhere he can find them and rooting them out. 

     See, he is really zealous about this.  This is not just a lark with him.  It's not just a game.  In his mind, he's convinced that Christianity is heresy, that it is the defamation of the character of God and the traditions of Judaism, and he seeks them out with a certain amount of honesty.  And he hears, apparently, that there is a group of Christians up there in a place called Damascus, and so he feels that he's got to get up there and take care of that group, and that's where we pick it up in verse 1 of chapter 9.  "And Saul, still," or yet, "breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest."

     You notice the term "breathing out."  In the literal Greek, it's "breathing in."  It's not so much the idea that he's sort of expelling air as it is the idea that he's inhaling it.  He lives in an aura of threat and slaughter.  He breathes the very air of slaughter.  This man is totally encompassed, his whole lifestyle, his very life breath, is threat and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord.  And what it means is that that's all that occupied him.  He was consumed in this thing.  This is not just a Saturday afternoon hobby.  This was the consuming passion of his very existence, to exterminate every Christian he could find.

     His sin was like, you remember Haman the Agagite in the Book of Esther, who wanted to exterminate every Jew, and he chased after Mordecai.  His ending wasn't quite so good as Saul's.  He wound up hanging in his own gallows.  Saul fortunately comes to a knowledge of Jesus Christ.  But he wanted to exterminate the Christians. 

     Notice the term "disciples."  Don't think that means only the 12.  It doesn't.  The word "disciple" is simply mathetes.  It means a learner.  Anyone who comes to Jesus Christ is a disciple.  Anyone who follows Christ to sit at His feet, to learn from Him, any saved individual, I believe, is a disciple.  And so Saul was after every disciple, but not just in Jerusalem.  He was going to get them wherever they went.

     Now, we don't know how he got the information about Damascus, but we know that he got it.  There were probably 150,000 minimum people in Damascus.  At least 20,000 were Jews.  We know that because it wasn't too long after this that Damascus was sacked and about 20,000 Jews were massacred.  So there had to be at least that many there.  So there's a Jewish community in this place called Damascus.

     Another note that you need to understand.  Christianity, in its original context, stayed within the framework of the synagogue.  You remember that in Jerusalem, when the Jews were getting saved, they didn't necessarily leave the synagogue.  You'll also remember that when Paul went to the Christians in various towns on his missionary journeys, where did he always go?  To the synagogue.  Because, in many cases, the Christians had not yet separated themselves from the synagogue.  Christianity began in the synagogue and went from there, you see.  So in every area, really, where it began, it began with a group of Jews who then saw the new covenant and moved away from that, but they didn't necessarily move out of the synagogue.

     That was a problem, incidentally, and that's the problem on which the Book of Hebrews is based, the fact that you had Jews who had come to Christ but who maintained their involvement in all of the rigmarole of the Jewish synagogue.  And so that was what the Book of Hebrews was really written to do, was to detach the Christians from the traditions that were so much a part of their former life.

     And so these Christians apparently were within the framework of the synagogue, and he wanted to get rights and privileges from the high priest to go up there and sort of just go through the synagogue there and root out all the Christians.  And there must have been many synagogues, incidentally, for that many Jews.

     All right, so verse 9 tells us that this is a fury that's in him, or verse 1, I should say, of chapter 9, tells us.  Verse 2 then takes it a step further.  "He desired from the high priest letters," which means permits, to go and get the Christians.  And he had to have them, because he couldn't operate on his own.  The whole place was under Roman rule.  And the Romans recognized the right of the high priest within the Jewish state.  And so if he had letters from the high priest to do this as a religious function, in the framework of Judaism, he then could do it.  He couldn't do it apart from that under the Roman jurisdiction. 

     So he wanted some of the letters or the approval or the authority of the high priest to go to Damascus, to the synagogues, "that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women," and Luke continually makes a point about the fact that Saul was after woman as much as men, "he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem."  And so he designs to go to Damascus.

     Now, just a quick geographical note about Damascus, because it is somewhat immaterial in the narrative here.  Damascus was a very beautiful city.  It was situated about 2,200 feet above sea level, 60 miles inland from the coast, about 160 miles northeast of Jerusalem, I'd guess.  It was such a beautiful area that one of the Oriental writers said that "Damascus was like a handful of pearls in a goblet of emerald," which'll give you a little idea.  Lush, green and a beautiful white city.  In fact, the historians called it the paradise of the earth.

     Now, Damascus was an ancient city.  It was the capital city of Syria, and it was very old.  In fact, if you go back into Genesis, you'll find that Abraham had a servant who came from Damascus, which means that Damascus predated Abraham.  So it's an old, old city, and yet it still remained, and now with a great Jewish population.

     It's very likely that the man who really was the spiritual leader of this church was Ananias, and Paul runs into him, from our perspective, next Sunday.  Now, it also is very likely that some refugees from Jerusalem had made it to Damascus, and Paul was after them, too, Christian refugees.

     One other note in verse 2.  It says that he was looking for any of "this way."  Now, that's an interesting thing.  That's a good Bible study sometime.  Just go through the Book of Acts and even through the New Testament and find all the uses of the term "way" as a description of Christianity.  That became...that became the popular name for Christianity, "the way."  "The way."  Even Saul was pursuing people of "this way." 

     Jesus, you remember, had said, "I am," what?  "The way, the truth and the life."  And over and over and over again He had isolated Christianity as the only way to God, you see.  So Christianity became known as "the way."  It's interesting, because there probably couldn't be a more apropos term than that.    In Acts 18, the Bible says that it's the way to God.  In Hebrews, chapter 9 and chapter 10, it's the way to the holiest.  In Revelation 3:17, it's called the way of peace.  In II Peter 2, it's called the way of truth and the way of righteousness. 

     Christianity is the way.  There's only one way to God, and it's through Jesus Christ.  And Christianity became known as "the way," and indeed it is.  "Now, there is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death."  Isaiah said this.  "This is the way.  Walk ye in it."  Jesus said, "It is a narrow way and," what?  "Few there be that find it."  And Saul was after those few.

     Now, he wanted to bring them back to Jerusalem.  They were going through some kind of legal procedure, apparently, so that they could be established as ecclesiastical offenders before the Sanhedrin.  So he wanted to go to Damascus, get them and bring them back, which means he probably had really a large entourage of people going along with him to bring these prisoners back.  So this whole gang is going north. 

     And what's a fantastic note is this.  Just think about this.  To go north to Damascus, 160 miles, he's got to go right through Samaria.  Now, if you we