God Calls the Least Likely (Acts 9-10)

A Few Thoughts to Consider

Have you ever felt like God plays favorites?

Sometimes, it feels like God has some he likes and some he dislikes. God has his favorite people, the Jews, but then he has those who are afterthoughts. But Acts 9-10 reveals this is clearly not the story.  

In these chapters, we have two dramatic conversion stories. The first is Saul, who becomes Paul, and the second is Cornelius. Acts 9 opens with these words: ¹ “Now Saul was still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord. He went to the high priest ² and requested letters from him to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any men or women who belonged to the Way, he might bring them as prisoners to Jerusalem.”

The first Christians were known as people who belonged to “the way.” As F.F. Bruce writes, “It was evidently a term used by the early followers of Jesus to denote their movement as the way of life or the way of salvation.”^[1] It was people who were committed to living as Jesus lived. In Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer says, “Transformation is possible if we are willing to arrange our lives around the practices, rhythms, and truths that Jesus himself did, which will open our lives to God’s power to change. Said another way, we can be transformed if we are willing to apprentice ourselves to Jesus.”[2]

These were the people Saul wanted to abolish. He tried to rid the nation of anyone who followed in Jesus’ ways. How could he do this? F.F. Bruce explains: “When the Jewish state won its independence under the Hasmonaean dynasty of ruling priests (142 B.C.), the Romans, who patronized the new state for reasons of their own, required neighboring states to grant it the privileges of a sovereign state, including the right of extradition.”^[3]

But on the way, God reveals himself to Saul. Some Biblical scholars like N.T. Wright surmise that as a dedicated Pharisee, Saul might have been practicing a form of “throne-chariot meditation” based on Ezekiel 1. If that was the case, Wright believed this is how things would have unfolded.

He was on his way to act for the glory of God, the glory which he believed was being besmirched by these crazy followers of Jesus. He needed to keep that glory firmly before his eyes, to make sure his zeal was properly fired up and rightly directed. To that end, shall we suppose, he had been in prayer and meditation, trying to envisage the divine throne-chariot. He had gazed with the eyes of his heart on the angels. He had stared at the wheels as they flashed to and fro. He had longed to be able to raise his eyes from the angels and the wheels to the chariot itself, and then (would it be possible? he must have wondered; would he be allowed?) to the figure which sat on the chariot, flaming with fire, surrounded by brilliant light. Imagine his excitement as, in the depth of devout meditation, he saw with the eyes of his heart, so real that it seemed as though he was seeing it with his ordinary physical eyes, and then so real that he realized he was seeing it with his physical eyes, the form, the fire, the blazing light, and — the face! And the face was the face of Jesus of Nazareth.^[4]

Whether this was the case or not, we’ll never know. But we do know that Saul thought he was doing what was right, and then, in a moment, everything changed. In response, Saul began to speak of Jesus in the synagogues, and Acts 9:22 says, “Saul grew stronger and kept confounding the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.

A Meditation to PRAY