Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. Acts 9:1 AMP.

God’s plan was clear: the gospel message of Jesus’s kingdom would go to the ends of the earth. In the first eight chapters of Acts, the only people who accepted Jesus had been Jews and Samaritans. Acts takes an unprecedented change in direction in chapter 10 when the gospel message is received by Gentiles.

Chapter 9 is the hinge. Here, God chooses Saul of Tarsus to be the key person through whom Christ’s gospel would come to the Gentiles. There’s only one problem: Saul was persecuting Jesus’ followers with murderous threats and arresting anyone who accepted Jesus.

One of the most amazing conversion stories in the Bible is when Jesus appears directly to Saul. Jesus transforms him into the chief preacher of the gospel message to the Gentiles. Today, read the story of how Jesus confronts him and how his life begins to change.

And Paul burned zealously.

In Acts 7, we first meet Saul as a man watching over the coats of the Sanhedrin while they stone Stephen. Animosity towards followers of the Way (that is, Jesus) had been growing. It started with threats, grew to imprisonment, then to flogging, and now the dam finally breaks. The Sanhedrin escalate past a point of no return. For the first time, they kill someone for following Jesus. (Not that this was completely new territory. They did the same to Jesus!)

Most believers fled, and some fled to Damascus. Saul’s plan was to seek out and arrest those who fled to stop the gospel message of Jesus from traveling any further. Think about this. Jerusalem to Damascus by ancient roads was about 150 miles. That’s a two-week journey on foot, one way, through rough terrain, through Samaritan country, to Damascus, in pursuit of followers of the Way who might have fled there.

The Bible uses a word to describe this kind of behavior: zeal. Zealousness took a few forms in the first century. Some, like the Pharisees, practiced it by absolute commitment and devotion to following God’s law. Others, like the Sadducees, practiced it by absolute commitment and devotion to the temple system with all of its rituals and sacrifices. (These two come crashing together in the stoning of Stephen. The accusation made by the Sanhedrin – the Jewish ruling council made up of zealous Sadducees and Pharisees, was that Stephen and followers of the Way were speaking against the temple and the law of Moses.)

But zeal did not stop there. To quote NT Wright, zeal for others, like the Zealots, was “something that you did with a knife.” It wasn’t too long in Israel’s past that zealous devotion to the Lord led to armed rebellion and a freedom fighters’ revolt against the Seleucid empire, which was trying to oppress Israel into idolatry and into forsaking the way of Yahweh. Though decades past, the revolution was embedded deep in Israel’s psyche. Think Revolutionary War or World War 2 from the perspective of someone in the USA.

As Phillip Long points out, characters from Israel’s past like Judas Maccabeus, Phineas (Num 25:1-18), and Elijah (1 Kings 19) burned with a zealous commitment to the Lord that challenged evil head-on by killing those that practiced idolatry. (Psalm 106 even celebrates it.) “If the Jews were to be ready when the Anointed One comes, then the Law needs to be kept now.” But here was this: Jesus and his obstinate followers continuing to proclaim him as the incarnate Yahweh. From a Jewish standpoint, could there be any greater form of idolatry?

And Paul burned zealously.

The growing violence of the Sanhedrin seemed to embolden Saul because, from this point on, he made it his mission to destroy the church. Combining the zeal of Pharisee, Zealot, and perhaps even Sadducee, he travels far and wide, breathing out “murderous threats” and bent on rooting out followers of Jesus to have them imprisoned.

Those of us who know the story know that Saul’s direction and efforts were against God, as Saul’s zeal completely blinded him to his own unrighteousness. Which should make us pause once again to consider. Think of just how deep and how far God’s grace extends. Consider that Jesus would come to him, let alone even bother with him, confront him, and call him rather than strike him down and invite him to be one of his own. He does the same with you. This is the saving power of God.

“the work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.” N.T. Wright