Acts 22

When we left the apostle Paul at the end of Chapter 21, we were in the middle of a single episode. Paul was being taken into the barracks for his own safety, since some Jews from the province of Asia had dragged him out of the temple and wanted to kill him. As the crowd became involved, the confusion increased, so that those who had him in their custody were quite unclear as to who he really was, and what he had done. He requested an opportunity to speak to the crowd prior to going inside, and it is in this chapter that we hear his words to them. He called those who were trying to harm him “brothers and fathers,” and as he spoke to them in Hebrew, some measure of order was restored.

He told them His story. Paul was a Jew, and remained a Jew. What kind of Jew was he? He was a part of that segment of Judaism in the first century that had embraced Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, who we might call Christian Jews. Earlier in his life he had been trained by a man, Gamaliel, who was a respected Pharisee and a member of the Jewish ruling council. Paul had once been a zealous enemy of Christian Judaism, which he called in this address “this Way.” There were those among the religious authorities who could testify to his past beliefs and actions.

But something had happened to him. God visited him in an amazing event, a “theophany,” a visible manifestation of God’s presence. Visible and audible in this case, Paul heard these words, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Paul had been troubling Christian Jews, but now the Lord who appeared to him, identifying Himself as the risen Jesus of Nazareth, informed Paul that when Paul was being difficult with the church, he was persecuting Him, the Lord of the church. Because of the brightness of the light, Paul could not see, but he was instructed concerning what he should do. It was Christian Jews who helped him in his weakened condition, including one Ananias, through whom he had miraculously received his sight.

Paul did not present the events of his new life as somehow divorced from Judaism. He said that he had come to learn from these Christian Jews that this had everything to do with “the God of our fathers,” with His divine will, and with the Messiah, the “Righteous One” promised in the Hebrew Scriptures. Paul had heard from Jesus, and this Jesus was not against Jews, but for Jews. This Paul was to be a witness of this Jesus to everyone, a witness of what Paul himself had seen and heard. He was under orders from the God of the Jews, in the person the Jewish Messiah. The orders included Christian baptism, and a calling upon the Name of the Lord, a Lord he would proclaim to many. His sins had been washed away, and while there was certainly a new life given to this man, that new life was built upon an old foundation that did not need to be rejected. Paul did not have to hate true Judaism in order to follow the Way. The doctrine of Christ was the completion of Judaism and not the rejection of true Judaism.

Paul then revealed something that we did not know before. He had experienced something in the temple in Jerusalem years ago after returning from Damascus. The Lord had once again spoken to him, and had revealed that Paul’s testimony would not be accepted in Jerusalem, and that he should leave, which he did. Paul had not immediately understood this rejection, insisting that he was known by many to have been a violent opponent of Christian Judaism. He thought that this fact, and his approval of the stoning of Stephen, might at least win him a hearing among other Jews who still held the opinions that had once been Paul’s own. But it was then that God had spoken these important words to Paul: “Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.”

It was this sentence that caused a dramatic eruption among the crowd. This confirmed the word that God had spoken so many years before, a word Paul had seen fulfilled not only in Jerusalem, but in synagogue after synagogue throughout his various missionary travels. Many Jews rejected not only Jesus, but also the very notion of going to the Gentiles with a message of salvation based on a Jewish Messiah. This produced a vicious reaction among the crowd that day, so much so that the tribune cut off this address, and returned to his early plan to bring Paul into the barracks. The enhanced plan was to flog Paul, and in doing this to find why all these people were so strongly against him.

We are told that they had stretched out Paul to be whipped, when he informed the centurion that he was a Roman citizen. We are also told that the decision was eventually made to have Paul appear before the Jewish ruling council. Paul chose to use the fact of his citizenship in certain situations, just as he chose to use his heritage as a Pharisee in certain situations. He did not run away from these facts, but recognized that the same God who had sent His Son to die for our sins, the God who had appeared to him and spoken to him on a number of occasions, the God who had made him such a fruitful teacher in the places where He had sent him, this God had given him the heritage that he had as both a Roman citizen and a Pharisee of Pharisees.

All of the facts of who we are, though they are nothing compared to the glory of what we shall be, are part of the Sovereign work of God, and are an important fact of life. He has made us to live in a given time and place, and we need to use our heritage for His glory. Jews do not need to run away from being Jewish in order to receive the Jewish Messiah. Citizens of Rome or of any other city do not need to think that they are excluded from the opportunity of being citizens of heaven because of their past. Our heritage has a place in God’s economy that may be very useful for the present, particularly once we come to embrace the central fact of life: that Christ Jesus came to save sinners, and that means that He came to save me.