The Apostle Paul

Welcome to the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

I'm Lee Webb, and we're glad that you could join us today as we continue Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, The Women and Women of the Bible. Today we're going to consider the Apostle Paul.

Superlatives abound as R.C. describes the man who, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, gave us much of the theological framework that is taught from the pulpits of faithful churches today. There's no one who has ever surpassed Paul. Paul is the theologian par excellence of Christendom. No theologian's writings have ever been studied as thoroughly and so meticulously and so devotionally as have the writings of the Apostle Paul. Thirteen books of the New Testament are attributed to his pen, and his writings are not only profound and intellectually stimulating, but there is a personal warmth, a pastoral heart that comes through those writings again and again and again.

And one of the things I like about Paul is his humanness, is that his human feelings, his aspirations, his fears, the things that irritate him, all of that comes through the pages of his writings. You know the basic background of his story, how this man started out his life as a scholar. He was a student in Jerusalem where he studied at the feet of Gamaliel. And Gamaliel in the first century was the leading Jewish rabbi in the world and one of the top three or four rabbis in all of Jewish history. And Paul was his prized student. It's been said of the Apostle Paul that by the time he was 21 years old, he had two PhDs and that before he was converted to Christianity, he was the most educated Jew in Palestine. Apart from Jesus, I don't know any single individual who's had a greater impact than shaping Western civilization than Saul of Tarsus.

So a man that formidable, a man that significant is a man that is worthy of our attention, not only attention to his teaching, but attention to his person. Now in all of his writings, there is a portion of one chapter that contains the greatest amount of biographical data that we find in the New Testament. And that chapter is the eleventh chapter of his second letter to the church at Corinth. And I want to spend a few minutes today looking at some of the things that Paul says about himself and about his life in the eleventh chapter of 2 Corinthians. Before I give an exposition of this chapter, let me preface it by saying in this chapter we find Paul uncharacteristically personally upset.

He has been provoked and annoyed. He's upset with what's going on in the Corinthian community. We know that he wrote that large first letter to the Corinthian church, and the people did not respond in a way that was favorable. And the bickering and the fighting continued to go on, and people were challenging Paul's authority as the apostle to the Gentiles. And we know he went through three arduous missionary journeys, and wherever he went he would establish churches. And the people loved him, but as soon as he'd go on to the next church, somebody would come into those churches and begin to stir up trouble and begin to attack Paul and undermine his authority. And that happened in spades at Corinth. And so finally Paul responds to all of this, and I'll just begin at the first verse of chapter 11 and then skip down.

Would to God you could bear with me a little in my folly, for I am jealous over you with godly jealousy, for I have espoused you to one husband that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. If ever there was a man who had a pastor's heart for his people, it was Paul. Even when he rebuked them, even when he admonished them, you could feel the tears that he was experiencing. He loved those people.

He cared about those people. He was jealous for their well-being, and now he's tried everything to get this situation in Corinth straightened out, and now he said, Let me act like a fool for a minute. And then he said, You seem to suffer fools gladly anyway.

There's a little barb there. He said, You're listening to all this foolishness, and you're majoring in foolishness, and if that's the only thing that you can respond to is foolishness, let me be foolish too. Let me play the role of a fool for a moment. Let's jump down to verse 16. I say again, Let no man think me a fool, if otherwise yet as a fool receive me, that I may boast myself a little bit.

And this is why I like this chapter so much is that there's a sense in which all protocol is stripped away, all of the normal canons and standards of discussing oneself are removed. And Paul said, Paul doesn't brag. He doesn't boast, but they force him to it.

They push him to it. And he said, Okay, if you want me to be a fool, I'll be a fool. If you want me to remind you of my credentials, let me do it. Paul says, Seeing that many of you glory after the flesh, I will glory as well. For you suffer fools gladly, seeing that you yourselves are wise. Now, I speak concerning reproach as though we had been weak. However, whereinsoever any is bold, and then he says in parentheses, I speak foolishly, I am bold too. You think some of your people that are coming in and trying to take over the church are bold? You're following them because you think they're courageous? Let me give you a lesson in courage. Let me give you a lesson in boldness.

Let me give you a lesson in what it means to participate in the sacrifices of leadership for the sake of the church. Let me talk turkey to you for a second. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I.

Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? I speak as a fool now. I am more.

Now let me just pause here. This sounds like an exercise in foolish egotism and that Paul is writing in a self-serving style. But remember, this is the same apostle who, under the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit, set down as a rule for the church that we ought not to think more highly of ourselves than we truly are, and that we should think soberly, making an accurate evaluation of our character, our abilities, our gifts, our achievements. Now in that exhortation that Paul gives elsewhere, where he calls us to make a sober analysis, he speaks very strongly against idle, foolish boasting. Yet at the same time, his comments teach us that we ought not to be indulged in false humility, where we underestimate the gifts that God has given us. Arrogance and pride happen when we overestimate our abilities, but it's also sort of a flipside of pride.

There's something distorted about underestimating them. And so now Paul says he's speaking foolishly, but even though he says that parenthetically, he is speaking accurately. Everything that he says about himself here is true. Are they ministers?

So am I more so. In labors more abundant, okay, item number one, I have worked harder than any minister in the church. Nobody ever worked harder for the kingdom of God and for Jesus Christ than the apostle Paul. In labors more abundant, in stripes above measure. The thing that's so amazing to me about Paul is not only his intellectual strength, but from everything that we can read in antiquity to describe the physical characteristics of Paul, say that he was a short man.

Take comfort. He was short. All great men are short.

We know that. He was short and that he was sort of slight of build, wiry, and he had frailties, physical infirmities, bad eyesight, and things like that that plagued him throughout his life. But was he tough? Not only was his head strong, but if you wanted to see the kind of physical strength that Paul had, all you had to do was ask him to take off his shirt. I doubt if there was a single square inch on the apostle Paul's back that was not scar tissue.

His back would have looked like a road map, in stripes without measure, from the lash. In prisons more frequent, I added up—Vest and I were just playing around the other day, and we added it up, and we spent 233 nights this past year away from our house. And that seems like something until you think not one of them was in jail.

Every night that I spent away from my house this year, I spent in a comfortable bed with nice amenities, nice food, everything that you could ask for. Paul practically had a permanent address in prison. He knew the inside of practically every prison in Asia Minor, not to mention in Palestine.

In prison more frequent, in deaths often. Let me get specific, he's saying here, of the Jews, five times received I forty stripes save one. Five times he got the maximum lashing, thirty-nine lashes. That's difficult for us to understand, but there were many, many, many, many people who died from thirty-nine lashes.

Paul had it five times. That is a hundred and ninety-five times that lash with metal jagged edges on the end bit into his back. Three times I was beaten with rods. So not only did he get the lash five times, but he got the rod, the heavy stick, the same kind of beating or worse, than he had with the lash.

So that's eight times he went through that. Once I was stoned. Now how many people do we read about in the ancient world who write about telling us the fact that they were stoned? How many testimonies survive today of people who were stoned?

This is the only one I know of. Why? Because it was a method of execution. It's like Paul said, once I went to the electric chair, or once I was hung, or once I went to the gas chamber. That was capital punishment. And when people were stoned, they were stoned to death. And being stoned to death was like being killed an inch at a time where everybody just pummeled you with rocks until your head was gashed open and your face was turned into mush and your body was just lacerated from head to toe. And they didn't just throw stones at somebody and run. They made sure they were dead.

So that means probably that they tried to find a pulse on the Apostle Paul in a heartbeat and they couldn't. He was stoned to within, you know, a millimeter of death. Three times I suffered shipwreck.

Right? That's eight beatings, one stoning, three shipwrecks. How many times would I have to be beaten and stoned and shipwrecked before I would start cooling it a little bit with my teaching? A night and a day I have been in the deep. That is, the shipwrecks, he's left in the water all night long, hanging on to flotsam, jetsam, whatever, treading water all night. I mean this isn't a night and a day in a life raft.

This is a night and a day in the water, clinging to something for life, all night and all day. What are a man's thoughts when he's in the middle of the sea hanging on to a piece of wood in the darkness? In journeyings often, in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren. Let me ask you this, where was the Apostle Paul safe?

Nowhere. In the city, in the country, in the wilderness, he would stop at a night in an inn. He didn't know whether he would be alive the next morning. In weariness and painfulness, and we can rush over that quickly, it is hard to be a saint when you're tired, and it is hard to be a saint when you hurt. But this is his life in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and in nakedness. Besides those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all of the churches, as a concluding unscientific postscript. I've talked to three ministers in the last three weeks who have come that close to leaving the ministry because they can't stand the pressure, the bickering, and the people down on him. And all of it goes with trying to keep a congregation of people happy.

That is no small task in this day and age. How many churches was Paul the pastor of? I mean, being the pastor of all the churches that Paul is the pastor of was enough to drive any man to the grave without ever being in jail, without ever being beaten, without ever being shipwrecked, without ever being arrested, or any of these things. But he said, keep in mind the daily care of all the churches. Now who is weak and I am not weak?

Who is offended and I burn not? If I have to boast, I will boast of the things that concern my infirmities. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is blessed forever, knows that I lie not. Paul uses the solemn form of the oath here to verify that every single thing he has just said about himself is the truth before God. In Damascus the governor, under Aretas the king, kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison desirous to apprehend me, and through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall and escaped his hands. And then he goes on and he talks about fighting with the wild beasts of Ephesus and so on, and we could go on all day with the trials and tribulations of the Apostle Paul. Now this question I have for you, how could any man do it and keep doing it all the way to Rome where his final destiny was to go into the square and to put his head on a block and have a man pick up a sword and cut off his head? That's how he died, faithful to the very end.

And he knew he was going to die like that, and knowing that he was going to die like that, he's spending his time comforting his friends. He says to Timothy, I have fought the good fight of the faith. I have run the race. I've kept the faith. I have kept the faith. That's what the Apostle Paul says to me, a man who kept the faith in spite of every single terrifying thing that the world could throw at him. He kept the faith. He finished the race. And he says, I forget those things that are behind, and I look forward to that which is ahead, and I count it gain to die.

Who wouldn't count it gain to die with a life like that? But again, my question is, what made it possible for him to do that? This man, every time he stood before kings, every time he had a chance to explain himself, he spoke about the same thing. He kept going back to one pregnant moment in his life when he was on the road to Damascus, filled with fury and vehemence against the early church, hostile, militant against the Christian community. And he says when he says to the king, and oh king, at midday I was blinded by this light, and I was thrown to the ground, and I heard a voice speaking to me in my own tongue in Hebrew saying, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And I said, Who is it, Lord? And he said, It is Jesus whom thou persecuted.

When Paul was before King Agrippa, he makes this statement after he's finished his biography. He said, and oh king, I was not disobedient to my heavenly vision. At least once a week, I have to force myself to think back to the day of my conversion, to remember what God has done for me. We all need to do that, and we need the grace, the persevering grace, to be obedient to the vision that God has given to us so that we can say, I have kept the faith. That's what Paul says to me. He's a man who kept the faith. The missionary William Carey once said, Expect great things from God and attempt great things for God. I can't help but wonder if he was thinking about the apostle Paul when he made that bold statement. Today's message is from Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, Great Men and Women of the Bible, and we invite you to return each Saturday as we work our way through this series.

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