The Baddest of the Bad Meets Jesus

Transcription

1 Dartmouth Bible Notes Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of Dartmouth Bible Church Series: Studies in Acts, Lesson 12 Scripture: Acts 9:1-9 Speaker: Rev. Neil C. Damgaard, Th.M., D.Min. Date: December 16 th, 2018 The Baddest of the Bad Meets Jesus Acts 9:1-9 (ESV) But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, Who are you, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do. The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul rose from the ground, and although his eyes were opened, he saw nothing. So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And for three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank. Introduction There is a thing that happens at Christmas each year we hear about loving one another. There was a Maranatha! song in the early 1980s: We often start to worry And people get upset If things don't go alright on Christmas day. What we should remember In all the push and shove is Christmas is a time to love. Maybe things don't sound right Or look the way they should And maybe they're not perfectly in tune. It really doesn't matter Lets keep our eyes above--cuz Christmas is a time to love. And I think that s a good idea. Let s lay aside problems and grudges at least at Christmas. Let s love on each other. But at the same time there s weird things going on which people call love. A new book called The Coddling of the American Mind 1 has three basic accusations to make of our present society: 1. the first is what they call the Untruth of Fragility, that teaching kids that failures, insults and painful experiences will do lasting damage (and 1 The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation; 2018 by Greg Lukianoff American University; Stanford Law School, Jonathan Haidt Professor at NYU Stern School of Business; Penguin Press.

2 should thus be avoided at all costs) is HARMFUL in itself. This contributes to the coddling of the American mind. 2. Second, is what they call the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning, which is the belief that we can always trust our feelings and if we are offended by something (of which, we are told, there are a million micro-aggressions floating around), we should always defer to our feelings. And so any time you feel offended, you should entertain that feeling of offense and lobby for nobody ever offending you! This also, according to the authors, contributes to the coddling of the American mind. 3. The third accusation according to these authors, is the Untruth of Us versus Them LIFE IS A BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD PEOPLE AND EVIL PEOPLE. This third idea is interesting because what the authors say, is often right there are many engineered and partisan alliances which people naturally accommodate and allow to create hostilities. But I also think this coddling is misleading. There ARE evil people in the world and there IS right. One of the greatest stories in the Book of Acts is the story of Saul of Tarsus meeting the risen Jesus Christ on the road that leads into Damascus. It is from our passage today in Acts 9. Luke wrote: But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he passed through he preached the gospel to all the towns until he came to Caesarea. But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord (Acts 8:40-9:1a) In 8:3 Luke had written: Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. This was a bad man, the baddest of the bad although he was a very, very good young Jewish leader. But he was filled with anger, and I suppose HE is why I thought of Lukianoff & Haidt s book and their third proposition! Saul of Tarsus was not someone who was just imagined or depicted to be evil by an opposing political party. This was not just one more example of a coddled society which creates an artificial animosity against people. This was a man who had a passion to hurt, a conviction to stomp out and a commission to exterminate a class of Jews who were aligned with the executed Jesus of Nazareth. The KJV has it, As for Saul, he made havoc of the church Luke describes him in 9:1 as breathing threats and murder. This is the only NT use of the term ἐμπνέω (empneō) for breathe. 2 Another ancient use of the word is to breathe the lust of war. This is how Luke describes Paul who knew him and in effect, 2 Bock, Darrell L.. Acts (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament) (Kindle Locations ). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 2

3 how Paul later remembered himself. He was full of rage and hot-faced about the Jesus-followers. He was, at that moment, an enemy of the cross. Much later Paul himself would describe others as enemies of the cross of Jesus (Philippians 3:18,19) For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. He wasn t unfeeling about them but he had learned that there IS good and evil in the world. He had authorizing documents, allowing him to arrest any in Damascus that were members of THE WAY (tés odou, τῆς ὁδοῦ), which is what Christianity was first called. This event is somewhere between one and three years after chapter 1, the ascension of Jesus let s say about two years later. But THE WAY had spread quickly and was already in Damascus, one hundred thirty-five miles away from Jerusalem. It was in Azotus and Caesarea and soon in Antioch and now even in Damascus, and Saul was going to catch them! He was a predator, on the hunt. He was going to take them all back to Jerusalem and maybe even ship them off to far-away Rome as agitators. But on that road, Paul is mowed down by a sudden light from heaven. I want you to think for a moment with me about that detail. Luke has mentioned this LIGHT to Theophilus once before (Luke 2:9), that time it was night and there were shepherds lounging around outside of Bethlehem: And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. In heaven the light is not separated from darkness. There is no night or day there. The light that is there does not emanate from a star or a moon or from fire or from electricity. Cosmos magazine said 3 : It was the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell who collected ideas about electricity and magnetism (plus a few others) and pulled them together into one coherent theory of electromagnetism. But Maxwell s most celebrated insight was when he combined the work of Ørsted and Faraday to explain the essence of light. He realized that a changing electric field could create a changing magnetic field, which would then create another electric field and so on. The result would be a self-sustaining electromagnetic field, endlessly repeating, travelling incredibly fast. How fast? Maxwell was able to calculate this too, at about 300,000,000 meters each second pretty close to what had recently been measured for the speed of light. And so this is what light is: AN ELECTRIC FIELD TIED UP WITH A MAGNETIC FIELD, FLYING THROUGH SPACE

4 But this light which suddenly burst upon and around Saul, breathing out threats, was not a made-light, a physics-based light. It was the very glory of the Lord, a blazing and gleaming outshining of the presence of God Himself. And then we read, And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It wasn t an hour, it wasn t gradual (liberals like to rationalize this, Oh, Paul mistook the dawning sun for something more dramatic and fictionalized this story ). It burned him down because it was a supernatural thing. It was PHOS APO TOU OURANOU, LIGHT from HEAVEN. Saul falls down, as would anyone A voice comes out of that light I don t know in what language: Hebrew? Greek? Aramaic? Some heavenly language but Saul understood that voice. It got right to the point: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? In Greek it is SAOUL SAOUL TI ME DIOKEIS (Σαοὺλ Σαούλ, τί με διώκεις). The voice addresses him by name, twice. I think (with commentator Darrell Bock) that this means there is emotion in the voice. (The KJV adds the words that are present in 26:14 where Paul tells the story himself. An explanation is given below) 4. The point, to which the voice immediately got, was a question. WHY are you, Saul of Tarsus, persecuting ME? The voice seems to have taken it personally, that to which Paul was breathing out threats. The voice didn t soften its accusation, why is your philosophy so intolerant?, why are you questioning me? why are you giving my people resistance? why are you disenfranchising a newly evolving movement? No. It is why are you persecuting me? Saul answers the voice with his own question, knowing somehow, this is the Lord. He says, Who are you, Lord? Saul is blinded by the light. He does not recognize the Lord s voice. But he DOES perceive that this miraculous appearance IS the Lord. The voice responds: I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. And Paul himself, later, says that Jesus also said It is hard for you to kick against the goads. This is a picture from an ancient plow which would have metal or wooden spikes on them that if the oxen or pulling animal kicked back, he would prick or gouge his leg. Jesus is saying, Saul, you re only hurting yourself by resisting Me. Then Jesus says, But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do. Jesus appears to Saul and changes his life in one shot. Saul 4 It is probable that the words were introduced by copyists who assimilated the passage to the account of Paul s conversion given in 26:14, where the clause follows διώκεις (the text is firm). In support of this judgment is the lack of any reason that would satisfactorily account for the omission of the clause from verses 4 or 5, had it stood there originally. Likewise, it is always suspicious when a variant reading, which agrees with a parallel passage, has no fixed location but vacillates between two points of attachment in Western witnesses. (A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition, Bruce Metzger, ed.) 4

5 has reason or excuse to not LET Jesus change his life. Jesus is alive. He is unyielding in His plan. The plan of God includes massive forgiveness and grace and goodness but it is a sovereign and non-negotiable plan. Saul has been chosen to do hard but great things, things which he could never at that point imagine. It would involve much suffering for the Gospel. But Saul, who would become Paul soon enough, never emerged from considering his privilege to serve, as a slave, the One Who he had been persecuting, by being so mean and vicious to His disciples. Paul never says, Oh Lord I never meant YOU any harm just your nerdy and insistent followers. He never makes any excuses for standing by, approving, while Stephen was killed. He never tries to soften the things he did to men AND WOMEN. He was completely guilty, if ignorant that Jesus really was alive. Now he knows. He is led into Jerusalem, blind, and spent his first three days in discipleship now. We wonder what he thought about We wonder if he had those letters discarded from his backpack. We wonder how he prayed. Jesus was working on the other end in Damascus too, and appears in a vision to a fellow named Ananias, the second man of that name in the Acts. We will pick it up there after Christmas Let s sing this last stanza to the carol Then let us all with one accord Sing praises to our heavenly Lord That hath made Heaven and earth of nought And with his blood mankind has bought. Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel Born is the King of Israel! 5

6 Renée and I saw this actual Caravaggio in Rome ( The Conversion of Paul )! One wonders why he thought the horse needed to be so prominent 6