Derek Thomas

His views about the law, about circumcision, about fraternizing with the Gentiles has all now been called into question.

The Judaizers might have been saying, this man, you know, this man's a liberal.

This man is from out west somewhere, and he's coming to the church, and he's forgetting the traditions of the church.

And he may well have been a conservative in the past, but now he's something of a religious liberal, and Paul has to defend himself.

I have a former life, and you know all about it.

It's not as though some reporter has done some investigation and has now published a kind of scoop on the apostle Paul revealing his past that no one was ever aware of.

Everybody knew Saul of Tarsus' past.

You have heard, he says in verse 13.

And what is it that they've heard?

How I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it.

We cannot overemphasize the degree to which Saul of Tarsus almost extinguished the early church.

He had it within his power.

or at least almost from a human point of view, to actually put out, to snuff out the Christian church at its very infancy.

And Luke, for example, gives us more than one account of Paul's conversion, and this is another one, so we have lots of information here about Paul's past.

going after men, women, and children, writing letters of authority to Jewish henchmen who would arrest and try and even in some cases kill these early Christians.

I suppose, I guess, that not a night went by when Paul lay his head on a pillow that he didn't think about his involvement in that violent past.

We see examples of it in our own time in terms of religious zealotry and so on that involve acts of violence.

It's been part of Christian history.

It's part of Islamic history in our own time, for example, that there is this violent section given to implementing their understanding of Scripture or holy books or laws to the point of putting men and women and children to death.

And this is Paul's past.