Sizing Paul Up

What about the man's credentials? Who was he? People sometimes think of Paul as a sort of "weak sister," since he apparently was ill a good deal of the time and had to have a doctor with him. (This was Dr. Lukas, who wrote the book of The Acts.) But the more you examine Paul's life the more you see that for a healthy man to have done what Paul did would be quite a record; whereas for a sick man to have done it is little short of a miracle. We can safely conclude that there was nothing "weak" or lukewarm about Paul.

He was always in the thick of a fight. If he wasn't speaking out of turn in the king's court, he was breaking out of jail. If he wasn't getting whipped with a lash, he was getting stoned. He'd go on a long sea voyage and be in a shipwreck. He'd go on another voyage and be in another shipwreck. When he went to a new town, the chances were pretty good that he'd be run out of town a few days later. Wherever he went he seemed to incite, as someone has said, either a riot or a revival. You couldn't keep him down. Put him in jail and he'd go you one better by converting the jailer. Try to trap him in a walled city by guarding all the exit gates, and he'd escape at night by being lowered over the wall in a basket.

This "stormy petrel" was born in Tarsus, which was "no mean city," as he tells us proudly. He was a Roman citizen, a fact of which he was also proud. He worked for a living, being a tentmaker by trade. He was a Jew through and through, he tells us, "circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless" ( Phil. 3: 5, 6). Such a person had no use for the nonsensical claims of the Christians. So, in characteristically direct fashion, Paul acted. "I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it," he says with utmost candor to his friends ( Gal. 1: 13). He is first mentioned in the New Testament at the time when a Christian named Stephen was being stoned to death for his views ( Acts 7: 57; 8: 1).

Paul thought it was a splendid idea. He helped.