PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST

[nChrist]

PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
I PRE-NATAL GRACE
F. B. Meyer

(1 Timothy 1:14)

"A city throned upon the height behold,
Wherein no foot of man as yet has trod;
The City of man's Life fulfilled in God --
Bathed all in light, with open gates of gold."
PHILLIPS BROOKS

THE SOURCE of a stream must be sought, not where it arises in some green glen among the hills, making a tiny tam of clear water, where the mountain sheep come down to drink; but in the mighty sea, drawn upwards in evaporation, or in the clouds that condense against the cold slopes of the hills. So with the life of God within us. In its earlier stages we are apt to suppose it originated in our will and choice, and return to our Father's House. But as we review it from the eminence of the years, we discover that we chose because we were chosen; that we loved because we were first loved; that we left the sepulchre of our selfishness and the cerements of death, because the Son of God flung his majestic word into the sepulchral vault, crying, "Come forth!" All mature piety extols the grace of God -- that unmerited love, which each man thinks was magnified most abundantly in his own case. "By the grace of God, I am what I am," is a confession which is elicited from every man as he reaches the crest of the hill, and looks back on the cities of the plain from which he has escaped.

Paul is very emphatic in his acknowledgments of this pre-natal grace. He loves to trace back all the good that was in his heart and life to a Love that was set on him before the mountains were brought forth, or ever God had formed the earth and the world. In the silence of eternity God's delights had already been with him as a son of man.


1. FOREKNOWN.

"Known unto God," said the grave, linen-vested James, "are all his works from the beginning of the world"; and if his works were foreknown, how much more his saints! Again the evangelist tells us, that Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray Him; surely then He must have known from the beginning who the believers were, and who should become his devoted lovers and apostles. Before time began it was known in heaven who would be attracted by the love of the cross to trust, love, and obey; who would be drawn to the dying and risen Son of God; who would have eternal affinity with Him in death and resurrection: and of these it is said, "Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren" (Romans 8:29).

It is not a complete solution of the mystery of Predestination, and only removes it one stage further back; yet the suggestion casts a gleaming torch-light into the darkness of the impenetrable abyss when we are told that God included in the eternal purposes of life all those whom He foresaw would be attracted to an indissoluble union of faith and life with his Son. All who come to Jesus show that they were included in the Father's gift to his Son. The Father gave Him all those who in the fulness of times should come. But why some have an affinity with the Man of the cross, and not others; why some come and others stay away; why some sheep hear the Shepherd's voice and follow, while others persist in straying, is one of those secrets which are not revealed as yet to the children of men.
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[nChrist]

PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
I PRE-NATAL GRACE
F. B. Meyer

But as the eye of omniscient love glanced down the ages, it must have lighted with peculiar pleasure on the eager, devoted soul of Paul. God foreknew and predestinated him. The Divine purpose, descrying his capacity for the best, selected him for it, and it for him. And there is a gleam of holy rapture on his face when, reviewing the process of those eternal movements of love from his Roman prison, he writes, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ; even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:3-4, R.V.).


2. CREATED IN CHRIST JESUS UNTO GOOD WORKS.

He has been showing the place of works in the gospel scheme, insisting, with unusual emphasis and sharpness of outline, that neither our salvation, nor our faith, is matter for boasting. "It is the gift of God; not of works," he cries, and then proceeds to the magnificent assertion, "We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10, R.V.).

The Greek word translated workmanship is poem. We are God's Poem. And as we review our life after the lapse of years -- save where we have wilfully violated the obvious intention of our Creator  -- we shall perceive that there has been an underlying plan and conception, the development of which has proceeded in ever-widening circles. "I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me," is as true of our life as of Cyrus, who was raised up to be the destroyer of Babylon, the liberator of the people of God. God has a distinct thought in each human life. He creates with a purpose. As a great poet may adopt various kinds of rhythm and measure, such as may suit his conception, but has nevertheless a purpose in each poem that issues from his creative fancy, so God means something as He sends each life forth from the silence of eternity; and if we do not hinder Him He superintends the embodiment of that conception, making our entire life, from the cradle to the grave, a symmetrical and homogeneous poem, dominated by one thought, though wrought out with an infinite variety of illustration and detail.

In a poem the expression is adapted to the conception. A rugged strain befits strong and terse thinking, whilst more flowing and mellifluous measures are better adapted to tender and plaintive musings. Possibly we can thus account for the differences which characterize human lives. Yonder is the fragment of a great epic, there the lyric or dramatic, here the sonnet or elegy. Your life is smooth and flowing, or broken over stones of sorrow, or headlong in its impetuosity, because God's thought must be mated to the metre most suited for its expression. Paul's career reminds us of the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Paradise Lost, or the mighty conception of Dante. It is ocean-like in depth, variety, and change. As in an oratorio, so here, the storehouse of expression is ransacked to convey the deep and varied transition of the Creator's thought, emotion, and passion.

The poet's art demands that no touch of description or narrative, in the earlier lines, should be fruitless or redundant. To allow the canvas to be covered by figures or objects which do not conduce to the main intention of a picture is in the highest degree reprehensible. Watch well the earlier chapters of a great tale, and you will notice that the touches and descriptions of every paragraph prepare for the ultimate unfolding of the story, and lead up to the climax to which the closing pages hurry.

So in human life. God knows the works which are prepared, that we should walk in them. And as He has created them for us, so He has created us for them, in Christ Jesus. The year of our birth, the place and scenes of early childhood, our parentage and education, the influences that have moulded us, whether of books or art, or the conditions of daily toil, have been planned with an  unerring wisdom and predisposition, that through us might be made known unto the principalities and powers in the heavenly places the manifold wisdom of God according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord; in whom we have boldness and access in confidence, through our faith in Him.

It was, therefore, a matter of constant congratulation to the Apostle that he had not to cut or carve his way, but simply to discover the track which God had prepared for his steps from of old; and when he found it, it would not only be consistent with his place in the mystical Body of Christ, but be the very pathway for which his character and gifts were most adapted.
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[nChrist]

PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
I PRE-NATAL GRACE
F. B. Meyer

3. RAISED IN CHRIST'S RESURRECTION.

Paul's education differed widely from that of his fellow-apostles. They had grown up with Christ. It is likely that the Master was familiar with many of them before He called them. No one has travelled down from the highland village of Nazareth to the blue waters of Galilee without realizing how easy and constant the intercourse must have been during those thirty silent years. They grew gradually therefore into the mysteries of his death and resurrection. They knew Jesus the man before they recognized Christ the Messiah. From the Jordan valley they had been ascending the hill of the Lord, and were therefore less amazed when the sharp steep spur of Calvary suddenly confronted them, surmounted by the peaks of resurrection and ascension rising in peerless beauty beyond.

To Paul, on the other hand, the first conception of Jesus was in his risen glory. He knew perfectly, for it was common talk when he was resident in Jerusalem, that Jesus had been crucified under Pontius Pilate; but now he beheld Him risen, living, speaking, his face shining with light above the brightness of the sun. It was a spectacle that could never be effaced from his memory. Besides answering all his difficulties, it gave an aspect to his faith, which it never lost. The "yea rather, who is risen again" of Romans viii is very significant. He had to think his way back from the ascension and resurrection glory to Calvary, Gethsemane, the human life, and the far-away scenes of the Lord's nativity and early years.

But more than this, Paul had a very vivid belief in the identification of all who believe with the risen Lord, and that from the moment of his resurrection. He held and taught, that all the members of the mystical body shared in the experiences and exploits of their Head. What happened to Him happened to them also, and to each of them. There was no single believer, therefore, that could not avow as his own all that had befallen Jesus, though at the time he might have been dead in trespasses and sins, or had not begun to exist.

The apostle never allowed his views of personal union with the Saviour to clash with his presentation of the unique character of that death, by virtue of which He did for men what no one man, nor all men together, could have done. He always taught that the death of the cross was a propitiating sacrifice for the sins of the whole world -- a sacrifice which stands alone in its sublime and unapproachable glory. But he loved to dwell on that other and secondary aspect of the Saviour's death, by virtue of which, in the Divine intention, all who believe are reckoned one with Him in his death, resurrection, and ascension into the heavenlies.

In one memorable text he connects these two aspects of the cross. "He loved me, He gave Himself /or me," is bound by a golden link to the words, "I have been crucified with Christ." He is always clear in saying, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

We were reconciled to God by the death of his Son." But he is as clear and emphatic in saying, "When we were dead through our trespasses, He quickened us together with Christ, and raised us up with Him, and made us to sit with Him in the heavenlies, in Christ." "That one died for all" was an undoubted article in his creed; but this was another, "Our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away, that we should no longer be in bondage to sin." He loved to reckon that he had died with Christ, and to claim that he should daily receive the power of his risen life. He longed to know Jesus Christ, and the power of his resurrection, being quite prepared to taste the fellowship of his sufferings and to become conformed unto his death, if only he might day by day attain unto the resurrection from the dead (Philippians 3).

This conception of his union with Christ in death and resurrection underlies the who]e tenor of his appeals to a holy and consecrated life. "Ye were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above .... Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God .... Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested" (Colossians 3:1-4).
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
I PRE-NATAL GRACE
F. B. Meyer

It was a radiant vision, and one of which the apostle never wearied. It was attributable to nothing less than the great love with which God had loved him, when he was a blasphemer and a persecutor, and injurious; living, as he confesses he did, in the lusts of his flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and by nature a child of wrath even as the rest (Ephesians 2:3). For us too that vision waits; and in battling against the lusts of the flesh, the fascinations of the world, and the power of the devil, there is no position more fraught with the certainty of victory than this of our resurrection standing and privilege. When the world would cast the spell of its blandishments over you, dare to answer the challenge by the assertion that it has no further jurisdiction over you, since you have passed from its territory and control, by virtue of your union with Him who, in that He died, died unto sin once, and in that He liveth, liveth unto God.

Get up into the high mountains, believing children of God, and view the everlasting love of your Father towards you in Jesus! Recount all that that love has brought for you before you had any being! Is it likely to drop you now because of any unworthiness it perceives? Can anything appear in us which was not anticipated by One who before taking us for his own possession sat down and counted the cost? Is there not comfort in knowing that your keel is caught by a current which emanated from the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will, and is bearing you towards his heart? "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory for ever. Amen."
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
II "WHEN I WAS A CHILD"
F. B. Meyer

(Philippians 3:1-11)

"I was bred
In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim,
And saw naught lovely save the sky and stars."
COLERIDGE

NOT FAR from the easternmost bay of the Mediterranean, in the midst of a rich and luxuriant plain, stood Tarsus, "no mean city," as one of its greatest sons tells us, but at the time of which we write a thriving emporium of trade, and a focus of intellectual and religious activity. On the edge of the plain, to the north, rose the mighty Taurus mountains, with their peaks of eternal snow, feeding with perpetual freshness and fulness the river Cydnus, which, after pouring over a cataract of considerable size, passed through the midst of the town, and so to the sea. During the last part of its course it was navigable by the largest vessels, which brought the treasures of East and West to the wharves that lined either bank. Here were piled merchandise and commodities of every kind, brought to exchange for the cloth of goats' hair for which the town was famous, and which was furnished by the flocks of goats that browsed on the lower slopes of the Taurus, tended by the hardy mountaineers. Tarsus also received the trade which poured through the Cilician Gates -- a famous pass through the mountains, which led upwards from the coast to Central Asia Minor, to Phrygia and Lycaonia on one side, and to Cappadocia on the other.

In the Jew quarter of this thriving city at the beginning of this era (perhaps about A.D. 4, while Jesus was still an infant in his mother's arms at Nazareth, a child was born, who by his life and words was destined to make it famous in all after time, and to give a new impulse to men's religious convictions. At his circumcision he probably received a double name, that of Saul for his family, and that of Paul for the world of trade and municipal life.

The stamp of the great city left an ineffaceable impression on the growing lad, and in this his early years were widely different from his Master's. Jesus was nurtured in a highland village, and avoiding towns, loved to teach on the hillside, and cull his illustrations from the field of nature. Paul was reared amid the busy streets and crowded bazaars of Tarsus, thronged with merchants, students, and sailors from all parts of the world. Unconsciously, as the lad grew he was being prepared to understand human life under every aspect, and to become habituated to the thoughts and habits of the store, the camp, the arena, the temple. He became a man to whom nothing which touched human life was foreign. He loved the stir of city life, and drew his metaphors from its keen interests.

He came of pure Hebrew stock. "A Hebrew of (sprung from) the Hebrews." On both sides his genealogy was pure. There was no Gentile admixture in his blood, no bar sinister in his descent. His father must have been a man of considerable position, or he would not have possessed the coveted birthright of Roman citizenship. Though living away from Palestine, he was not a Hellenist Jew; but as distinctly Hebrew as any that dwelt in the Holy City herself. Perhaps given to sternness with his children; or it might not have occurred to his son, in after years, to warn fathers against provoking their children to wrath, lest they should become discouraged. The mother, too, though we have no precise knowledge of her, must have been imbued with those lofty ideas of which we catch a trace in the mothers of Samuel, John the Baptist, and Jesus. Perhaps she died in his early childhood; or her son would not in after years have so lovingly turned to the mother of Rufus for motherhood (Romans 16:13).
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[nChrist]

PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
II "WHEN I WAS A CHILD"
F. B. Meyer

The Hebrew tongue was probably the ordinary speech of that home. This may in a measure account for the apostle's intimate acquaintance with the Hebrew Scriptures, which he so often quotes. It was in Hebrew that Jesus spoke to him on the road to Damascus, and in Hebrew that he addressed the crowds from the steps of the castle. To him Jerusalem was more than Athens or Rome; and Abraham, David, Isaiah, than the heroes of the Iliad. He counted it no small thing to have as ancestors those holy patriarchs and prophets who had followed God from Ur, wrestled with the Angel at the Jabbok, and spoken to Him at Horeb, face to face. His pulse beat quick as he remembered that he belonged to the chosen race, God's first-born, whose were the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises. However much birth and wealth flaunted before his eyes, he held himself to have been born of a nobler ancestry, to belong to a higher aristocracy. From his tribe had sprung the first king of Israel, whose name he was proud to bear.

His early education was very religious. "He was a Pharisee, and the son of a Pharisee." In our day the word Pharisee is a synonym for religious pride and hypocrisy; but we must never forget that in those old Jewish days the Pharisee represented some of the noblest traditions of the Hebrew people. Amid the prevailing indifference the Pharisees stood for a strict religious life. As against the scepticism of the Sadducees, who believed in neither spirit nor unseen world, the Pharisees held to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amid the lax morals of the time, which infected Jerusalem almost as much as Rome, the Pharisee was austere in his ideals, and holy in life. The texts on his phylacteries at least evidenced his devotion to Scripture; the tithing of mint, cummin, and anise, at least proved the scrupulosity of his obedience to the law; his prayers might be ostentatious, but they were conspicuous evidence of his belief in the unseen.

Such was the father of the future apostle. His early home was dominated by these austere and strong religious conceptions, and the boy imbibed them. According to the straitest sect of his religion, he lived a Pharisee. He was proud that at the earliest possible moment he had been initiated into the rites and privileges of his religion, being "circumcised the eighth day." As he heard of proselytes entering the covenant of his fathers in mature life, he congratulated himself that as a child he had been admitted into covenant relationship with God.

He was blameless in outward life. As touching the righteousness which is of the law, so far as outward observances went, he was blameless. There was no precept in the moral or ceremonial law which he would consciously disregard; and though the rabbis had built upon the law of Moses an immense superstructure of casuistical comments and minute injunctions, he bravely set himself to master them. He would hold it a crime to enter into the house of a Gentile; and on leaving market or street he would carefully wash his hands of any defilement contracted through touching what had been handled by the uncircumcised. He often thanked God that he was not as other men. He was taught to fast twice in the week, and give tithes of all he possessed. He would observe the Sabbath and festivals with punctilious and awful care. "Brethren," he said on one occasion, "I have lived, before God, in all conscience until this day."

The ardent soul of the young Pharisee was bent on standing in the front rank of saints. Early in life he had made up his mind to win the prize of God's favour. He could imagine nothing more desirable than this. When, therefore, in answer to his inquiry of the recognized religious teachers, he learned that absolute obedience to the words of the rabbis was the only method of achieving the object on which his heart was set, he determined with unremitting devotion to scale the perilous heights, and tread the glacier slopes. Perhaps he encountered disappointment from the first. Possibly the cry, "O wretched man that I am," began to formulate itself long before he became a Christian. Though outwardly his conduct was exemplary, his soul may have been rent by mortal strife. Often he saw and approved the better, and did the worse; often he lamented the infirmity of his motives and the infirmity of his will. Conscious of shortcomings which no other eye discerned; yearning for power to spend one absolutely holy day, which the rabbis taught, if lived by any one Israelite, would secure the immediate advent of the Messiah.
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[nChrist]

PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
II "WHEN I WAS A CHILD"
F. B. Meyer

His nature must have been warm-hearted and fervid from the first. The tears that flowed at Miletus, the heart that was nearly broken on his last journey to Jerusalem. the pathetic appeals and allusions of his epistles, his capacity for ardent and constant friend-ships -- were not the growth of his mature years; but were present, in germ at least, from his earliest childhood. He must always have been extremely sensitive to kindness; and the contrast between his remembrance of his friends in after life, and his entire reticence about his parents, and brothers or sisters, shows how bitter and final was that disowning which followed on his avowal of Christianity. There is more than appears on the surface in his remark, "For whom I suffered the loss of all things."

The zeal, which in after years led him to persecute the church, was already stirring in his heart. "I am a Jew," he once said, "born in Tarsus of Cilicia, instructed according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God." Indeed, he tells us that he advanced in the Jews' religion beyond many of his own age among his countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of the fathers. He did not hold truth indolently or superficially, or as a necessity of his early nurture and education; but as a tincture which had saturated and dyed the deepest emotions of a very intense nature.

There was a sense in which he might have applied to himself some older words, and said, "The zeal of Thine house hath eaten me up." May there not also have been an undefined hope that his zeal might atone for some of those defects of which he was so painfully conscious, and commend him to God? He knew, by personal experience, what it was to have, as the rest of his brethren after the flesh, a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

As a child he would learn by heart Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Psalms 113:1-9, 118. The days of his childhood must have passed thus: At five he began to read the Scriptures; at six he would be sent to the school of a neighbouring rabbi; at ten he would be instructed in the oral law; at thirteen he would become, by a kind of confirmation, a son of the law. But it is not likely that he received the culture of the Greek Philosophy, for which Tarsus was rather famous. This was rendered impossible by the uncompromising attitude of the Jews of the Dispersion to all the Gentile community around them. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen he would be sent to Jerusalem, to pursue his training for the office of a rabbi, to which he was evidently designated by the ambition of his father. It was easy for the boy to do thus, as he had a married sister in Jerusalem with whom he could lodge during his attendance on the classes of the illustrious Gamaliel. "I was brought up in this city," he said afterwards, "at the feet of Gamaliel."

We must not, omit to record that during these boyish years he acquired a trade, which served him usefully when hard pressed for means of livelihood. "He that teacheth not a trade is as though he taught his son to be a thief" -- so ran the old Jewish proverb.

Every Jew was taught a trade, generally that of his father. Probably Paul's family for generations back had been engaged in weaving a dark coarse cloth of goats' hair. From his childhood he must have been familiar with the rattle of the looms, in which the long hair of the mountain goats was woven into a strong material, suitable alike for the outer coats of artisans or for tents, and known as Cilician cloth, after the name of the province in which Tarsus was situated. This handicraft was poorly remunerated; but in Paul's case it was highly suitable to the exigencies of a wandering life. Other trades would require a settled workshop and expensive apparatus; but this was a simple industry, capable of being pursued anywhere, and needing the smallest possible apparatus and tools.
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
II "WHEN I WAS A CHILD"
F. B. Meyer

Across a gulf of fifty years from the confinement of a Roman prison, Paul had time to review these things which he had before counted gain. To the earnest gaze which he directed towards them, the receding shores of his early life came near again; and as he counted up their treasures he wrote across them -- loss, dross: "the things that were gain to me, these I counted loss for Christ. Yea, doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord."

It was not a small thing to have come of noble and Godly parentage, to be a child of Abraham, and heir of the promises made to his seed. But he counted it loss.

It was not a small thing to have built up by constant obedience and scrupulous care a fabric of blameless reputation. But he counted it loss.

It was not a small thing to be conscious of the throbbing of a fervent spirit which would brook no indolence or lethargy, and which transformed duty to delight. But he counted it dross.

There was calm deliberation in his tone. Youth may be impassioned and hasty, but the man who speaks thus is not a youth; his brow is girt with mature wisdom, and his heart stored with the experience of several lives crowded into one. He has spent long years in prison, where there has been plenty of time for reflection, and ample opportunity of weighing the past against the present; but notwithstanding all, and that the difficulties of the past are always minimised while those of the present are magnified, he twice over speaks of the advantages and achievements which had been the pride of his early manhood, as loss and worse.

There was no irreverence in his allusions to the rites of the venerable system in which he had been nurtured. For long years Judaism had been the only interpreter to him of the Divine, the only nourishment of his religious instincts. The grounds of trust which he now deemed insufficient had at least been the landing-places on the stairway of his upward ascent. He could not forget that God Himself had been the Architect of the House in which his soul had found a shelter and home; that his voice had spoken in the Prophets, that his thoughts had inspired them, that his purposes had been fulfilled. No thoughtful man will talk contemptuously of his hornbook, or of his first teachers. In these probably lay the rudiments of all he has afterwards learnt. But, notwithstanding the noble reverence of the Apostle's soul, he could not but affirm that what he had counted gain was loss.

The grounds for this verdict are probably to be found in two directions. On the one hand, he discovered that the sacrifices of Judaism, as was obvious from their constant repetition, might bring sins to remembrance, but they could not remove them; he discovered that outward rites, however punctiliously observed, did not avail to cleanse the conscience; he discovered that in Judaism there was no power unto salvation, nothing to reinforce and renew the flagging energies of the soul. On the other hand, he had found something better.
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
II "WHEN I WAS A CHILD"
F. B. Meyer

The young artist leaves his village home, inflated with pride at his achievements. Nothing like them has ever been seen by the simple neighbours. They count him a prodigy, and he is only too glad to accept their estimate. In his secret judgment he counts himself able to step forth into the arena of the world as a successful competitor for its prizes. So he fares forth, to Paris, to Milan, to Rome. But each month weakens his self-confidence, and gives him a lower estimate of his powers. Presently he becomes the pupil of some master-artist; and when, at the expiration of several years, he returns again to his home and opens the portfolio filled with the early studies, he closes it immediately with disgust. He wonders how he could ever have dared to count them art. What things were gain to him, those in the light of all that he has seen and learnt, he now counts loss.

So Paul had seen Jesus. Before the glory of that heavenly vision all other objects of attraction had paled. He counted all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord. In comparison with his finished work, all his own efforts were futile. It was a relief to turn from his own righteousness, which was of the law, and to avail himself of God's method of righteousness, which was through faith in Christ. So long as he anticipated having to meet the demands of God's infinite holiness by his own endeavours, he was haunted with the dread that there might be some fatal flaw; but directly he learnt that by renouncing all he might gain Christ; that by forsaking his own efforts and trusting Christ he might be found in Him, possessed of the flawless righteousness which had been wrought by his obedience unto death; that by confessing himself unable to do the good he would, and identifying himself with the death of Christ, he might come to know the power of his resurrection, and attain day by day to something of its likeness -- then with great thankfulness he abandoned his own strivings and efforts, and counted all his former gains but dross and dung, that he might win Christ and all that Christ could be and do.

It is an awful experience, when the soul first awakes to find that he has been making a mistake in the most important of matters, and has nearly missed the deepest meaning of life: when it discovers that the rules it has made for itself, and the structure of character it has laboriously built up, are but wood, hay, and stubble; when it learns that it has been building on an insecure foundation, and that every brick must be taken down. Ah reel it is a discovery which, when it comes in early manhood, for the moment at least, paralyses -- we fall to the ground, and spend three days and nights stunned and dazed; when it comes at the end of life, is full of infinite regret; when it comes in the other world, is black with the darkness of unutterable despair. The worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

There is one test only which can really show whether we are right or wrong: it is our attitude to Jesus Christ. If our religious life revolves around anything less than Himself -- though it be the doctrines of Christianity, work for Him, the rules of a holy life -- it will inevitably disappoint and fail us. But if He is Alpha and Omega; if our faith, however feebly, looks up to Him; if we press on to know Him, the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings; if we count all things but loss for the excellency of his knowledge -- we may possess ourselves in peace amid the mysteries of life, and the lofty requirements of the great white throne.
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
III SEPARATED FROM BIRTH
F. B. Meyer

(Galatians 1:15)

"What to thee is shadow, to Him is day
And the end He knoweth;
And not on a blind and aimless way,
The spirit goeth.

Like warp and woof, all destinies
Are woven fast,
Linked in sympathy, like the keys
Of an organ vast."
WHITTIER

WHEN he became a man, Paul put away childish things; but there were some things which he could not put away, and there was no need that he should, because they had been planned beforehand by God as a special qualification and preparation for his life-work. Over his cradle in the crowded Jewish quarter of Tarsus a Divine purpose hovered. As to Jeremiah, so to him, the Word of the Lord might have come, saying, "Before I formed thee, I knew thee; and before thou camest forth I sanctified thee: I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations." He had some inkling of this when he said, in writing to the Galatians, "It was the good pleasure of God who separated me even from my birth, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles."

God has a purpose in every life; and where the soul is perfectly yielded and acquiescent, He will certainly realize it. Blessed is he who has never thwarted the execution of the Divine ideal.

One of the most interesting studies in human life is to see how all the circumstances and incidents of its initial stages have been shaped by a determining will, and made to subserve a beneficent purpose. Every thread is needed for the completed pattern; every piece of equipment stands in good stead at the final test.

The future Apostle must be deeply instructed in the Jewish law. "The law" must stand here as a convenient term, not only for the moral and Levitical code, as given in the Pentateuch, but for the minute and laborious additions of the rabbis, who -- to use one of their own illustrations -- had so overlaid the sweet flute of truth with their gilding as to silence its music. The righteousness which was of the law consisted in meats, and drinks, and divers ordinances and washings; in the length of fringes and number of tassels; the straining of wine lest there should be the dead body of a fly; the tithing of the stalk as well as the flower of mint; the punctilious measuring of the ground, that not a step might be taken beyond the legitimate Sabbath day's journey. One great rabbi spent the whole week in considering how to observe the coming Sabbath.

No one could have appreciated the intolerable burden of this, yoke of legalism -- which even Peter said neither they nor their fathers were able to bear -- unless he had been taught, as Paul was, "according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers." As Luther was reared in the Roman Catholic Church that he might appreciate the utter impotence of her system to pacify the conscience, or appease the heart, and that, having broken from it, he might show the way of escape to others; so Saul of Tarsus must needs tarry amid the experiences of which he speaks so often in the Epistle to the Galatians, that he might be able to magnify the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free.
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
III SEPARATED FROM BIRTH
F. B. Meyer

He needed to be apt in his quotation and application of the Hebrew Scriptures. Every question in religious and ordinary Jewish life was settled by an appeal to the Scriptures. No speaker could gain the audience, or hold the attention of a Jewish congregation for a moment, unless he were able to show, the more ingeniously the better, that his statements could be substantiated from the Inspired Word. To the law and the testimony every assertion must be brought. Before that venerable bar every teacher must stand.

It was above all things necessary that Christianity should be shown to be, not the destruction but the fulfilment of the ancient law -- the white flower growing from the plant which God had brought from Ur of the Chaldees; the meridian day of which the dawn first streaked the sky at Moriah. What made Paul so "mad" against Christianity was its apparent denial and betrayal of the obvious meaning of Old Testament prophecies and types. Neither he nor any of his co-religionists were prepared to accept a humiliated, suffering, dying Messiah, unless it could be shown without controversy that such a conception were the true reading of Moses, the Prophets, and the Law. If any collection of sincere and earnest Jews had been asked the question, "Ought not the Messiah to suffer such things and to enter into his glory?" they would have unhesitatingly answered No; and would have required one who was thoroughly versed, not only in Scripture, but in the recondite interpretations of the rabbi, to prove to them from the entire range of the Old Testament that it behoved the Messiah to suffer.

This qualification also Paul acquired during his years of training under Gamaliel. Throughout the entire course, "the sacred oracles" were the only text-book; and every day was spent in the careful and minute consideration of words, lines, and letters, together with the interpretations of the various rabbis.

Men might chafe at his renderings of the ancient words, but they could not dispute his intimate acquaintance with them, and his profound erudition. He knew the whole ground perfectly. There was not a single argument with which he was not familiar, and for which he was not instantly ready with a reply. The field of Scripture had been repeatedly ploughed over by that keen mind, and its harvests gathered into that retentive memory. There are passages in his writings which are little else than stairways of quotation, one built up from another. His arguments are clenched by an appeal to the Sacred Word, as though otherwise they would be inconclusive. For illustration he will go, not to the illuminated missal of nature, for which he seems to have had no eye, but to the incidents and narratives which have made the Old Testament the storybook of all the ages. It was this power that gave him an entrance into every synagogue, and carried conviction to so many candid Jews. How richly, for instance, it was appreciated by Bible-students, like those whom he met at Beroea!

He needed to have large and liberal views. Jewish intolerance and exclusivism had reared a high wall of partition between Jew and Gentile. The Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans; how much less with the Gentile dogs that crouched beneath the well-spread table of the children! Here is a characteristic saying of one of the doctors of the law: "If a Gentile fall into the sea, a Jew is not to pull him out; for it is written, Thou shalt not be guilty of thy neighbour's blood -- but the Gentile is not thy neighbour."
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
III SEPARATED FROM BIRTH
F. B. Meyer

The majority of the apostles were largely influenced by this caste spirit. It was hard for them, though they had been moulded by the Lord Himself, to break through the ring-fence of early training. Had the shaping of the primitive church been left to them, though theoretically they might have acknowledged the equality of Jew and Gentile in God's sight, yet practically they would have drawn distinctions between the Jewish Christians and those other sheep which their Shepherd was bringing, but which were not of the Hebrew fold. Peter will go into a Gentile house, and eat with the uncircumcised beneath the pressure of the heavenly vision; but when the glory of that memorable day has faded, and certain come down from James, he makes an excuse to withdraw into the impregnable fastness of Jewish superiority. Evidently another than James, or even Peter, was needed, who would dare to insist on the absolute equality of all who by faith had become stones in the one church, or buildings in the one holy temple, that was growing into an habitation for God. The need of a trumpet voice was urgent, to proclaim that Jesus had abolished in his flesh the enmity, that He might create in Himself of the twain one new man, so making peace.

Through the ordering of Divine Providence this qualification also was communicated to the future Apostle of the Uncircumcision.

By birth, as we have seen, he was a Hebrew: not otherwise could he have influenced Jews, or obtained admission into their synagogues. But he had been brought up at the feet of the great rabbi, who, while reverenced as "the beauty of the law," was recognized also as the most large-hearted of all the Jewish doctors. Grandson of the great Hillel, he was, as the story of the Acts indicates, one of the leaders of the Sanhedrin: "A doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people" (Acts v. 34). But he went so far as to permit and advocate the study of Greek literature. In his speech before the Sanhedrin, given in Acts v, we trace the movements of a human and generous mind, willing to admit the workings of the Divine Spirit beyond the limits of rigid orthodoxy, and to follow the torch of truth wherever it might lead -- a very holy man, deeply attached to the religion of his people, yet accustomed to look at all questions from the standpoint of a large culture and wide charity.

The influence of such a teacher must have been very potent on the young Tarsus student, who had come to sit at his feet, and who regarded him with a boundless enthusiasm. Into the upturned furrows of that impressible nature may have been sown seeds, which under the sun of Christianity would ripen into such sayings as that "there is neither Jew nor Greek... for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

There was needed specially a wide knowledge of the world. The man who was to be a missionary to men must know them. He who would be all things to all men, that by all means he might win some, must be familiar with their methods of life and thought. A Jerusalem-Jew could not possibly have adapted himself to cultured Greeks and practical Romans, to barbarians and Scythians, to bond and free; to Festus the imperial governor, and Agrippa the Hebrew king; to Onesimus the slave, and Philemon the master, as Paul did.
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
III SEPARATED FROM BIRTH
F. B. Meyer

But this qualification also was supplied without his realizing its worth. From boyhood he was familiar with the tides of Gentile life that flowed up the Cydnus into his native city. Men from all the world came thither for purposes of trade. The wharves, baths, colonnades, and open places of the city, were thronged with the costumes, and rang with the many tongues of all the lands that touched on the great inland sea. And thus insensibly the horizon of the boy's mind was widened to include the great outer world.

When his training at Jerusalem was complete he must have returned to Tarsus. This surely would be immediately before the appearance of John the Baptist, preaching repentance in the Jordan valley. Paul could not have been in Judaea at this time without making some reference to his marvellous ministry and tragic end. In the same way he must have missed the ministry and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, and the early years of the existence of the church. But during this interval his education was proceeding. In these years he probably married, else he would not afterwards have occupied a seat in the Sanhedrin; and steadily pursued his trade, or exercised his profession as a rabbi in the local synagogue, or travelled far afield on some religious mission, compassing sea and land to make proselytes.

But imagine what those seven or eight years must have meant to the young Pharisee. Could the young athlete have restrained himself from encounters with the system of things by which he was surrounded? There was a school of heathen philosophy in search of the supreme good: would he not try a throw with its exponents? There was a vast system of idolatry, especially of Baal-worship: would he not reason with its votaries, arguing that they cannot be gods which are made with hands? There was wild indulgence of shameless, sensual passion: would he not contrast it with the comparative purity of his own race? And all the while he would be keenly observing and noting every phase of Gentile heathendom.

The pictures of the world of that age given in the first chapter to the Romans and the first epistle to the Corinthians, and comprising such dark allusions to the depravity and abandonment of the Gentiles, could only have been given by one who obtained his information first-hand, and by personal observation. What vivid touches there are in his entreaty not to walk "as the Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God . . . who being past feeling give themselves up to lasciviousness, to make a trade of all uncleanness with greediness" (Ephesians 4:18-19, R.V.).

He needed also to be equipped with the pre-requisites of a great traveller. For this there were three necessary conditions: speech, safety, sustenance. And each was forthcoming.
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
III SEPARATED FROM BIRTH
F. B. Meyer

Speech. Greek was the common language of the world, the medium of intercourse among educated persons, as English is in India today. And Paul was even more familiar with Greek than with the sacred Hebrew. When quoting the Scriptures he habitually employed the Septuagint (i.e., the Greek) version; and he was able to speak their tongue fluently and elegantly enough to hold the attention of Athenian philosophers.

Safety. All the world was Roman. Roman governors in every province; Roman usages in every city; Roman coins, customs, and officials. To be a Roman citizen gave a man a standing and position in any part of the empire. He might not be beaten without trial; or if he were, the magistrates were in jeopardy of losing their office, and even their life. He could demand trial at the bar of Caesar; if he appealed to Caesar, to Caesar he must go. He would be permitted to plead for himself before the bar of Roman justice. So great were the advantages, that men like Lysias the chief captain thought it worth while to purchase the right of freedom with a great sum. How great an advantage, then, to be able to say as Paul could, I was free born! His family may have been originally settled in Tarsus as part of a Roman colony, and Jews were always considered excellent colonists, and so this inestimable privilege came to cast its sheltering folds around its most illustrious son.

Sustenance. This also was secured to him. On whatever shore he was cast there were always goats, and always the demand for the coarse cloth at which he had been wont to work from his boyhood.

In all this how evidently was the Divine purpose at work, shaping all things after the counsel of its own will. And what was true in Paul's case is as true for us all. A providence is shaping our ends; a plan is developing in our lives; a supremely wise and loving Being is making all things work together for good. In the sequel of our life's story we shall see that there was a meaning and necessity in all the previous incidents, save those which were the result of our own folly and sin, and that even these have been made to contribute to the final result. Trust Him, child of God: He is leading you by a right way to the celestial City of Habitation; and as from the terrace of eternity you review the path by which you came from the morning-land of childhood, you will confess that He hath done all things well.

TO BE CONTINUED...
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PAUL A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST
IV  "THY MARTYR STEPHEN"
F. B. Meyer

(Acts 22:20)

"He heeded not reviling tones,
Nor sold his heart to idle moans,
Tho' cursed, and scorn'd and bruised with stones.

But looking upward, full of grace,
He prayed, and from a happy place
God's glory smote him on the face."
TENNYSON

THE METHOD of God's introduction of his greatest servants to the world differs widely. In some cases they rise gradually and majestically, like the dawn, from the glimmer of childhood's early promise to the meridian of mature power and usefulness. In other cases they flash like the lightning on the dark abyss of night. Sometimes God charges a man with a message, and launches him forth suddenly and irresistibly. Such a man was Elijah, with his "Thus saith the Lord, before whom I stand"; John the Baptist, with his "It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife"; such also was Savonarola, of Florence; with many another. And such was Stephen.

We know little or nothing of his antecedents. That he was a Hellenist Jew is almost certain; and that he had personally known and consorted with the Son of Man, whom he afterwards recognized in his glory, is more than probable. But of father, mother, birthplace, and education, we know nothing. We have the story of one day, the record of one speech -- that day his last, that speech his apology and defence for his life.

He reminds us of a cloud, not specially distinguishable from its companions, which has helped to form the leaden covering of the sky during an overcast afternoon; we had not noticed it, indeed, the sun had set without even touching it; but when the orb of day has passed beneath the horizon, the cloud catches its departing rays, and becomes saturated and steeped with fire. See how it burns with glory! Its very heart is turned to flame! For a few moments the light remains, and it is gone! So Stephen caught for a brief space the glory of the departed Lord, and, reflecting it, was transformed into the same image; "and all that sat in the council, fastening their eyes on him, saw his face, as it had been the face of an angel."

Stephen's life and death must always have attracted reverent interest; but how much more so as we trace his influence on the method, thought, and character of the great Apostle, whose lifework it became to perpetuate and render permanent what was rarest and noblest in the church's first deacon and martyr.
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