Blinded by Hatred, Blinded by Love
Hatred is a dark, violent, selfish emotion that can destroy the human heart even the best of them. Hatred has a way of taking root within us like no other emotion can. It twists our thinking and speaking until all that spews out of us are dark sentences.
It’s hard to believe but God wants to reach people that are just like that. God’s heart aches to reach people just like this and God has given us an example of what happens when He does touch the heart that is full of hate. That example is found in the life of the Apostle Paul.
There is so much to who and what St. Paul is that no single telling can fully reveal the whole man. Today I wish to add my contribution in the hope that you may learn something of St. Paul that you might have missed or overlooked in the past. I have been studying his life and work this past week and I am emotionally exhausted by what I have learned. Again and again I marvel at this man we call St. Paul and how he worked and suffered for the cause of Jesus Christ.
Last week our guest Rev. Greg Girard explained how trials in our life should produce patience and joy. James chapter one says 2Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. 4Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. James was telling us that God takes the bitter and turns it sweet. No greater example exists for us than the life of St. Paul.
Beginning in the book of Acts Chapter 8 Paul is a party to murder but here he is not known to us as Paul but Saul the bright young Pharisee trained by Gamaliel. The murder victim is the young disciple Stephen who as he is being stoned prays to God asking that this sin not be charged against his murders. Stephen becomes the first recorded Martyr of the early church.
Saul is young, he comes from a wealthy family and he has risen through the Jewish equivalent of the Dallas Theological Seminary of A.D. 35. He is gifted with an incredible mind for reason and debate which he applies skillfully as he defends the Jewish faith. No one wants to debate or argue with Saul because he can rip you to shreds with his reason, logic and wit. He does not want to wound you intellectually he wants to destroy you.
Saul arrives at the perfect place in history as the chief defender for the Jewish faith which is dealing with a new and to them a blasphemous sect called The Way. It is the infancy of the early Christian church and Saul borrows a page from King Herod and realizes that he must exterminate the new faith or the Jewish priestly class and its amassed authority will be deposed.
Saul is filled not with fear by this new faith, not with disgust or intolerance but with pure hate. You see Saul is a Pharisee amongst Pharisee’s he is “The” role model of a purely legalistic, autocratic, judgmental and antiquated religious system. A system that Jesus came to change and replace with a new covenant of Love.
Saul is full of self righteousness since he fully believes he is as perfect as a man can be under the Mosaic covenant. It is this full blown self righteousness and his grasp and use of the law that causes all around him to mind their place. It is also the force that has propelled him to high standing within the members of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish High Theological court.
He is for all intensive purposes the right man for the right job. That job is to wipe out the followers of the Nazarene. It is with this purpose and mind set that he sets out across the country side seeking to imprison, destroy and kill everyone he can find who is a follower of Jesus the one they call the Christ.
Pastor Greg Nance from Signal Mountain Church of Christ Tennessee put it this way:(Sermon Central.Com)
” Saul hated Jesus. He saw him as a blasphemer and false prophet. With his type “A” personality, he took up the cause of wiping this new movement out! In fact, it appears to have become almost an obsession. Listen to what the scriptures say in Acts:
8:1 And Saul was there, giving approval to his death. On that day a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.
2 Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him.
3 But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison.
9:1 Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest
2 and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem.
He later said in Acts 26: 9 "I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
10 And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the saints in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them.
11 Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. In my obsession against them, I even went to foreign cities to persecute them.”
Pastor Nance goes on to put it in contemporary terms for us.
“I’m convinced that if he could, he would have strapped bombs on his body and if he thought he could take out all the followers of Jesus with him, he would detonate! Saul was the first terrorist against followers of Jesus.”
I just finished watching a movie called “The Kingdom” in that movie I saw the most graphic visual re-enactment of a terrorist blowing himself up along with his victims. It was a powerful and provocative visual image that has left an indelible imprint on my psyche.
This is the kind of hate that fueled Saul and held him captive in the dark recesses of his heart.
Pastor Nance asks the perplexing question.
“So what happened? How did Saul the persecutor of the church become Paul the persecuted for Jesus Christ? It all happened suddenly, as he was on the way to Damascus.”
Let us look to scripture and witness Saul’s transformation into Paul. He is on the Damascus road with arrest warrants in his hands for known leaders and adherents of this “Way”. He is accompanied by the best thugs money could buy, they would be needed to beat and arrest these Jesus followers.
Acts 9:3 Saul falls to the ground fearful and blinded by a light from heaven that shines around him. The hunter becomes the hunted. A loud voice protests to Saul
“"Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
5"Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked.
"I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. 6"Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do."
7The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. 8Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. 9For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.
Here is where Saul’s faith becomes real for probably the first time in his life. Here Saul meets the God he has studied for years. Here the subject expert meets the very subject he has studied and he is driven to his knees in humility and reverent fear. There is nothing hypothetical or metaphorical about this meeting it is very, very real.
Now the metamorphosis begins. The one who was blinded by hate is now blinded by Love. The pure, holy, perfect, eternal, transforming divine love of Jesus Christ enters Saul’s sight. Where there once was hate it is now engulfed by the illuminating power of Jesus love. This holy light enters the eyes but somehow becomes embedded in Saul’s heart.
For three days and nights Saul is blind and all that time this great religious intellect is dumbfounded as he comes to the realization that Jesus is the Christ. Paul makes good use of this time and spends it in prayer. God speaks to the church leader Ananias and the enemy of the church becomes the evangelist to the gentiles. Ananias lays his hands on Saul as God directed and Saul’s sight is returned and he is filled with the Holy Spirit and baptized.
At once he begins to preach that Jesus is the Son of God. The rest as they sat is history. Saul becomes Paul at Antioch where he spends two years with Barnabas. It is from Antioch that the followers are first called Christians.
Paul would go on to speak to thousands, and tens of thousands and along the way he will be beaten, scourged, imprisoned, stoned and left for dead, ship wrecked and finally have his head cut off with a sword. The light from heaven fell like a lightning bolt that day and hate was blinded by love.
God is the same today, yesterday and tomorrow. I want you to know that a similar event touched the life of someone in our own time. He was a terrorist, he was full of hate and he was a religious person of authority. He was a Muslim Imam to his fellow prisoners until one day he like Saul heard the voice of Jesus call to him.
He became a Christian and then had to explain it to his fellow Muslim inmates. He led many to Christ and is now the pastor of a church in British Columbia. This is not an isolated incident a search on the internet revealed that many Muslim’s are coming to Jesus.
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=hBw8oIteRfk
Jesus is still on the Damascus road confronting those who hate Him with the light of His love. Let us pray this week for the peace of Jerusalem and the Palestinian people as those who were once terrorist towards each other might become evangelists for Jesus Christ.
Let us pray.
Blinded by hatred, Blinded by Love - Outline
Hate – Defined Hatred is a dark, violent, selfish emotion that can destroy the human heart even the best of them
It’s hard to believe but God wants to reach people that are just like that.
Saul’s motivation and emotions –
Saul is young, he comes from a wealthy family and he has risen through the Jewish equivalent of the Dallas Theological Seminary of A.D. 35. He is gifted with an incredible mind for reason and debate which he applies skillfully as he defends the Jewish faith. No one wants to debate or argue with Saul because he can rip you to shreds with his reason, logic and wit. He does not want to wound you intellectually he wants to destroy you.
Pastor Greg Nance from Signal Mountain Church of Christ Tennessee put it this way in contemporary terms:
“I’m convinced that if he could, he would have strapped bombs on his body and if he thought he could take out all the followers of Jesus with him, he would detonate! Saul was the first terrorist against followers of Jesus.”
Movie “The Kingdom”
Let us look to scripture and witness Saul’s transformation into Paul.
9For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.
The one who was blinded by hate is now blinded by Love.
Paul would go on to speak to thousands, and tens of thousands and along the way he will be beaten, scourged, imprisoned, stoned and left for dead, ship wrecked and finally have his head cut off with a sword. The light from heaven fell like a lightning bolt that day and hate was blinded by love.
I want you to know that a similar event touched the life of someone in our own time.
Jesus is still on the Damascus road confronting those who hate Him with the light of His love. Let us pray this week for the peace of Jerusalem and the Palestinian people as those who were once terrorist towards each other might become evangelists for Jesus Christ.
