The Unique Apostleship Of Paul. Series

THE UNIQUE APOSTLESHIP OF PAUL.

Galatians 1:11-24.

The gospel which was preached by Paul was “not according to men. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ” (GALATIANS 1:11-12). Paul elaborates on this assertion throughout the rest of the chapter.

Paul's testimony is that he is ‘the least of the apostles,’ but he still saw the risen Lord and is a witness to the resurrection ‘as one born out of due time’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:8-9). Paul asserted his apostleship by saying, ‘Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 9:1). Although Saul's companions on the Damascus road also witnessed the bright light and heard the sound of the voice, it was Saul alone who beheld Jesus (cf. Acts 9:1-9).

The Damascus road experience was not just Paul's conversion, but also his commissioning to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. Ananias was told that Paul was a chosen vessel to bear the Lord's name before the Gentiles (cf. Acts 9:15). Paul himself recalls Jesus saying, ‘I will deliver you from the people, and from the Gentiles, to whom I now send you’ (cf. Acts 26:17). The word ‘apostle’ is literally ‘sent one.’

Paul's defence of his apostleship is that he received it ‘not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead’ (cf. Galatians 1:1). Paul received the gospel, he says, by direct revelation from Jesus. Also, his commission as Apostle to the Gentiles came directly from Jesus (GALATIANS 1:11-12; GALATIANS 1:15-16).

After the brethren in Damascus let him down in a basket over the wall of their city (cf. Acts 9:25), Paul seems to have spent three years in Arabia (GALATIANS 1:17). Perhaps there he communed with his new-found Lord, and in meditation upon God's word embraced those teachings of which he was able to say later, ‘I received from the Lord,’ and ‘this I say, and testify in the Lord,’ and ‘I command, yet not I but the Lord’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:23; 1 Corinthians 15:3; Ephesians 4:17; 1 Corinthians 7:10).

Certainly, it was three years before Paul went up to Jerusalem to meet Peter, and he stayed with him just fifteen days (GALATIANS 1:18). This was hardly long enough for Paul to have learned the gospel from Peter, or from “the other apostles” (who seem to have been absent.) The only other leader of the Jerusalem church who Paul met, incidentally, was James the Lord’s brother (GALATIANS 1:19).

At this point the Apostle adds his solemn affirmation – in effect, “As God is my witness, I lie not” (GALATIANS 1:20). The point being that the apostleship of Paul was ‘not by man, but by Jesus Christ’ (cf. Galatians 1:1). After all, his call came directly from the risen Lord Christ.

After this brief visit, Paul returned to Syria, and to Cilicia in the southeast of modern Turkey (GALATIANS 1:21). The capital of Syria was Damascus, on the road to which Paul had been converted. The capital of Cilicia was Tarsus, Paul’s home town.

In the meantime, Paul was unknown by face by the assemblies of Judaea which were in Christ. They had only heard a rumour that their persecutor was now preaching the faith which he had once sought to destroy (cf. GALATIANS 1:13-14). And on this account, “they glorified God because of me” (GALATIANS 1:22-24)

It was a full fourteen years after his conversion before Paul returned to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus, and there received the right hand of fellowship from Peter, James the Lord's brother, and John (cf. Galatians 2:1; Galatians 2:9). This was the time of the famous Council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15.

We see Peter's esteem of the Apostle Paul in his own later epistle to the churches of the dispersion: for Peter, the epistles of Paul are equal with ‘the other scriptures’ (cf. 2 Peter 3:15-16).