[00:00:00] Hello listeners, welcome to my podcast. Acts. We will continue from yesterday. Acts. A commentary by E. M. Blaiklock. J.S. Stewart devotes a chapter to the theme. He takes the proverb which is twice quoted, 9-5-26-14, with its vivid picture of the recalcitrant animal which, as it is being yoked to the plough, kicks out at the man behind it and only hurts itself in doing well.
[00:00:30] And lists the pricks in first-class homiletic style. Thus there was, first, Saul's own growing sense of the failure of Judaism. His religion had not brought him peace with God. Hence the fury of his attack on the new sect. Action might relieve his brooding.
[00:00:49] Then there was the fact of the historic Jesus. The Pharisees had watched the Lord's ministry carefully. As an honest man, Saul could not brush aside the evidence of something extraordinary. Third, he had to account for the lives of the Christians. And fourth, there was the death of Stephen. The last point should be emphasized. Luke is a consummate historian, to be ranged in his own right with the great writers of the Greeks.
[00:01:17] When he makes pointed mention of Saul, and the part he played of the martyr's death, he was deliberately linking Stephen with Saul. He was, after all, the Apostle's intimate friend, and knew his mind as no other men.
[00:01:32] It may safely be deduced from his hint, 7.58, together with the Apostle's own cryptic reference, 22.20, that the dying words of Stephen and the manner of his passing were a haunting memory, and that the brilliant speech which had but stirred the murderous animosity of the Jerusalem Pharisees gripped the mind of the Jew of Tarsus with strange power.
[00:01:56] Remember, finally, the intervention of God. Hostile critics have sought to dismiss the vision of Christ as the hallucination of an epileptic. Ramsey discusses this absurdity, and his argument may be summed up in a quotation. There have been madmen at all times, but the difficulty which many feel in classing St. Paul among them arises from the fact that not merely did he persuade everyone who heard him that he was sane and spoke the truth,
[00:02:25] but that also he has moved the truth, but that also he has moved the truth, changed the whole course of history, and made us what we are. Is the world moved at the word of a lunatic? To think so would be to abandon all belief in the existence of order and unity in the world and in history, and therefore we are driven to the conclusion that St. Paul's vision is one of those things about which evidence ought to be examined without any foregone conclusion in the mind.
[00:02:53] Suffice it to add to Ramsey's reserved words that the Apostle's life, half the New Testament, and all European history, together with all the history and thought derived therefrom, is evidence. Saul was converted. He was to be Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. He was already near middle age, with the vast task of the world's evangelization ahead of him. God seemed in no hurry.
[00:03:20] Fourteen years, over which Luke passes, are mentioned by Paul, Galatians 1.15-2.1, as his period of preparation. Probably the earliest acceptable date for the conversion on the Damascus road is AD 33. This would leave AD 33-46 for the visit to Arabia, Galatians 1.17, and the restoration of the man after the shattering experience he had known,
[00:03:47] and for the early ministry in Tarsus, Syria, Cilicia, and Antioch, which prepared mind and method for the major assault on the pagan world. The splendid deliberateness with which God forged his human tool is the great lesson of these years. Impatient men forget that God is not bound by time. His conversion was by far the most vital influence in Paul's life.
[00:04:12] Ancestry, Pharisaic training, Hellenistic education were fused by it into the character which the Holy Spirit formed and fashioned over the fourteen years of training. At length, in God's good time, the door opened, and the events of half a lifetime assumed final and complete significance. So often with man's days in Christ, the traveller breasts a last rise, looks back and sees the road behind,
[00:04:40] the reason for its bends and turnings, and its unerring movement to a goal. And in the vision, the crooked places become straight, and the rough places plain. Tomorrow we will go to page 91 and the sequel, 9.10 to 3.10. Thanks for listening. We will continue tomorrow.