“ ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied. 16 ‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen and will see of me. 17 I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them 18 to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’
19 “So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. 20 First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and then to the Gentiles, I preached that they should repent and turn to God and demonstrate their repentance by their deeds. 21 That is why some Jews seized me in the temple courts and tried to kill me. 22 But God has helped me to this very day; so I stand here and testify to small and great alike. I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen— 23 that the Messiah would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would bring the message of light to his own people and to the Gentiles.”
Dig Deeper
A few years back I had a friend who worked for a major corporation within the United States. He had a relatively important and difficult job working for that corporation. He was typically a very good employee and was well thought of within the company by both his co-workers and bosses. But after a time it came to his attention that the company would, from time to time, engage in practices that were, shall we say, less than ethical. This put my friend, who was a devout disciple of Jesus Christ, into quite a bind. He wanted to be a good employee and obey his bosses as best he could, but he also had a higher authority to whom he answered. He quickly decided that he would be the best employee that he could possibly be at all times but that he would never do anything that would force him to compromise his obedience to God. That quickly came to a head when his boss asked him to go along with one of those unethical practices, and in fact to take part in being deceitful in a way that would benefit the company. My friend took no time in refusing to do so even though he was eventually threatened with being fired. He really had no choice in his mind. How could he obey man and disobey God? He simply couldn’t and so he stuck to his guns and took a great deal of persecution for it. It would be nice to say that such stands always work out in the end, and I suppose they do from the grander perspective of God, but in the moment, he paid for his obedience to God with his job.
That is an uncomfortable truth in following the gospel and obeying God. Doing so will often lead us straight into conflict with the systems of worldly authority around us and leave us with the difficult choice of obeying God or man. Peter and John found themselves in that very conundrum in Acts 4, and they boldly stated to the Jewish leadership that they felt they had no choice in the matter. Their obedience to God would always trump their desire to be as peaceful with and obedient to the power of man whenever possible. Of course they were only following the example that Jesus had set for them during their time with him as he ministered to the people of Israel. Jesus had set a clear example of putting God’s will and obedience to the Father above cowering before the authority or power of man.
Paul would be no different. His life was a constant reminder of the truth that the gospel is a life of peace but that life of peace will always come into conflict with those that are committed to fighting against God’s purposes. So when faced with the decision of obeying God or staying in the good graces of his fellow Jews, Paul felt he had no choice at all. It might cost him his life but his preaching of the gospel was not an act of rebellion against the Jews and it was not an abandoning of their ancient faith in God. He didn’t convert to a new religion at all. He was called by God to be part of the new thing that God was doing in the world through his Messiah. It was as simple as that. What could Paul do but obey God?
This scene before Agrippa offered Luke the opportunity to present Paul’s story of being called by God to a new commission for the third time. And like watching the replays of a sports play over and over again from different angles begins to bring what really happened into better view, Luke shows us a slightly different angle each time. In the end, we begin to get a fuller sense of what happened that day on the road to Damascus.
Paul stressed for Agrippa that he was on this mission with full consent of the chief priests. He was not some rogue or rebel. He was obeying what he thought was the highest authority accessible at the time, because in his mind, the chief priests were the most direct representative of God. On the way he and his companions were knocked back by a light that outshone the sun in the middle of the day, truly an amazing feat. The whole scene was obviously miraculous and unique as the light was seen by the entire party but only Paul saw Jesus and only Paul was blinded. Similarly, the whole party heard some sort of noise but only Paul was allowed to distinguish the voice of Jesus speaking. The point was that Paul was not having some delusion or private vision. Everyone with him heard and saw something miraculous, yet only he was chosen to receive the direct revelation of Jesus.
The primary new piece of information that we receive in this third telling of Paul’s encounter with Jesus is that after asking Paul why he was persecuting Jesus by his continual persecution of his church, is that Jesus also told Paul that it is hard to kick against the goads. A goad was a sharpened stick that was used to prick and drive cattle in a certain direction. The image being given was that God was now clearly driving Paul in a new direction and to fight against that would be as painful and fruitless as a cow trying to fight and kick against the goads. As one who was deeply committed to obeying the God of Israel his whole life, what could Paul do?
In accepting the truth that Jesus really was the Lord, Paul telescoped the situation a bit to summarize the important details for Agrippa and probably recounted the commission details that Jesus would give him over the course of the three days in Damascus as one event with the initial encounter with Jesus. His commission was clear and specific and came from the Lord, it was not a self-appointed job. First, Paul would fulfill the requirements of an apostle by being a witness of the resurrected Christ and being directly commissioned by him to do so. Second, he would be rescued from the backlash of the Jews and be sent to the Gentiles to declare the gospel to them. Third, he would be sent to the Gentiles to open their blind eyes and rescue them from the darkness into the light of the family of God. Fourth, this act of rescuing them from Satan would result in their being forgiven of their sin by being baptized into Christ.
These were the very activities that had gotten Paul in so much trouble and generated so much opposition from the Jewish leadership. They were incensed that Paul would declare that Gentiles could enter into the family of God’s people through such a meager means, in their eyes, as a baptism of faith into the life of Christ. But Paul made clear to the King that he had little choice as one who had committed to obedience to God. He was not only obeying God, but if the Jews would simply open their eyes they would see that Paul was preaching that they must repent of their sins and turn to God. True, they were not observing the Law but they were turning from their idolatry and sin to the holy lives of God’s family.
When Paul put it in those terms, it almost makes the Jewish opposition to him look silly. How could Paul be faulted for doing nothing more than obeying God by bringing the Gentiles under the rule and reign of God as any Jew, no matter how begrudgingly, would have to admit was something that God had declared through his prophets would eventually happen? At least this was Paul’s perspective. He had been arrested and persecuted for preaching nothing more and nothing less than what Moses and the prophets, in other words the Old Testament Scriptures, had proclaimed would happen.
The Scriptures, particularly Isaiah, had pointed to a Messiah and a suffering servant that would take on the suffering of the people onto himself. They also declared the vocation of the people of God to be a light to the world and the means through whom God would bless the entire world. Of course that’s where expectation and reality had run directly into one another. By the time of Jesus and Paul, the typical Jewish expectation was that the Messiah would come and bring about the end of the present age. It was then that the presence of God would flood the earth, restoring it and bringing the Kingdom of God to bear on the earth, and only then fully judging and somehow also blessing the nations of the world. Paul’s message about the Messiah had slammed up against all of that belief. They had gotten some of the details correct, but they had been wrong on the important stuff just as Paul had until he was confronted by the resurrected Christ. That’s when the reality of what God had really done through Jesus had burst forth into Paul’s understanding. The age to come, the resurrection life, and the blessing of the Gentiles would all come fully at the end of the present age and yet somehow, quite shockingly, they had all broken into the present age and were available to all who would have faith in the life of Christ and enter into it.
That was Paul’s gospel that he was boldly proclaiming to Agrippa. It hasn’t changed one bit since then. The question that we must bring to bear as witnesses of the gospel is the same question that Paul wanted Agrippa to answer. Would he see what God had done for all of humanity, Jew and Gentile alike, and accept it in faith.
Devotional Thought
Does the opinions of the people around you matter more to you than what God has called you to do? I think it’s important that we don’t answer that question too quickly and really take time to think how much we can water down God’s word because we don’t want to stand out or be different. Paul was willing to obey God’s call on his life no matter what opposition it brought him. Are you just as willing?
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