St. Paul the apostle: a Biblical portrait and a mirror of the manifold grace of God.

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IlIBRARY OF CONGRESS J

I UNITED STATES OF AMBEICl.^

ST PAUL THE APOSTLE

II. The Phaeisee

'' I was alive without the law once ; but when the commandment came, sin revived." — Eom. vii. 9.

Such a Pharisee as the man in Luke xviii. 11, satisfied in his negative righteousness, Saul was not. No, he took bitter pains in his Pharisaism, walking, as he w^as taught, according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, being zealous toward God, (Acts xxii. 3 ;) and he painfully felt the rod of the legal driver, when, ignorant of God's righteousness, he went about to establish his own, (Eom. X, 3.) The star of his hope, the glorious splendour of Messiah's reign, he could conceive only as rising over ''a righteous nation which keepeth the truth," or ''the faith," (as Luther has rendered Is. xxvi. 2.) To keep the faith was all Saul's aim ; but he knew not what faith is, though we have learnt it of Paul to be no human work nor virtue, but that organ wrought in our heart through God's word and Spirit, by means of which we apprehend and receive with childlike trust and confidence, the riches of His grace in Christ Jesus our Lord. But to Saul the Pharisee it still was a work, .a legal virtue, the due respect and literal observance of all God-appointed institutions and ordinances, circumcision, the passover, and the reading of the Law and the Prophets on every Sabbath ; all which he kept strictly, and walked in unblamably. '' Prepare ye the way of the Lord ! " This prophetic call to repentance would sound in Saul's

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ear as a spur to unreraitting exertions; for not till his nation should have returned to unblamable righteousness could he think that Messiah would appear to deliver Israel from all her enemies, and crown His chosen people with glory and honour in His kingdom of righteousness. These were the cravings of Saul's soul.

" Touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless," (Phil. iii. 6,) this was his motto as a Pharisee. Before men he had succeeded in obtaining this blamelessness, and to obtain it before God did not appear to him out of the reach of his power. For how should God have given laws to His people which they were not able to keep ? Eighteousness, then, must verily be obtainable by the deeds of the law, which must give life, or else it were not ''holy and just, and good." So Saul argued and thought. Had he been a hypocritical, or even superficial Pharisee, the coming to a compromise with the requirements of the law might have caused him little difficulty. But he felt the deadly point of the law in the tenth commandment, " Thou shalt not covet," (Eom. vii. 7 ;) and the knowledge of its spirituality discovered to him that he was " carnal, sold under sin," (Eom. vii. 14.)* But did this discovery make

* Like that honest farmer (Michael was his name) who, on his deathbed, called out to his son: "Jack, just reach down the Catechism from yonder shelf, to see how my past life agrees with it. Please, read me the commandments." "Thou shalt have none other gods but me. Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image," &c. " Oh, these two I have always kept ; I have neither worshipped idols, like the heathen, nor bowed down to images, like the Roman Catholics, Please, proceed to the third." " Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," &c. " Here I am right also ; I never swore an oath except in a court of justice; pray, pass to the next." " Eemember that thou keep holy the Sabbath-day." " Oh, there I am not to blame either ; I have always gone to church of a Sunday, and never played at cards, nor made my servants work. Which follows now?" "Honour thy father and thy motlicr." "Ay, as to that, Jack, I may well bid you follow my example ; for when a boy I shewed

Saul lose trust in his own power ? By no means ; it incited him only the more earnestly to set about establishing his own righteousness. "And I profited/' he says, "in the Jews' religion above many mine equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers," (Gal. i. 14.) He knew only one way of silencing his conscience, which accused him of the lust stirred up in his members by the commandment ; and that was, by keeping the commandment. Even that chiefest of all : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might," (Deut. vi. 5,) he despaired not to attain to it, and therefore entered his resolute '' ISTo " to the death-threatening sentence of the law. He knew nothing yet of the law '' working death " in him, " that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful," (Eom. vii. 13 ;) and, as dying unto sin was still a strange doctrine to him, he was utterly unwilling to die by sin ; and therefore strove with all his might to get the mastery over it, that he might live by righteousness. Stung by the commandment, sin would take occasion daily to gnaw at the fair flower of his selfrighteousness, making it fade and droop ; but daily also

all honour and respect to my poor parents, God bless them ! What 'a the next ? " " Thou shalt do no murder." " Thank God, that 's not on my conscience. I never slew a man, not even in lawful war. Go on." " Thou shalt not commit adultery." " Of that I have kept clear also, and always been faithful to your poor mother. Proceed." " Thou shalt not steal." " I never took aught did not belong to me. ^Rext." " Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neigbour." " I never was summoned as witness, nor would I swear falsely against any person. Are there any more ? " " Yes, one : Thou shalt not covet." Stop, Jack ! there, I^ must think a little ; yes, I cannot say I have never coveted. Pray, look for poor mamma's Bible on the subject." And here Jack found a reference from Exod. XX, to Matt, v., by which the upright farmer was soon led to see that he had broken the whole, and, becoming fully conscious of his exceeding sinfulness, he betook himself to that Christ whom Paul preached, and died a penitent. — Te.

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would he water it anew by self-imposed acts of a legal martyrdom, and thus prolong its artificial existence. And why was he so careful and zealous ? whom did he really serve? He indeed imagined that he was serving the God of his fathers, while in fact he was committing sacrilege. (Eom. ii. 22 ;) because all the while only feeding the pride of that high and noble youth " of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee," (Phil, iii 5.) Saul ! "thou art w^earied in the greatness of thy way; yet saidst thou not, There is no hope : thou hast found the life of thine hand; therefore thou wast not grieved/ (Isa. Ivii. 10.) More sharply Paul could not have condemned his Pharisaism, more severely he could not have proved his own infatuated self-deception of this period, than by the words we have chosen for the motto of this chapter, '' I was alive without the law once." And herewith he does not mean the life of his childhood, when yet unconscious of the law's '' Thou shalt," and '' Thou shalt not ; " when lust had not yet appeared unto him as sin, and death not been felt by him as the punishment of it. For he adds, " and I died." But if this death had taken place on his first awakening to a consciousness of the law, he could no longer have ''found the life of his own hand," and of his Pharisaism there would have been an end. This was not the case ; on the contrary, unwilling to the last to concede the ''killing letter" a right over him, he continued his utmost efforts to ward off the death-thrusts of the law by trying to turn its flaming testimony against sin into a quenching engine against God's wrath. Thus, though in truth panting under the burden of the law, he fancied himself to be " alive without the law ; " while, by his righteousness after, the law, he constantly, but fruitlessly, sought to secure this imaginary life against the consuming

B fire of that very law, the brightness of which no man can bear to behold. Out of the wretchedness of this experience he speaks, when he says, '' But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vail is upon their heart," (2 Cor. iii. 15.) Only from behind this vail, woven thick as scales out of the illusions of man's free-will, can man bear to look upon the law, and take it to be the strength of righteousness, w^hilst in truth it is the strength of sin, (1 Cor. xv. 56.) Let us rightly understand St Paul's humble confession, " I was alive without the law once." Saul the Pharisee's error certainly was not that he took it over strictly with God's holy commandments. God indeed takes it far more strictly than the strictest Pharisee. On the contrary, his grievous fault was, with a serious face, to play, as it were, at hide-and-seek with the law. But it found him out in every place. Ever nearer and nearer it went to his life ; and the issue, alas ! of his unhappy marriage with it was one fruit after another brought forth unto death, (Eom. vii. 5.) A legion of lusts, doubts, unbelief, murmurings, or even enmity against the true God of the unflattering and unswerving law; in fine, the entire host of sins lurking in the flesh, revived and issued forth from their hidingplaces at law's call ; and thus sin by the commandment became exceeding sinful, (Eom vii. 13.) His fancied life " without the law," and the illusion of a righteousness after the Pharisaic phantom of the law, it became daily more difficult for him to maintain ; yea it was a life of death nigh unto hell. And yet Saul the Pharisee would rather prolong it by seeking, in hot conflict, to parry the death-stroke of the law, than die under the cry of helpless weakness, " God be merciful to me a sinner ! "

That this was pride, Saul would not then acknowledge, being zealous, as he thought, not for his own honour, but for that of the God of Israel ; and indignant, not so much

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against tlie reproacli of liTiman nature, as being too weak to work God's righteousness, but rather the blasphemous thought that the law was unable to effect it. The inability of the former to be '' subject to the law of God" (Eom. viii. 7,) he would not own, for the very reason that this admission would imply the other, that " the law was weak through the flesh," (Eom. viii. 3 ;) which must have shaken Ms faith in God altogether, for Him he knew not yet, who, by His perfect obedience to the will of God, and His atoning death for sinners, has brought in another righteousness, even that of faith. An adulterer, therefore, in the sense of Eom. vii. 3, Saul would have become, had he escaped from under the yoke of righteousness by the law, ere he knew of another, by faith in Christ Jesus. Thus, then, he was a very different man from those who boast of their freedom from the law without any " obedience to the faith," or, in other words, who make void the law, instead of establishing it through faith, (Eom. iii. 31.) To his experience rather that word of Christ would come home, " If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself," (John vii. 17.) This will of God, Saul found expressed in the law, to fulfil which he set to work all the powers of his wiU, in order only to learn that he was a lost and condemned sinner, needing a Saviour such as Christ Jesus. Though, indeed, Paul himself would give us the lie, were we to say that God had manifested His Son to him in reward of his earnestness and sincerity, (Eom ix. 16, xi. 6 :) yet — to agree with Paul — we shaU be correct in saying, that God's grace followed him in all the ways of his infatuated blindness, till, by the repeated chastisements of the law, as " our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ," (Gal. iii. 24,) he was so " wearied in the greatness of his way," that it needed but " the heavenly voice/' in order to throw himself at once and completely into the arms of his merciful Saviour. He that was to become a Paul, strong by grace of faith, had first to experience in Saul his utter inability to acquire a righteousness by the deeds of the law. The Jews' advantage over the Gentiles in their possessing the Eevelation, served to sharpen the accusations of their conscience through the broken law, in order that the true Israel, that is, the Church of Christ — being raised on the wrecks of Judaism — might, through grace, let the doctrine of righteousness by faith in Christ shine resplendent through all lands, to the joy of all true children of Abraham, (cf Eom. iii. and iv., and Gal. iii.)

Saul, the Pharisee, and Luther, the Austin friar, form a pair. The sophists, at whose feet Luther sat and studied his divinity, were very dexterous in the art of weaving veils, not only for Moses and the prophets, but also for Christ and His apostles, in order to conceal both the splendour of the law and the comforting light of the gospel, and thus to place in advantageous relief the bright shining qualities of the natural man. But for all that, Luther came under anguish of sin by the terrors of the law ; the lightningconductors fabricated by the "idle" scholastics to ward off its strokes did not shield him. As Saul at Jerusalem was intent on gaining merit by the diligent keeping of the Jewish ordinances, or pacifying the accusations of his conscience by legal acts of devotion and self-sacrifice, so Luther, in the monastery at Erfurt. Therefore, after Christ had shined into both their hearts, Luther learnt so thoroughly to understand Paul, that, unawed by the opposition of Eomish pharisees and scribes — ^strutting along against him with proofs, wherewith he himself, as monk, had endeavoured in vain to pacify his alarmed soul — he went on boldly to exalt Christ's blood and righteousness as the

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only remedy and refuge for sinners. " If there was ever any man/' he could say, after the manner of Paul, (Acts xxii. 3, &c. ; Phil. iii. 4-6,) " who held in repute the Pope's ordinances, and was zealous for the traditions of our fathers, it was I, who have heartily defended and looked upon them as holy relics, and upon their observance as indeed necessary to salvation ; yea, to keep them inviolate I have tormented my body with fasting, watching, prayer, and other exercises, more than all who are now mine enemies and persecutors ; for I thought in this wise to satisfy the law, and shield my conscience from the rod of the oppressor. Yet it availed me naught ; yea, the further I proceeded in this way the more terrified I grew, so that I had nigh despaired, had not Christ mercifully looked upon me, and enlightened my heart by the light of His Gospel." And when Paul "testified" to his countrymen ''the kingdom of God, persuading them concerning Jesus, both out of the law of Moses and out of the prophets," (Acts xxviii. 23, &c.,) what else did he do but convince his blind brethren that, though living under the law, they were, as he himself had once been, " alive without the law;" that with all their boast of the law, they mistook and denied the power of it? Ever and anon, during his unwearied apostolic labours, would his former life as Pharisee come fresh to his memory. Made himself a true Israelite, who, " through the law," had become " dead to the law," (Gal. ii. 19,) he stiU, in his "kinsmen according to the flesh," had to re-taste over and over again, to the very dregs, the enmity of false Israelites, who, under the law, lived without the law. But the Church has now, in the apostolic teaching of this former Pharisee, to enjoy the fruit of that seed which fell into such deeply-furrowed soil. The very first sermon St Luke has recorded of him, (at Antioch in Pisidia,) how beautifully clear is its evangelical tone !

'' Be it known nnto you, therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins : and by Him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses," (Acts xiii. 38, 39 ;) and in the Eomans he sums up the preaching of the faith in this short sentence, " Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth," (Eom. x. 4.)

Gamaliel, Saul's teacher, is celebrated to this day among the Jews as the author of a terrible prayer of theirs against Jesus of N"azareth. Who made Saul to differ ? The persecutor of Jesus in His people knew no other cause of his salvation than simply God's mercy in Christ.

" Saul would not die, but his whole soul was bent

To satisfy the law, and thereby live.

He scorn'd the thought that God's law should be meant

To kill, instead of righteousness to give ; Yea, and the more he had its smart to feel, The more he grew beyond his peers in zeal."

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III. The Peesecutoe

" I persecuted this way unto the death." — Acts xxii, 4.

" Ye liave received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it ! " exclaimed Stephen before the Council ; and they were cut to the heart, gnashing on him with their teeth, (Acts vii. 53, 54.) How deeply the arrow of this word penetrated into Saul's heart, w^e may gather from the manner in which, about sixteen * years after, he alludes to the same glorious manifestation of the law upon Sinai, (Gal. iii. 19 ; cf also Heb. ii. 2.) Stephen's whole speech was of a nature to stir to the utmost the enmity against Jesus and His followers in the heart of our pharisaic zealot for God, for His law, and His people; for, while ascribing to God's gracious choice and forbearing mercy alone all the glory shining through Israel's history, Stephen, with all the fire of a holy zeal for God, rencAved the cutting arraignment of God's servant of old against the rebellious children of Israel, " Understand, therefore, that the Lord thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for

* This period is evidently too short. From Gal. i. 17, 18, and ii. 1, more than seventeen years must have elapsed between Acts ix. and xv. And supposing Paul's stay at Antioch (xv. 38) ever so short, and his epistle written after his first visit to Galatia, (xvi. 6,) during his stay at Corinth, (xviii. 11,) a period of very near tv)enty years must lie between Stephen's martyrdom and Paul's Epistle to the Galatians.— Tr.

thy righteousness ; for thou art a stiff-necked people. Ye have been rebellious against God from the day that I knew you/' (Deut. ix. 6, 24; cf. Acts vii. 51.) The very privileges of which the Jews were so proud, (Eom. ix. 4, 5) he arrayed as witnesses against a disobedient and gainsaying people : They are of Israel, but not of the faith of Abraham; theirs is the adoption, but they deny and betray to the heathen the mystery of it, as did their fathers ; theirs is the glory, and they profane and desecrate the Temple of God ; the covenant, and of its ordinances, circumcision and the passover, they make a false trust for their uncircumcised and unbelieving hearts ; the law, and they have neither kept it, nor known and acknowledged, as its fulfiUer, Him of whom Moses testified ; the service of God, and instead of redeeming mercy, they rejoice in the sacrifices of their own hand ; the promises, and they believe them not ; theirs are the fathers, and verily they are the children of those their fathers, who envied Joseph, and sold him into Egypt, " but God was with him ; '' finally, from them came Christ, " who is over all, God blessed for ever;'' and Stephen thus accuses them: ''Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted ? And they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One ; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers."

Saul lived heart and soul in the history of his nation. He now saw the sanctuary of his holy devotion defamed and condemned, and the whole fabric of his pharisaic notions of national glory torn and shattered. Let no one wonder, then, that Stephen's speech went like a sharp saw through his very heart. While accusing the holy Pharisees, one and all, of injustice and the breach of the law, Stephen had called Jesus the " Just One ; " and therewith had struck wounds into Saul's conscience, to bind up which,

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his tormented soul wonld labour day and night. To the heart of this youthful zealot, before whose zeal people were already bowing, the conviction would come home with irresistible force : Either Stephen or I ; there can be no compromise between us ; either Stephen has spoken the truth, and then I am lost and undone, or I have been rightly instructed in history and Holy Writ, and then this Jesus of ISTazareth must have been a false prophet, and his disciple is guilty of death. A last struggle this decision would inevitably cost him ; but so strongly was the notion of Pharisaic sanctity engrained in his flesh, that with prayerful imprecations in Jehova's name he would soon be led to reject, as a fiendish temptation, every doubt as to the correctness of the historical authorities represented by the heads of his nation. Thus his rencontre with Stephen would form an important turning point in Saul's life, and serve to hasten to its last climax his inveterate zeal against Jesus of ISTazareth and His followers. From this time, then, he was resolved to " persecute this way unto the death.'' To serve the God of his fathers was a life and death question with him, and the one point at stake was, AVho is that God ? Is it He who in His Christ upon the cross has held judgment over the sins of the world, "to declare His righteousness," which no flesh, not even that of Israel, can satisfy, but which requires the atoning sacrifice of Christ's blood, in order to save by grace those who believe in Him ; or is it He who will send His Christ to defy the lawless heathen, and rescue from their oppression His chosen people, keeping the law in righteousness, and to whom, in reward for their obedience, He will give the world for a possession ?

Is it He who, upon the instigation of the Jews, has delivered His Christ into the hands of the Gentiles to be scourged and crucified by order of Pontius Pilate, before whom He declared that His kingdom was not of this world, and thereby traced His people's way through it to be likewise one of suffering and death ? or is it He who will send His Christ to " judge the world with righteousness and the people with His truth/' (Ps. xcvi. 13 J but establish for His own the kingdom of Israel in cloudless glory ? Finally, is it He who has sent the Spirit of His Christ — now exalted to His right hand in heaven — into the hearts of Hispeople, thatthey should serve Him, whose '' kingdom is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost," and that, living in hope of becoming "joint-heirs with Christ," they should reckon the sufferings of this present time as not worthy to be compared with- the glory which shall be revealed in them," (Eom. viii. 17, 18) ; or is it He who will make His Christ appear to His chosen people in visible and palpable glory, and so save all Israel at once by transforming her present state of helpless servitude into one of kingly rule and heavenly felicity, thus fulfilling the prayer of our fathers, " Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion ! When the Lord bringeth back the captivity of His people, Jacob shall rejoice, and Israel shall bie glad," (Ps. xiv. 7.) In his zeal for the glory of the law, Saul persecuted Him who bore the curse of the law ; in his enthusiasm for the^ national honour of Israel, he persecuted '' the glory of Tiael," (Luke ii. 32,) whom Pilate in mockery styled '' the King of the Jews ;" and in his carnalminded enmity to a life of faith he persecuted " the Author and Finisher of our faith," whose " kingdom is not of this world."

"But Stephen, being fuU of the Holy Ghost, looked stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said. Behold I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God : " while to the eyes of the Jews the heavens were closed, whither Jesus had ascended, whose

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glory they knew not, (1 Cor. ii. 8.) And shutting their enraged ears, they " ran upon him with one accord, and cast him out of the city, and stoned him ; " and the witnesses of his supposed blasphemy, whose office it was to cast the first stone, prepared for their ''divine service," (Johnxvi. 2,) by laying down their clothes at a young man's feet, who was the very soul of this zealous deed — even our youthful Saul " the persecutor." *

" In all stones they throw at Stephen Saul's soul rages, more than even Theirs whose clothes lie at his feet.

While to die is sweet to Stephen, For he sees in open heaven Jesus whom his soul shall meet."

Adam de St Yictok,

'' Saul was consenting unto his death," writes St Luke (Acts viii. 1,) and Paul, upon his being won by Christ, thus expresses to the Lord Himself the feeling at his once unhappy participation in this scene, ''And when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by, and consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment of them that slew him," (Acts xxii. 20.) Were some Jews, if not most, short-sighted enough to imagine Stephen as possessed of a different spirit from that of the rest of Christ's disciples, Saul, with his penetrating eye, knew better than to think that the grave of this one would close over the name of the Nazarene, unless every one of " this way " could be destroyed with him ; and therefore he owns long after, before King Agrippa, " I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of l^aza-

* The celebrated Spanish painter Yicente Joannes has represented Saul as walking at the martyr's side lost in profound meditation, in striking contrast with the wild rabble. Fervent devotion is painted on his face, and upon his bror/ falls apparently from far off a ray of light that beams from Stephen's face (Acts vi. 15 ;) but which, with as much difficulty as determination, he evidently forces himself to ward off.

reth," (Acts xxvi. 9,) and the " ravening wolf " of the tribe of Benjamin (Gen. xlix. 27,) deemed it a "profiting in the Jews' religion" when he "persecuted the church of God and wasted it/' (Gal. i. 13, 14.) And such was the influence which Saul — a man already even in his youth — exercised over the minds of the people, who hitherto — from the powerful, heavenly demonstrations in their behalf — had evidently regarded the Apostles and their work with reverential awe, if not with favour, (Acts ii. 47, iii. 9-11, iv. 21, V. 13, 26,) that from Stephen's martyrdom he carried them away to a general persecution, he himself their leader, '' making havoc of the Church, entered into every house, and haling men and women, committed them to prison, and when they were put to death, he gave his voice against them ; " yea and '' oft in every synagogue " he punished and '' compelled them to blaspheme," thus becoming a murderer of their souls also. ]^or did it satisfy his blind zeal for the honour of God and His law to persecute and destroy " this way " in Jerusalem only, but " being exceedingly mad against them," he applied for warrants to the chief priests — to whose Sadducean lukewarmness in the cause, the fiery Saul might be now becoming rather irksome at Jerusalem — and went with them, destroying the churches where he came, ''even unto strange cities," as far as Damascus, whence from the " scattered " flock of Christ rays of light were already spreading abroad into heathen countries, (Acts viii. 3, 4, ix. 1, 2, xxii. 4, 5, xxvi. 9-11.)