From persecutor to unlikely champion: God’s surprising choices

Saul or Paul was the unlikeliest of apostles, hardly the image of an all-conquering champion. Apocryphal and other contemporary texts from the period describe him as small or short, bald with somewhat reddish hair, bent, with crooked legs and sturdy physique, and a reddish complexion similar to a pomegranate! He could have been all of four feet six inches tall.

Apr 28, 2018

By Anil Netto
Imagine you are struggling for a cause to make your world a better place.

The person in which you had placed much hope was arrested, detained and no longer physically around to help you. Instead he can only encourage you, give you moral support now from another place, far removed from the frontlines.

You find it hard to reach folks beyond your base, where the message must be heard as well.

If only you had someone who could take your message further beyond, a courageous charismatic person who could carry your message to the heartlands, where it could really spread and make a difference to the struggle.

Meanwhile, the system you are struggling to change is biting back. Your followers are being persecuted, even arrested and personally suffering all kinds of hardship for trying to spread the message.

One of the leaders of the system, brought up in the conservative old school, has been particularly zealous in resisting your message of change. Harsh and autocratic, he presides over or supports the persecution of those on your team.

Then, one fine day, this man, this leader resisting change and persecuting your team, has a life-changing experience. He ‘sees the light’, so to speak, and he is a changed man. He comes to you and he says he now wants to help your team to promote your message.

At first, your team is taken aback. How can this fellow have changed? You can imagine the unease among your team. Can we trust this guy? Why, he was the very person who was persecuting us, who was resisting change all along.

We wanted someone to champion our message and take it to another level — and we get this guy, this unlikeliest of fellows, coming to us, saying he wants to help us? What if his messages doesn’t jive with ours? What if he brings in other people, whom we are not comfortable with?

But then again, this chap speaks the language of the target group we want to reach — the groups beyond our base, beyond our comfort zones.

We question ourselves: could this persecutor really be the one to one to take us to another level?

Well, they say God works in mysterious ways. And in the Acts of the Apostles, he sent us Saul or Paul to take the Good News to the Gentiles and the Jews living beyond Judea and Galilee.

This was the same Saul, who came from the Pharisaic tradition, studied in the school of Gamaliel, where he became an expert in the Hebrew Scriptures. The same Saul whose ancestors lived in a distant land, Tarsus in Turkey, for long a seat of learning in the region.

Saul or Paul was the unlikeliest of apostles, hardly the image of an all-conquering champion. Apocryphal and other contemporary texts from the period describe him as small or short, bald with somewhat reddish hair, bent, with crooked legs and sturdy physique, and a reddish complexion similar to a pomegranate! He could have been all of four feet six inches tall. Not exactly the mental image you would have of someone who took the message to the furthest reaches of Empire, perhaps past Rome all the way into Spain.

But Saul had crucial advantages — he also had Roman citizenship which offered him a certain degree of protection from the forces of empire. He was learned in the law and Stoic philosophy.

So this persecutor went on to become the author of a solid chunk of the New Testament: 13 of the 26 books are attributed to Paul, seven of the 13 undisputedly written by him, while scholars argue about whether the remaining six were written by him or his followers.

The point is, just as the early Christians did, we sometimes expect God to intervene in human history by sending us a champion who would lift us from the marauding darkness besieging us on all sides. Then, we have a certain mental image of what a champion to take us out of our misery should look like, what they should be like.

But God constantly surprises us by sending us the unlikeliest of people. For the early followers of Jesus, he put a fisherman in charge. To take the message into the heart of empire, he coopted one of the harshest persecutors of his followers, and transformed him to an unlikely champion of his message, spreading it well beyond, to the very heartland of the empire.

It was not perfect, but God uses frail human beings, in all their weakness and imperfections, for his own purpose and design.

We are left marvelling at his surprising choices even to this day.

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