Acts 22:12-22

12 Someone named Ananias, a devout man according to the law, having a good reputation with all the Jews residing there, 13 came and stood by me and said, ‘Brother Saul, regain your sight.’ And in that very hour I looked up and saw him. 14 Then he said, ‘The God of our fathers has appointed you to know His will, to see the Righteous One, and to hear the sound of His voice.[c] 15 For you will be a witness for Him to all people of what you have seen and heard. 16 And now, why delay? Get up and be baptized, and wash away your sins by calling on His name.’

17 “After I came back to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple complex, I went into a visionary state 18 and saw Him telling me, ‘Hurry and get out of Jerusalem quickly, because they will not accept your testimony about Me!’

19 “But I said, ‘Lord, they know that in synagogue after synagogue I had those who believed in You imprisoned and beaten. 20 And when the blood of Your witness Stephen was being shed, I was standing by and approving,[d] and I guarded the clothes of those who killed him.’

21 “Then He said to me, ‘Go, because I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”

22 They listened to him up to this word. Then they raised their voices, shouting, “Wipe this person off the earth—it’s a disgrace for him to live!”



Dig Deeper
I have recently taken a liking to a campy little science fiction show called “Warehouse 13” on the SyFy Network. It’s certainly not the highest budget show or even the most well-made but I really enjoy the fun themes and adventures of the series and I like the characters that they have created. The show chronicles a team of relic hunters who travel around the world collecting artifacts that have somehow been imbued with the power to induce amazing and somewhat magical events if invoked in the proper manner. Of course, the catch is that there are always bad guys who wish to harness the power of these artifacts for there own nefarious plans. The team must chase down and capture these artifacts and lock them safely away in Warehouse 13. In the most recent season, the team welcomed a new member to help them as the need to collect artifacts and fight off the bad guys continued to mount. But just when they were facing their stiffest challenge, this new member of their group betrayed them. They were facing a life and death situation against a bad guy who seemed poised to take control of the Warehouse itself and gain the power of all of the thousands of artifacts. As you can imagine, his betrayal caused a major amount of bitterness on the part of those that he had betrayed. How could someone so vital to their cause betray them when the challenges were at their most dangerous? When they finally tracked him down, he was with the primary bad guy that they were chasing but as they trapped this betrayer, he had an amazing tale to tell them just before dying as a result of actions of the bad guy. He had not betrayed them at all. Their boss that oversaw all of the operations at the Warehouse had actually called him to go undercover. They thought he was betraying him but he was actually working for their benefit the entire time. At that moment they had a big decision to face. Would they believe him or reject his story?

Paul might have been able to identify with this fictional character just a bit. He was a proud and zealous Jew and was willing to take a life or given his own in defense of God’s Law. He was making his way through the Jewish ranks and quickly becoming one of the major players in Judaism and their fight to rid Israel of this new Christian movement gathered around their so-called Messiah Jesus. Just when this fight began to reach a fever pitch, Paul had seemingly betrayed his own brethren and joined the other side. This must have been rather dumbfounding for his fellow Jews and led them to despise him as a blasphemous betrayer, even worse, in some ways, than other Christians because of all that he had given up.

To add to this bitterness and hatred for Paul was the historical background to all of this. The Jewish people had suffered greatly at the hands of the pagan nations. They had been slaughtered ruthlessly and scattered throughout the world time again, ripped from their homeland and dragged off into exile, all because they were the people of God’s Law. They refused to betray their God, at least from their perspective, and had paid the price for it. Now they laid on the ground once again in their own homeland with the boot of the pagan oppressor on their necks, this time in the form of the Roman Empire, and waited for God to free them from pagan domination. They waited for God to return and exalt his people, cast off the evil that ruled over them, show himself as the God of Israel, and rule over his people once-and-for-all. At that time, thought the Jews, God would put the pagan nations in their place and call them, humbled and defeated, to the mountain of the Lord to somehow share in God’s grace.

But just when things were at their worse, Paul had abandoned them, or so they thought. But now Paul was standing before them trying to explain that they had gotten it all wrong. He wasn’t betraying them and he certainly wasn’t abandoning the God of Israel. In fact, he had been working under the orders of their God the whole time and if the people would just hear him out they would see that he had been working to help them and serve God without fail. He was no betrayer but was as devoted to God as he had ever been.

That is why throughout this speech Paul is so careful to point out, at every possible opportunity, that Paul was and continued to act as a good and devout Jew who was nothing more than a servant to the God of Israel. In fact, after he had been confronted by the heavenly light and figure that announced that it was the Messiah himself who was confronting Paul from God’s realm in heaven, Paul was directed to Ananias. He doesn’t stress that Ananias was already a follower of Christ but that he was a devout man who followed the Law and still had a good reputation among the Jews in Damascus. Paul wanted them to see that he was no rabble rouser fighting against the Law and the Jewish people. He was a follower of God just as they were.

When Ananias came in there was no blasphemy or pagan rituals going on, he was praying to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Ananias spoke to him of “the God of our fathers” and was the conduit through whom that God worked to restore the sight that Paul had lost for three days. There was no betrayal here. What else could Paul do. The God of Israel himself had healed him, had come to him, and was revealing his will to him. Yes, it was in a way that Paul would have never imagined, and in a way that would have seemed shocking to most Jews. The very man who had seemed like little more than a failed Messiah and who had died at the hands of the pagans was now being revealed as God’s very own Righteous One, the Messiah that had long been promised by God. The God of Israel really had returned to free his people from their oppression but they had gotten the bad guy wrong. It wasn’t the pagan nations or the Roman Empire but the power of sin and death. The God of Israel was calling Paul to be his witness to the good news that Jesus really was the Son of God who had defeated sin and death, and in him was everything that Israel had hoped for (2 Cor. 1:20).

Ananias had called him to enter into fulfillment of the great promises of the prophets that one day God’s people would truly be able to call on his name and be saved (Joel 2:32; Zech. 13:9). But his was not coming about in a way that Paul or anyone else might have seen coming. It makes sense, of course, looking back in hindsight, that by being baptized into the life of Christ one is, in fact, calling on the name of the Lord. The term “name” was used in such a way in those times that it could be virtually synonymous with “life,” and that was the point. In calling on the name of the Lord at baptism, one was calling on, and demonstrating faith that the life of Christ is the only path to salvation.

After that, Paul was still not maligning the Lord or the Temple despite the fact that he was now being accused of both things. He was actually praying in the Temple complex as any good Jew would, when the Lord came to him again and told him to leave in respect to his safety. It was God himself who foresaw and warned Paul that the Jews would not accept the truth of his testimony at that time, and they were in danger of repeating that error now. Paul stressed that he knew how difficult it would be for the Jews to swallow his testimony. He could hardly believe it himself. He was not disgruntled Jew looking to cast off the beliefs of his people. He was a devout believer of the one, true God who was willing to follow wherever that God led. That God was calling him to be a witness to the resurrected Christ and if the Jews wouldn’t accept his testimony, then that was fine because God had something else in mind for him anyway. He would be sent to the Gentiles to bring them into God’s family.

And that is when the stuff hit the proverbial fan. Centuries of anger and disdain for the ungodly and destructive ways of the Gentile pagans and hundreds of years of longing for God to end the long exile of God’s people from God himself, largely at the hands of those same pagans (at least in the eyes of the Jews) came spewing out in Paul’s assertion that God had sent him to the Gentiles. He had the audience up to that point but that was way too far for them. How dare Paul insinuate that God was allowing the pagans into his family as they were without following the Law, without becoming Jewish; it was unthinkable. Despite everything else that Paul had said, this was all they heard and then they quickly filled in all of the gaps with their own preconceived prejudices. It no longer mattered what Paul would have said after that. The Jews were now convinced that he really had been teaching pagan Gentiles that they could become God’s people without doing anything and that he really had been telling Jews to abandon the Law of Moses and desecrate Gods’ Word and the Temple. They had heard what they wanted to hear and nothing else mattered.

With those words, all of the anger and frustration that had been building up in the Jewish people were about to be aimed at Paul. They wanted him wiped off the face of the earth, saving for him the feelings of disgust that are generally saved for those that people feel have betrayed them, feelings which are often much deeper and more explosive than the actual enemy.

So, just as we saw as the crowds violently and maliciously call for the death of Jesus, they wanted the same for Paul. This was perhaps a sad parody of the parable of the prodigal son when the younger brother returned home, only to be rejected by the older brother. This whole incident took place probably months or even weeks after Paul wrote the book of Romans where he expressed his own crushing sorrow over the fact that his own Jewish brethren were rejecting the Messiah to the point that he almost felt that he would trade places with him if he could (Rom. 9:3-4). They had a great zeal for God but it was without knowledge and they had been left in the precarious position of trying to obtain righteousness their own way rather than understanding and accepting what God was actually doing (Rom. 10:2-3). One of the great hopes of Paul’s ministry was that in bringing the Gentiles into the kingdom of God it would spur some of the Jews to jealously seeing that this was their God, their hope, their inheritance, and be motivated into accepting the truth of the gospel. If only they would hear him out and let him finish his speech. Sadly, they were not the first to refuse to hear out the full message of the gospel and drown it out with their own expectations and prejudices, and they weren’t the last. In fact, history and experience shows us that they weren’t even close to the last.


Devotional Thought
Paul was willing to stand before a hostile audience and share the gospel even though he knew the chances of success were slim. It was an uncomfortable and even dangerous situation, but Paul felt compelled by the love of Christ despite the circumstances. Do you share Paul’s zeal? What difficult and uncomfortable circumstances are you willing to wade into today in order to share the gospel with someone else?