Encounter on the Road

One of Jesus’ Apostles demonstrated a transformation in his life that is incomprehensible unless a literal, historical resurrection can be accepted as fact.  Without such an event, the life of this man makes no sense.  The man was Saul of Tarsus.  He became the Apostle Paul, author of approximately thirty-percent of the material known today as the New Testament.  Paul is the unquestioned source of the major Christian doctrines, which characterize the faith.

When we think about people of the Bible, we tend to forget they were like us.  They were no better and no worse, yet we somehow fail to see their humanity and the authenticity of their lives.  It is when we can see Saul of Tarsus as someone like us, that we begin to appreciate his story.  This forces some serious thinking about what happened to him, and it is impossible to fully appreciate the conversion of Saul, without some understanding of Judaism in the first century.

During the fourteen-hundred years between the time of Moses and the first century of our era, God’s people (the Jews) were not idle in evaluating His commandments.  The material in the Old Testament is but the framework of a much larger body of commentary and religious discipline, developed over a period of a thousand years by Jewish theologians.  The Old Testament is considered to be breathed of God and the commentary is the human interpretation of the revelation.  By the time of Saul, the human commentary had become the most visible influence in the daily life of the average Jew.

The commentary contained detailed interpretations of the scriptures and eventually developed into an enforced religious system of right and wrong, with respect to the details of Jewish life.  It was an extremely legalistic religious system that enslaved

its practitioners, and no doubt produced feelings of guilt, fear, depression and futility in the common Jew.  It was also very unrealistic.  Once the Jews started rendering human decisions about right things, they were unable to stop the process.  Almost every detail of human life was eventually evaluated in the commentaries.  And like a lot of human opinion today, the scriptures were used to justify the evaluation.

At the time Christ was crucified this religious system was supervised and enforced by two major theological factions composed of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  A simple description, to help us get a feel for their importance, would be to say they were the Republicans and Democrats of first century Judaism.  Republicans and Democrats have different political views, but they share political power.  The Pharisees and Sadducees had different theological views, but they shared power in the spiritual affairs of the Jews.  The Pharisees were absolute fanatics in many ways, and Saul of Tarsus was a Pharisee.

If you would like a mental picture of a first century Pharisee, try to think of the most stubborn, obstinate, self-righteous fanatic you have ever known.  You might be approaching a Pharisee.  I must admit that I have some Pharisee in me.  When I believe I am correct, it is very difficult for anyone or anything to change my mind.  When I reach basic conclusions that are foundational to a position I hold, it requires the strongest evidence possible to move me to a new position.  This is another way of saying I am obstinate and hard-headed about certain things.  By comparison, the Pharisees of the first century would have considered me to be wishy-washy and weak.  They were a tough group.

The reason Jesus of Nazareth wound up on a Roman cross was because of the things he said, as he traveled around the countryside.  He locked horns with the Pharisees early in his ministry and never got off their backs.  They absolutely hated him.  He made fools of them by merely telling stories and asking questions.  One of the points of his teaching ministry to the Jews was to expose their misunderstanding of the Law.  Jesus regularly condemned the hypocrisy that had been developed and perpetuated by extreme legalism.  His major point was that the condition of the heart transcends the deed.

Jesus also demonstrated the ability to perform supernatural acts that involved healing, sight restoration, and control of the natural elements.  The Pharisees were aware of these things and were fearful of him, because he had a significant amount of support among the common people.  Whether or not all of the Pharisees believed Jesus was actually performing miracles is unclear.  They did believe there were many Jews who believed, who were openly reporting the miracles as facts.

The most offensive thing Jesus did, which was the ultimate cause of his death, was leaving his listeners with the distinct impression he claimed to be God in the flesh.  This was the reason the Pharisees had him executed, and the chief reason for their extreme hatred.       If I was an important religious leader and believed it was unlikely that I could make a mistake, a person confronting me with reasoning that made me appear to be an idiot would certainly have my attention.  About the time that person began to claim to be God, I would probably become unfriendly.

We lose sight of much of the human drama in the Bible, because we forget these were real people, living real events, involving issues of great importance to them.  We must remember that Saul of Tarsus was a devout Pharisee, and that the Pharisees hated everything Jesus said and did.

After Jesus was crucified by the Romans, the problem he had presented to the Pharisees did not go away.  It got worse.  Three days after Jesus was executed, stories began to float around Jerusalem that he had risen from the dead and had physically appeared to his followers.  For the Pharisees it was a huge problem, because large numbers of Jews were becoming convinced Jesus had really been raised from the dead.

People were believing as a result of the testimony of the poor fishermen who had traveled with Jesus during his ministry.  They were going about proclaiming that Jesus was alive, and that they had personally seen and touched him.  I believe they were believed because it is hard to imagine several people simultaneously going crazy and suffering from the same delusion.  Ultimately, there were about five-hundred people who saw Jesus alive.

Saul, the Pharisee, was involved in hunting down these believers and throwing them in jail.  Some of his victims were executed for their faith.  Saul was on his way to Damascus from Jerusalem, for the purpose of searching out believers in that city, when a most remarkable thing happened to him in broad daylight.  His experience is reported in the New Testament book of Acts, where the following testimony of the event appears:

I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city.  Under Gamaliel I was thoroughly trained in the law of our fathers and was just as zealous for God as any of you are  today.  I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison, as also the high priest and all the Council can testify.  I even obtained letters from them to their brothers in Damascus, and went there to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem to be punished.

About noon as I came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me.  I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me,

“Saul! Saul!  Why do you persecute me?”

“Who are you Lord?”  I asked.

“I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting,” he replied.  My companions saw the light, but they did not understand the voice of him who was speaking to me.

“What shall I do Lord,”  I asked

.        “Get up,” the Lord said, “and go into Damascus.  There you will be told all that you have been assigned to do.” (Acts 22:3-10)

Saul, who subsequently became Paul, joined the believers he had been persecuting to death.  A stubborn, obstinate Pharisee had become a personal witness of the resurrection.

The significance of this cannot be overstated when we relate to the kind of evidence that would have been necessary to change the mind of someone like Saul.  There are only two options that can explain the change in him:

1.  The event happened, or

2.  Saul lost his mind.

To determine if the event happened, is dependent upon Saul/Paul’s own testimony, which was confirmed by his action.  He went to his death many years later telling the same tale.  In between his conversion and his death, the man revolutionized religion and provided the doctrinal foundation for Christianity.  To read the writings of Paul in the New Testament, the picture is not of a man who has lost his mind.  It is a mind of piercing clarity that presents spiritual concepts that have challenged the world for the past two-thousand years.  Thousands of books have been written evaluating the words of this man, and the truths revealed in his writing have provided peace, joy, and contentment for millions.

With the exception of Jesus himself, no other man has so impacted the world in such a dramatic way.  The amazing thing is that Paul said he had not received his message from any human source, and neither was it a product of his own thinking.  He claims he received the message by direct revelation from Jesus Christ, and that he was merely a messenger.

I have tried to imagine myself as Saul on the road to Damascus, and to feel his attitude prior to meeting Jesus.  Saul must have been one of the most sanctimonious, self-righteous, pompous, characters we could ever hope we would never meet.  He believed the Jesus followers were evil people who were blasphemers of his God and The Law.  Everything Saul had lived for to that point, was grounded in The Law and the teachings of the Pharisees.  He had spent years studying the minutia of the Jewish commentaries and was a brilliant man.

Saul had probably thought through every precept he held to be true, and was firmly rooted in his tradition.  There is no doubt a theological debate with this man would have been a difficult proposition for anyone because Saul was convinced of the error being preached by the Jesus fanatics.  He was fully committed to their elimination from Jewish society.

When I can see this Saul, his account of meeting Jesus takes on incredible meaning that reeks of truth.  The slightest understanding of human nature would indicate the last thing Saul of Tarsus would have wanted in his life, was a personal revelation of Jesus Christ.  If someone had told Saul before he left Jerusalem that he would see Jesus on the road to Damascus, he would have had the person arrested and flogged.  Yet, Saul was converted and changed from a proud, self-righteous, Pharisee into a willing servant.

From my study of Saul I can see he was the kind of man who would have required compelling evidence.  The event that convinced Saul is the same event that faces each person today, as they consider the claims of Christianity.  That event is the historic, literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  If this event did not occur, Christianity is the biggest lie that has ever been foisted upon the world, and those who have believed are fools of the first order.