Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, according to the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus,

To Timothy, my dear son:

Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. (2 Timothy 1:1-2)

As Paul writes elsewhere, he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5). He was one of the Pharisees, a very strict sect of the Jewish religion. Before he converted to the Christian faith, all this counted for something, but later he would realize that his background earned him no favor in God’s sight. He had to come to God another way.

Luke introduces him in Acts 7. He was called Saul at that time, and he consented when the Jews stoned Stephen to death. From a non-Christian perspective, or from the perspective of those blinded to the truth, Saul was a proper Jewish man, an upright Pharisee, a highly credentialed scholar. However, the truth was that he was an accomplice to the murder of an innocent man. In the Acts of the Apostles, this is the first thing that we learn about him.

Saul continued in this direction, and Acts 9 reports that he was “breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples.” He received authority from the high priest to visit Damascus in order to capture and imprison the Christians there. It seems that a person who would pursue, imprison, and even murder others must be serious about his own convictions. Indeed, he was a zealous man. But as he would later admit, he acted in “ignorance and unbelief.” His zeal was not informed by the truth, and it did not arise from an openness toward God, or faith in what God has revealed. Those who oppose and persecute Christians are, by definition, unintelligent and unrighteous people.

His religion did not make him a godly man. It made him a murderer. The problem was not in religion as such. Saul had a specific kind of religion, and either it was this religion that made him a murderer, or he became a murderer because his commitment to this religion was defective or distorted. It would appear that his devotion to his religion was rather “faultless” (Philippians 3:6). Thus even if there was a personal and subjective side to his great error, there was also a public and objective side to it.

There was something wrong with his religion. I am not referring to the religion of the Old Testament. This is the mistake that many people make – they assume that the religion of the Jews and the Pharisees was the religion of the Old Testament. No, although their religion was based on the Old Testament, overall it was vastly different and even antagonistic to it, contradicting it in spirit and in letter. Some people have the misunderstanding that the Pharisees were hostile to Jesus because they were too adamant about following the law of Moses or the Old Testament. But they did the opposite. Jesus said that they circumvented God’s commandments by their traditions (Matthew 15:6). They had invented rules and customs that were supposedly consistent with God’s commands, but that in fact redefined and replaced God’s commands in their lives. He said that Isaiah’s prophecy applied to them: “They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men” (Matthew 15:9).

The religion of the Jews and the Pharisees was not the religion of the Old Testament. It was a system that they made up to excuse themselves from accepting the words of the prophets. Jesus said that they did not even believe the Old Testament: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?” (John 5:46-47). Faith in Christ, and thus faith in the New Testament, naturally follows from faith in the Old Testament, because Christ fulfilled the Old Testament. The Jews and the Pharisees did not follow God’s revelation, but their own human tradition. We must correct the idea that they were hostile to Christ because they were too obsessed with precision in their doctrine and obedience. No, they were hostile to Christ because they cared very much about how to avoid believing and obeying God’s word while giving the appearance of religious devotion, and Christ exposed their hypocrisy.

So Paul, or Saul, was a zealous man. But this zeal for his religion drove him to hatred and murder against God’s people. Some might say that this was a case of misdirected zeal. This is not entirely wrong, but the matter was not so simple. Zeal is not an ideologically neutral attitude – a person is zealous for something. Since a person is zealous for something, it means that zeal has content, and since the content – the beliefs or ideologies – can be right or wrong, then the zeal can be either right or wrong. Therefore, when a person’s zeal moves him to do something wrong, if this zeal is consistent with and a product of his ideology for which he is so zealous, then the zeal itself is wrong. It is not just misdirected zeal, but a wrong or evil zeal, and a different kind of zeal than zeal for that which is true and right.

We must not suppose that Paul had a natural zealous attitude that was good in itself, only that it was misdirected, and that this zeal made him a more effective believer once it was redirected by the gospel. Again, this assumes that zeal can be considered in itself, apart from what the person is zealous for, so that a person may use the same zeal for this or for that, depending on how it is directed. However, zeal cannot be detached from ideology. No, Paul had the wrong kind of zeal, a zeal that made him a murderer. It was a kind of zeal that, by his own admission, was based on “ignorance and unbelief.” The zeal that he exhibited as a Christian was based on an entirely different foundation, one that was generated by the work of the Spirit and a sound understanding of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. And since the Spirit works in all of God’s people, and since all of God’s people can understand the grace of Christ, all Christians can possess great zeal for the things of God. It is not something that belongs to the likes of Paul apart from the gospel, but something that is made available to all who believe the gospel.

The faith of Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the words of the prophets. Paul did not see this at first. He perceived Christ as a threat to his religion, although much of it was not the religion of the Old Testament, but of human tradition, that is, of human invention. Just as Ishmael mocked Isaac, the son of promise, and just as the Pharisees persecuted Christ, the Son of Promise, the Jews persecuted the Christians. The heirs of human tradition will always persecute the heirs of divine revelation. We must not have the slightest sympathy for Paul’s position before his conversion. He followed tradition instead of God’s word. His understanding of the law was wrong. He did not even believe what was written by Moses. If he had believed in God’s word, he would have believed in the gospel of Christ right away. But he did not. He was wrong.