Saul of Tarsus

If we would have said, well, who was the worst man that ever lived, Saul of Tarsus would have raised his hand.

He wasn't just being dramatic or humble. He really did believe that he was the chief of sinners, because if anyone should have known better, on that day in Jerusalem, it was Saul of Tarsus. Over the past couple of months, on Sundays, you have heard R.C. Sproul preach sermons from Ephesians and Galatians, wonderful letters written by the great Apostle Paul. But who was Paul, and why did he call himself and believe himself to be the chief of all sinners? Welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, where each week we feature the preaching ministry of Dr. Sproul. This week, we are in Acts, written not by Paul, but by Luke. However, in today's text, we meet Paul, or Saul, and read an incident that no doubt stayed with Paul his entire life.

Don't forget that until midnight, if you'd like to own your own copy of R.C. Sproul's expositional commentary on Acts, you can request the hardcover edition with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the Apostle Paul, otherwise known as Saul of Tarsus. This past week on vacation, I had an opportunity to relax and read. I read some theology, but not very much.

Most of the time was taken up by reading fiction and a little book that some folks in the church gave me a couple of weeks ago called The Summer of 49. And it was a vivid chronicle of one of the most fascinating and dramatic pennant races in Major League Baseball history. It chronicled the race between the Boston Red Sox with their great star, Ted Williams, and the New York Yankees with their superstar, Joe DiMaggio.

And the season went down to the final game of the year, wherein the Yankees, I'm sorry to say, prevailed over the Red Sox to win the pennant. But of course, that year was also the year in which Joe DiMaggio missed almost half of the season due to the serious bone spurs and surgeries that he had to correct them. And also the Boston Red Sox suffered the loss of some of their best pitchers with sore arms, most notably Boo Ferris. I mentioned Boo Ferris because I met him 15 years ago when he was the pitching coach at Delta State in Cleveland, Tennessee, and was present in a church where I was preaching.

And Boo was a devout Christian throughout his major league career. But during the course of that season, a newspaper writer came to Joe DiMaggio. And he said, Mr. DiMaggio, what do you think about Ted Williams as a ballplayer? And DiMaggio looked at the writer and he said, Ted Williams is the best left-handed batter in the history of baseball. And the reporter said, sir, but I asked you, what did you think of him as a baseball player? DiMaggio said, I think Ted Williams is the best left-handed hitter in the history of baseball. That's all that Joltin Joe was willing to give to Williams. But in those days, everybody asked the question in the hot stove league during the winter, who was the better player, Williams or DiMaggio?

And that goes on and on. Who's the greatest baseball player that ever lived? And you get arguments forever. Who's the best running back in the NFL? And people who never saw Jim Brown run argue that other people may have been better, but they don't know anything. And then people argue about who the greatest basketball player was. We're always arguing about who the best is. Well, I want to do a little survey this morning to ask some questions about who was the best. And first I'm going to ask, who was the greatest theologian that ever walked the face of the earth?

That's really a no-brainer. The greatest theologian that's ever walked the face of this earth is the Apostle Paul. He was the theologian par excellence. And if I were to ask the question, who was the greatest missionary in the history of the church? That's simple too, the Apostle Paul. If I were to say, who's the greatest evangelist that ever graced the church of Jesus Christ? My nomination, of course, would be the Apostle Paul. But if then we narrowed it a little more closely and said, who was the greatest pastor that ever lived? Again, it's no contest. It's the Apostle Paul.

Let me just take one last step. If you were to ask me, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate, who was the greatest man that ever graced this planet with his life, I would not hesitate in answering the Apostle Paul. Because what God wrought in and through the life of that man whom He gifted so graciously and who performed so valiantly and gallantly in behalf of the gospel staggers the imagination. And so much of what we will have in front of us as we continue our study of the book of Acts will be a profile of this man, Paul, of his life, of his ministry, of his suffering, and of his faithfulness to his master. But when we first meet him, here in the text that I read this morning, we don't meet the greatest pastor, the greatest missionary, the greatest evangelist, or the greatest man. We meet the early church's public enemy number one. We meet a man who is filled with hostility and hatred towards Christ and towards Christ's church and whose consuming passion at this time in his life is to eradicate Christianity from the face of the earth.

Well, just a little background of this man before we look at the text. He was born according to tradition the same year in which Jesus was born. But he was born in Asia Minor in the city of Tarsus, hence he was called Saul of Tarsus, Paul being the name that he used in Gentile circles. His father was a Roman citizen and a very respected merchant.

He must have done something significant to have been awarded Roman citizenship, but because Saul's father was a Roman citizen, Saul was born a free man and also inherited that citizenship from his father. Tarsus, if you read your Bible from Genesis through maps and look at the maps at the back, you know that Tarsus is at the extreme southeastern tip of Asia Minor. So if you have your geography in your mind, you can come down around to the coast and you see Tarsus is there right close to Antioch and just a little bit north of Jerusalem. And Tarsus was on the trade routes where all of the merchandise moved from Europe and Asia south across through the Middle East down into Africa and back. It was also one of the wealthiest cities of that region in antiquity. And the claim to fame of Tarsus was that Tarsus had the largest university in the world at that time, bigger than the two competitors to first place, which were the universities found in Athens and the one found in Alexandria in Egypt or in North Africa.

So Tarsus was a very cosmopolitan city, a city which merchants and scholars, intellectuals and travelers from all over the world mingled and spoke of things that were taking place here and there. And it was in that environment that young Saul grew up and at first he followed a tradition that was commonplace in Tarsus and in other places in the region, and that is of learning a trade by becoming an apprentice. And one of the most lucrative trades in that day and in that region was the trade of tent making. And so as a young lad, Saul learned the trade of making tents, which served him well throughout his entire life. But at age 13, because of the prowess and brilliance that he had already displayed, he was sent away from Tarsus to Jerusalem to go to seminary, as it were, to study under the tutorship of the leading theologian in the world of that time, and his name was Gamaliel. We already were introduced to Gamaliel in the fifth chapter of the book of Acts, as you may recall. Now, Saul studied under Gamaliel for seven years and received by the time he was 21 the equivalent of what we would call two PhDs in theology. It's been said that Saul of Tarsus by the time he was 21 was the most educated Jew in Palestine, and he had mastered the Old Testament and all of the rabbinic interpretations of the Old Testament, and his star had risen in meteoric fashion so that he was well known in and around the academic circles of Jerusalem by the time the episode that we read in Scripture today takes place, where we're told he was still a young man and he was present on the occasion of the stoning of Stephen.

And again, let's remember how he was introduced in the text. We read, "'And they cast him,' that is, Stephen, "'out of the city, and they stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul.'" So the first thing for which he's known in biblical history was he's the one who took care of the clothes of those who murdered the first Christian martyr. Now, the Bible doesn't tell us why they laid their clothes at the feet of Saul, but it's not hard to guess, I think, if we just try to read between the lines a little bit. It was to say everybody there in that crowd that was breathing fire against Stephen and wanted to take his life, they didn't have to go and ask Saul of Tarsus, are you with us or against us? Not only was his scholarship known to everyone around, but his profound hostility to Christianity was also well known so that there wasn't any doubt in their mind that Saul would at least acquiesce in this act. If he wasn't going to pick up rocks himself and throw them against Stephen, at least he would stand there, standing guard, giving his approval, being complicit in the action, certainly not raising any protest against it, and takes on the task of the escape driver or the lookout for the crime that's going down as he stands there and watches the clothes.

Two verses later Luke tells us, and Saul was consenting to the death of Stephen. As I've said before, one of the things that frightens me about the judgment that's recorded in the book of Revelation is that the first group of people who are named who will be thrown into the lake of fire at the last judgment will be the cowards. And a coward is a person who when evil is being done, does nothing, says nothing, sees no evil, hears no evil, says, I'm not going to participate in it myself, but what other people want to do is their own business. Now again in this case, Paul wasn't the coward in as much as that he agreed with what was being done.

But how many times in our lives have we seen it happen where evil has taken place right in front of us and we didn't say a word? We wouldn't take a stand. The philosophy of relativism has so infected our culture that it's still OK for Christians to say, well, I believe in the resurrection of Christ. But if somebody else in the church says, well, I don't believe in the resurrection of Christ, we say, well, to each his own.

Everybody does his own thing. I'm not going to get embroiled in that controversy. I'm not going to get in trouble by getting in a heated argument about something as insignificant as the resurrection of Christ or justification by faith alone. We come to the place where we're willing to say what we believe, but we will not raise our voices against the antithesis of the truth of Christianity.

I think if there's anything that characterizes the spirit of our age, it's that. And it's rooted and grounded in hearts that are cowardly to stand there. And Paul knew that that execution was unjust. Paul knew that that execution was against the law of Moses, of which he was an expert. And he let it happen, held the clothes, drove the getaway car, aiding and abetting a capital crime.

That's our introduction to this man. He probably, almost certainly at this time in his life, thought that he was doing the right thing. You know, there are people in this world who really believe, dear friends, that women ought to have the right to kill their own babies. Even they, oh, I wouldn't do that myself, but that's not my business. Anybody else, everybody should have the right. Nobody ever was given the right to do what's wrong. But there are people who believe it's right to do wrong. And I think Paul, at this point in his life, was one of those people.

I think he believed that it was right. Several months ago, I told you the story of what happened when I was a counselor in a Jewish boys' camp in Ohio, where this terrible storm came up one day, and the land was dark at two o'clock in the afternoon, and everyone headed for the shelter of the dining hall. We had the traditional customary headcount, and there were two campers missing, which is the scariest thing that could ever happen. I told you, Bob, we went out and found them.

They were caught in the way at the end of the lake, and I had to go out in a canoe and try to rescue them. I told you about that blowing wind. Well, there was another episode we had at that camp. One of our campers, certainly the most eccentric camper, I don't even remember his name, only his nickname. Yes, I'm looking at you, Rocky, because his name was Rock. I don't know how he got the nickname Rock, but that's what everybody called him, and that's what he called himself. His name was Rock. Well, one day we had one of these things. We had an account in the dining hall, and one of the campers was missing.

This time there's no storm, just one camper AWOL. We have no idea where he is, but we know who it was. It was Rock. He was gone, and we were terrified. And we set up people going to all different areas around the camp, outside the camp, out in the wilderness, trying to find Rock. I was sent up into the mountain, and I was by myself as the point person out in that particular group search party looking for Rock. And I came through this thick grove of trees, and there I saw Rock sitting on a rock.

With his head in his hand, I was enormously relieved that I found him. And I went to him and said, Rock, what are you doing? He said, I'm just sitting here. He said, I didn't want to be at the camp anymore. I said, but you know you're not allowed to leave the campgrounds like this without telling anybody where you're going.

What were you thinking? And he looked at me with all the seriousness he could muster, and he said, a famous man once said, be sure you're right, then go ahead. I said, who was that? He said, Davy Crockett. I don't know whether Davy Crockett ever said that, but I've never forgotten it. That's come into my mind many, many times when I wasn't sure what the right thing was to do, and I would be holding between two opinions, and I would weigh them and everything because there was no other.

Be sure you're right first before you make your move. So I learned something that day from this eccentric little boy. Paul was sure he was right, but he couldn't have been more wrong than to be complicit in the murder of a saint. In our prayer of confession today, we use the words whereby we confessed our sins and at the end we personalized and said, of which I am the chief. Really borrowing that phrase from the Apostle Paul, who to his life's end considered himself the chief of sinners. And if we would have said who was the best in Paul's company and changed the words just a little bit and say, well, who was the worst man that ever lived? Saul of Tarsus would have raised his hand.

He wasn't just being dramatic or humble. He really did believe that he was the chief of sinners because if anyone should have known better on that day in Jerusalem, it was Saul of Tarsus. And then Luke goes on to tell us that not only did he give consent to the murder of Stephen, but then he wreaked havoc in the early church. He was like the head of the Gestapo, who at midnight the knock would come at the door and without even waiting for an answer, Saul and his agents would sweep into the home and grab the father, grab the mother, whatever kids, and herd them off to prison and throw them into the prison because they were Christians. And I think till the day he died, even though he knew what it meant to have every sin in his life forgiven by the blood of Christ and no one had ever had a better understanding of the atonement than Saul of Tarsus, I believe when he put his head on the pillow at night and he closed his eyes, he could see Stephen on his knees bleeding from every part of his body, looking up into heaven with his face like an angel, saying, I see the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God, maybe even looking at Saul when he says, lay not this sin to their charge. Because after Saul met the risen Christ and Christ turned his life upside down and blinded him by the radiance of his own glory, this man who wreaked havoc against the body of Christ became the greatest champion that the church of Jesus Christ has ever known. But as we study now throughout the rest of the book of Acts, the activities of the other apostles and especially of Paul, please let us never forget his introduction, his starting place, what kind of a man he was before the Lord of glory touched his soul and transformed into the greatest Christian the church has ever known. The Apostle Paul, a story of God's grace and an encouragement to us, saying what God can do in and through His people for His glory.

That was R.C. Sproul on this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. Dr. Sproul preached through many books of the Bible while he served at St. Andrew's Chapel in Sanford, Florida, and those sermons formed the basis of what would become his expositional commentary series. You can add his hardcover commentary on Acts to your collection when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Walk through the early church with Dr. Sproul's theological insights and his pastoral heart when you request this resource that can aid you both in the study and in your devotional reading. This offer ends at midnight, so make your donation at renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes while there's still time. Saul of Tarsus did not remain a persecutor of the church, and we'll hear about his conversion next Sunday here on Renewing Your Mind. .