Apostle Paul (part II)

It occurs to me that many people aren’t really familiar with the life of Apostle Paul. I think that it’s important to be familiar with his life; he wrote a sizable chunk of the New Testament—possibly more than half. I am going to attempt to cover his life here, but it’s going to take more than one post. This is a continuation of Monday's post.

Saul spent a number of years learning about Christianity, and comparing the teachings of Christ to the teachings of the Old Testament. Armed, now, with the knowledge that Jesus was not teaching blasphemy, he began to see that the gospels were a continuation, or an extension, of the ways that had been taught previously. Paul also began to see that much of what he had been taught was in error, that people were reading into, or adding to, or taking from, the Word of God. Jesus asked the Pharisees once, why it was that they used tradition to negate the commandments of God: One of the commandments is Honor thy father and thy mother, but the Pharisees had been teaching that if the offspring made a statement that any means by which his parents benefitted by him, that was simply a gift, then he would be free from that obligation. This would have been one of the things that Paul would have been raised believing, because he was raised a Pharisee. To be honest, I think that Saul always suspected that there was something wrong with that.

So Paul goes on, and he teaches, and he shares his testimony, and his former colleagues get very upset. I guess it’s one thing to sit in the seat of judgment and look down on all of the poor, uneducated people who haven’t had the advantage of all of your education, and patiently try to explain to them why they are wrong, but when it is someone who has been your colleague, who has had the best education, who has been one of the most zealous among your sect, suddenly saying, no, you’re wrong… At one point, a group of Pharisees took a vow that they would neither eat nor drink until Paul was dead. I sometimes wonder if they broke their cow or starve to death? Another time they stoned Paul and left him for dead. These guys seriously wanted Paul to stop.

Paul, as a prisoner, was able to give his testimony, that is, to explain his conversion, to some very prominent people while being tried at various levels of the government of Rome. At one point, he appealed to Caesar, and he was put on a ship to be sent to Rome. The ship ran into a storm, but, by that time, Paul had established himself with the guards as being an upright man, and when he told them that they could all be saved, if they followed his instructions, they obeyed him (imagine that for a minute—a bunch of Roman soldiers taking orders from the prisoner that they are supposed to be escorting). Paul was right, though, the ship was destroyed, but passengers and crew were able to get to the island of Melita safely. On the island, the natives were hospitable to them. At one point, Paul was adding wood to a fire, and a viper bit him on the hand. Paul shook the viper into the fire, and went on about his business. Now the Melitans decided that Paul must be some kind of evil person, and the gods were going to take care of him with the snake. When Paul didn’t suffer any ill effects from the snake bite, though, they changed their opinion of him.

Paul was imprisoned for awhile, in fact, a lot of his writing he did from prison. He wrote that he had learned, in whatsoever state he was in, therein to be content. At least, as far as his physical being; he also talked about striving. I think that he believed in trying to improve himself, especially when there was little he could do to improve his situation. He accepted the fact that sometimes God was going to let him get into bad situations, to set an example for others. Remember Job? Why exactly was it that he went through all the things that he went through? Just because God wanted to show off what a truly faithful man of God was capable of withstanding. There was some of that in Paul’s story, too.

More to come...