Who was Paul in the Bible?

This apostle was of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of pure descent, born at Tarsus, a city of Cilicia, a fact which gave to him the privilege of Roman citizenship. He was a disciple of Gamaliel and a strict Pharisee. He is first introduced to us as a young man, by name SAUL, at whose feet the witnesses who stoned Stephen laid their clothes. He became afterwards a violent persecutor of the saints, both of men and women, acting with great zeal, thinking he was doing God's service.

We might think that the chief of sinners would be found among the ranks of the grossly evil and vile... But no; here is a man of irreproachable conduct. As "touching the righteousness which is in the law [he] was blameless" (Phil. 3:6). And yet writing under divine inspiration, he could declare himself to be the chief of sinners. It looks as if we must look for the chief of sinners, not among murderers and thieves, not in prisons and jails, but in places of reputed sanctity.

In Acts 9, we see a man on the highway to Damascus with a commission from the high priest to persecute the Jewish Christians. That was the only commission Paul received from man — an authority, not to preach the Gospel, but to extinguish it, if it were possible. But the Lord, in sovereign grace, not only converted Saul of Tarsus, but sent him out, direct from Himself, a preacher, and an apostle, and a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity.

Saul was converted by a testimony to the union of the saints with Christ, who appears to him from the glory, saying, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" There was in this the direct discovery that, in touching the saints, he was touching the Lord Himself... he is met on this very errand by the Lord in glory, and made the witness of Christ and His saints being one.

Now the Lord allowed this, in order to make him the witness and apostle of the sovereign grace which opened his eyes, converted and pardoned him. Here it is evidently sovereign grace meeting the fury of the ardent enemy of truth and grace, who sought, as he himself says, to destroy Christianity, and banish the name of Christ from the face of the earth.

Paul realised that if God's mercy could save him, there was no one that that mercy could not reach, and that God had saved him, the chief of sinners, that "Jesus Christ might show forth" in him "all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should afterwards believe on Him to life eternal" (1 Tim. 1:15-16).

His apostleship had nothing to do with Jerusalem, or with the twelve. It was outside of both. His call was extraordinary and direct from the Lord in heaven. He is privileged to bring out the new thing, the heavenly character of the church — that Christ and the church are one, and that heaven is their common home. (Eph. 2) So long as God was dealing with Israel these blessed truths were kept a secret in His own mind.

Labours, stripes, prisons, deaths, journeyings, perils of all descriptions, weariness, painfulness, watchings, hunger, thirst, fastings, cold, nakedness, care — what a list! It covers pretty well the whole range of human suffering, whether of body or mind.

Though a prisoner and poor — though aged and rejected — he was rich in God, he possessed Christ, and in Him all things. The Jesus whom he had seen in glory at the beginning of his course, and who had brought him into all the trials and labours of the gospel, was now his possession and his crown.