Was Paul the Gentile Moses?
Acts 9:1:19
We will take a look at a remarkable event this morning. The technical term for a vision of God used by theologians is a theophany. This is where God appears in a certain and life-changing way. Moses had such a vision at the burning bush. Isaiah saw the LORD high and lifted up in the Temple. John saw the Lord at Patmos. Peter, James, and John saw the Lord at the Transfiguration. Today we see the life changing experience given to Paul on the way to Damascus.
Luke records this event three times in Acts, here, before the Jews in Jerusalem, and then before Herod Agrippa. What us interesting is that there is some difference in the detail of what happened. Here it says that those with Paul were left standing and speechless. They heard a voice but did not see the vision. When Paul recounts this later, he says that they say the light but did not hear what was spoken. The third time it says all were thrown to the ground and enveloped in light. How do we harmonize this?
First of all, Luke was a careful historian. He certainly would have noticed the difference in detail and could have harmonized the accounts at the time of writing. It is to Luke’s credit that he records these differences. What we have is three slightly different accounts. We have in a sense three witnesses to the event.
What has to be said is what happened was both overwhelming as well as utterly unexpected just like the resurrection of Jesus. Differences in detail were bound to emerge due to the extreme excitement and confusion. However, they are in perfect agreement on the important points. This is what makes valid courtroom testimony. If the accounts were identical, then there would only be one witness and Luke would be accused of copy and paste.
If taken together, it would seem that those with Paul saw the physical light but not the face of the Lord and heard sound but did not understand it. They were aware that something very unusual had happened. They also knew that the experience blinded Paul, and he had to be led by hand to Damascus.
There was one other vision that day. It was not as dramatic in appearance, but the Lord appeared to a disciple named Ananias and directed him to go to the main street to resort Paul’s sight and to baptize him. It was a remarkable act of faith for an otherwise unknown disciple. He reminded the Lord of who Saul was, that he had ravaged the church in Jerusalem and had come to Damascus with letters to arrest all the Christians he could find. How would Paul have found these Christians, many of whom were in hiding? One way would be to feign conversion and to be admitted to the flock. He could be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But the Lord assured Ananias that this was for real. Ananias knew the Lord and he obeyed the summons. Ananias was also told that Paul was specially chosen to go to the Gentiles and would suffer many things on account of the name of Jesus. So he obeyed and the scales fell off Saul's eyes. He was baptized, an act of abject humiliation for the once proud Jew, to submit to a ritual extended to Gentile converts to Judaism. Then he was refreshed. Following this, he proved his conversion by public proclamation of Jesus as the Christ. The stunned Jews soon reacted and Paul had to be let down the city wall by the brethren to escape their clutches.
We should remember that Paul was called to the ministry to the Gentiles even before the door had been formally opened to them at Cornelius’ house. God would use Peter for that, and he would have to defend the action. But in God’s wisdom, the one who was primarily entrusted to the ministry of the circumcision would preach to Cornelius and demonstrate His approval by the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul was off in hiding.
In the title of the sermon, you probably wondered how Moses could possibly be compared to Paul? But there are very many coincidences. The first is that both were well instructed in the ways of the worldly wisdom of their day. Moses learned in the court of the Egyptian Pharaoh and Paul at the university at Tarsus. Both of them also came to identify themselves with Israel and not their earthly trappings.
Before their respective theophanies, both Paul and Moses tried to realize the promise of God to Abraham in a worldly way. Moses killed an Egyptian, and Paul thaught that he was cleansing Israel by the heretical sect of the Christians. Both had to flee as a result, in the case of Moses before the theophany, and afterwards in the case of Paul. The theophany was a change of course for both servants of the Lord. The Lord also spent considerable time retraining both Moses and Paul. Paul and Moses both were taught on the back side of the Arabian desert. Finally, both of them had a speech defect. They were both stammerers. These are some remarkable parallels.
Moses was called to release the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. But Paul would instead liberate the Egyptians and other Gentiles from slavery to sin and idols and turn them to the living God. We see a little bit of humor in God when he chooses the Pharisee of the Pharisees not just to become a Christian in a more Jewish sense, but to be a preacher to the Gentiles who were utterly detested by the Pharisees. We see this irony in Paul’s description of himself at the beginning of Romans. Beside being the Lord’s slave, he was separated unto the gospel of God. The very word Pharisee means “one who has separated himself” to God. But instead, Paul was to be a Pharisee to the Gentiles!
We see in the conversion and call of Paul a sense of completion of God’s promise to Abraham. It was not just to be ethnic Jews who were to be the inheritors of the promise but all nations. The promise says that in Abraham, all the nations (Gentiles) would be blessed. The promise itself was a development of the promise given to Eve in Genesis 3:15. She was promised that one of her descendants would suffer His feet to be bruised but would in turn bruise the head of the serpent. This promise was given when only Adam and Eve lived on earth. In other words, the promise was given to the entire human race.
Paul recounts in Galatians that in discussion with the reputable men of the Jerusalem church that this promise was to be fulfilled in Peter being the apostle to the circumcision and Paul to the Gentiles. The Jews were privileged to be the first in time to whom the promise of Christ was extended. But this privilege is a temporal one and not one of rank. The Jews were not like what we mean when we say the “First Families of Virginia.” Jews do not have a superior place to the Gentiles in the Kingdom of God. Paul adamantly affirms the equality of Jews and Gentiles before God. The binaries that separated people like male and female do not matter before God as far as our standing is concerned Gentiles are not like the Gibeonites of the Old Testament who tricked Joshua by pretending to be from a faw away land and were allowed to remain as slaves, as choppers of wood and drawers of water. Paul is adamantly opposed to this Judaizing idea that Gentiles occupied a subordinate place. Paul pronounces a curse against the very idea at the beginning of Galatians and says their gospel was no gospel at all.
It isn’t as though the Jews did not proselytize the Gentiles. They indeed felt that is was their God-given task to proclaim the God of Israel to them. But it was very hard if not impossible to gain admittance as a full Jew. This might take many generations. The Gentiles God-fearers were always aware of their subordinate position to native Jews. Paul would be a tireless champion to these Gentile God-fearers as well as to Gentiles who had never heard of the Lord. He tirelessly affirmed that the Gentiles were full members of Israel alongside native Jewish believers, even to the point of saying that native born Jews who felt that Gentiles must submit themselves to Jewish ceremony including circumcision were not Christians at all. They had not believed Jesus. Paul cried out to the Pharisaic Pharaoh’s of his day, “Let my people go!”
It troubles me to some point to see all of this love affair with Jewishness that is going on in the church today. It threatens to subjugate the Gentiles to Jewish regulations as though one has to become a Jew to be a better Christian. They run around in prayer shawls and call themselves Rabbi’s. I am all for evangelizing the Jews. Don’t get me wrong. I am also not against their commitment to their culture. One does not have to become a Greek to become a Christian. But is is just as true that a Gentile who comes to Christ has to become a Jew.
Paul in Galatians ends with the words calling the church “The Israel of God.” Note that he does not say a second Israel but uses the word “the”. In Romans he considers the makeup of Israel to be Christian believers in Jesus, the Lord of the Covenant, the Yahweh of the Old Testament. Those who fail to believe, even though they be natural branches would be cut off and believing Gentile branches added. What is important is that on becomes a member of Israel by faith in Jesus Christ, who was born a son of David, born under the law, born by a woman to die for all. Everyone who believes in their heart that God raised this Jesus from the dead and publicly confesses that He is Yahweh shall be saved.
When we look at denominations and divisions in the church today into Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterian, Independents, Methodists, etc., there is also this tendency to hold one’s beliefs to be superior to another. I am not saying that what distinctions one makes is necessarily wrong. They may be right. But this holier-than-thou attitude needs to be checked. Let us together separate ourselves and become slaves of Jesus Christ for the purpose of setting free the captives.
