Rufus M. Jones

“ In fact those who prove to be heroes in later life are almost always heroes in their school-days. This youth who had come to Jerusalem from Tarsus of Cilicia did not have to wait for some occasion, with all the world looking on, before he could rise to heroic actions. He found a chance to be heroic even in the quiet uneventful cloisters of Gamaliel’s school. All the boys and young men who gathered round this famous teacher very soon knew that a brave fellow and a real, born leader had joined their ranks. ”

“ Not only is our business in danger, but our whole city will suffer as well. People will stop coming to see the great temple which all the world admired. We must act. We must save the city and defend the great goddess!” Then all the silversmiths and goldsmiths and coppersmiths and workers in iron and brass began to make processions through the city, shouting as they marched, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” ”

“ Their great, wise king Solomon had told them, when he built the temple, that no temple, however wonderful, could contain the great God who fills the universe, but the people did not understand his words and seemed to think that God lived only in their temple. “You have always failed to see the truth,” Stephen cried. “You have always persecuted prophets when God has sent them to you. You have killed those who told about the coming of Jesus. ”

“ Now he suddenly found, in his own Synagogue even, people who said that the Messiah had come already, that the rulers and Pharisees who were expecting Him and preparing for Him had not recognised Him when He did come and had crucified Him. This seemed to Saul an awful idea—an unbelievable tale. He was sure the Messiah could not be crucified. But he was afraid that these enthusiastic and misguided followers of Jesus would ruin his hopes. Everything that could be done must be done at once to stop their teaching and to destroy their influence. ”

“ The old heroes of Greece were heroes because they went out to fight with beasts and to free the world of terrible monsters. Then, again, there were heroes who fought with giants, or with deadly enemies of their country, and who risked their lives for their friends or for their people. Paul was a new kind of hero. His great battle was a battle with false ideas, a battle for the truth, a battle for the good news which Christ had brought to the world. It is harder to be this kind of a hero. Most people do not recognise the new kind of hero when he comes. ”

“ He saw at once that he must have the best man whom he could find to help him push the work along, and as he sat thinking of the different persons who could do this great work, suddenly he remembered the young man whose persecutions had driven these first Christians to Antioch and he knew that Saul was now a changed man and a powerful champion of the truth. Whereupon he hurried off through the Syrian gate in the mountains to fetch Saul to Antioch and Saul went back with him to begin the greatest work any man has ever done in the world. ”

“ I do not care any more for the things people do to make themselves good. I feel Christ coming into me and giving me strength and power, just as the sun comes into the tree and builds its life from within. You can all have that power formed in you. You can all feel the 109life of Christ sweep into your lives and that will make you free. And you will cry ‘Abba, Father,’ for you will find the life and spirit of God in your own hearts. When that happens you will not think much about those things which these Jews from Jerusalem have been telling you you must do to be saved! ”

“ But I don’t see how He ever could spread out this great blue tent of a sky over all these fields and over all the city and over both the mountain ranges and as far as men have ever been. All the way to holy Jerusalem it goes—and farther, to Alexandria where the man lives, who wrote the book you read to me yesterday. Is there any end to that tent and what is it made of? Nobody in all our province of Cilicia can weave tent-cloth like that!”
“No, my son, nobody has ever found an end to the tent of the sky. It covers the whole world. ”

“ With the help of Gamaliel and his books, young Saul came to believe that a great day was soon to come for Jerusalem and for all good Jews. A new king, like David, only greater and wiser and better and stronger would suddenly appear. He would have power to turn stones to bread, or to leap from the top of the temple to the ground without being hurt in the least. He would break the Roman army all to pieces in a minute. He would call hosts of angel soldiers from the sky at the sound of a trumpet and they would destroy or carry away all who had been bad Jews and had not kept the law. ”

“ They supposed that Jesus was to be the king in Jerusalem and that only Jews were to be His people. Those who were not Jews could have no share in the good news which He proclaimed.
Stephen was so pure and good and wise that he got a new idea of what the coming of Jesus meant. The truth was far bigger than the others dreamed, and he began to see it, and to tell about it. If God is Father, as Jesus kept saying He was, then He must love all men as well as Jews, and if God is Life and Spirit, then He can come into men’s lives everywhere without any temple and without priests and sacrifices. ”

“ One of our own poets who lived here in Tarsus, in a great hymn to the Allwise One, says that we men of earth are children of God because our spirits have come from his Spirit, and this Spirit lives and moves in us, if we are good and wise. The human soul is like a little inlet into which the great sea flows. Bad and wicked men have become bad and 38wicked because they shut themselves off from the inflowing tides of that great divine Spirit. Those who have most of this divine Spirit in their souls do not fuss or worry. ”

“ He thought he might make the king Agrippa see that God always meant to send His Son to bring light and life to the world and he was telling him about the great prophecies in the Old Testament when suddenly Festus interrupted. He told Paul that he was wild and deluded, that he had thought over these things until he had lost his reason. Unmoved Paul answered and said “I am not deluded. I am calm and sober. I am talking about things which are absolutely certain and real. King Agrippa knows that these things are so.” ”

“ It was very hard to tell from the vague reports, which the travellers brought, what this kingdom was to be. It did not seem like the “new Jerusalem,” that Saul had learned about in Gamaliel’s school. It seemed even greater than that, for it seemed like a new kind of 43world for everybody. Everybody, who loved God and learned how to live a life of love and kindness to all people everywhere, could be in it, and it would grow and spread like seeds of grain in the field. ”

“ How are we to stop this force from pushing us and controlling us and spoiling us?” “You must get a new spirit,” Paul says. “The law and the commandments and the customs of Moses will not bring you life and power. You must find a new and higher 110force which will come into you and raise you out of your old self into a new way of life. Just that is what Christ does. When He helps you and comes into you, a new spirit is formed and you get love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and endurance in your own souls. It is like discovering a new world. ”

“ It is like a new creation. That is what Christ does. He makes people new creatures. These people who came to you from Jerusalem cannot tell you how to do that—but I can tell you. I bear in my body the marks of this new creation which Christ has formed in me.”
Something like that Paul wrote to his friends in Galatia and the best of it is, they believed him and stood by him. When they had read his letter, they said: Paul is right. It is so. We will take his way. We will have Christ and not the law-system—and so Paul had won his first great battle. ”

“ Paul was determined not to yield to these men from Jerusalem and he saw that he must go to Jerusalem himself and prove to the whole church there that this idea that only Jews could be Christians was false. He must make them see that the new idea which he and the Christians at Antioch held was true and right; the idea that all men everywhere, of every race and of every colour and of every custom could follow Christ and come to God through Him and live by the power of His Spirit without becoming Jews at all. ”

“ They were working people who had never had any real life before, and now the whole world seemed changed for them. It was as though they had been living in a dark cave before and now they had come into the beautiful world where the bright sun was shining. ”

“ One of the most beautiful temples in the world—one of the seven “wonders”—had been built to Diana in Ephesus and in this temple stood the famous statue. Now Demetrius made a great deal of money selling his silver images to those who visited the temple. But suddenly he discovered that people were not buying as many of his silver Dianas as they used to do. He began to wonder what was happening and he hit upon the idea that all the trouble was caused by the preaching of Paul! Paul was calling people to Christ and when they believed in Christ, they no longer worshipped Diana. ”

“ Time and the multiplication table go on in one century exactly as in another, no matter what else changes. Before the father and mother could quite realise it, or believe it possible, Saul, once our little boy, who looked out on his world and wondered, was old enough to go away from his home to a great school in Jerusalem where perhaps all his questions could be answered though only for a little while. ”

“ Paul cried out to them, “who are the real sons of Abraham!” “Not those who become Jews and keep the law but those who are full of faith, who trust Christ and live by His power. The most wonderful thing about Abraham was his faith. He believed God. He trusted God. He walked with God. He did not 108keep the law, because the law was not given until many centuries after Abraham had died. If you want to be ‘a son of Abraham’ you must live by faith. You must trust God and take Christ for your leader, your helper, your inward strength.” ”

“ He does not need the things which men make with their hands, idols and images and statues. He has given life and breath to all living beings. He has planned the universe and put His wisdom into all the parts of it. ”

“ The simple country people here made up their minds that Paul and Barnabas must be gods come down from heaven to visit them and they brought out their oxen and were ready to sacrifice them to Barnabas and Paul, who they thought were Jupiter and Mercury. It was here in this very region around Lystra that Baucis and Philemon once lived. And according to the old Greek stories, Jupiter and Mercury came down to earth on a visit. They came looking like common men and nobody knew that they were gods and when they came to men’s houses asking to be taken in and entertained, nobody would receive them. ”

“ But is there not something just a little like that in some of the beautiful psalms which we sing in the Synagogue—‘Like as a Father’?”
“But, Mother, this man, they say, died on a cross, and no good man, whom God approved, could die that way, for our law says that all who are hanged on trees are cursed and disapproved of by God, so that we need not think any more about him.” But try as he would, Saul could not get these things out of his mind. ”

“ It seemed to Paul a pitiful drop from his great and wonderful message. He could never go out and tell people that. If his 106discovery and his message were not true, then he could never go out again on a missionary journey. There was nothing left for him but to go back to Tarsus and make tents and then to die and be buried like the rest of men. Now if ever he must make his new converts see and understand his discovery and he must absolutely convince them that he was right and that God was with him. That is what the Epistle to the Galatians was written for. ”

“ Saul felt sure that, if God had sent Him and He had been divine, He would not have had to suffer, but He would have come in glory and power. But as he rode along in silence and in deep thought, he 70remembered that he had heard these followers of Jesus say in their meetings that the Old Testament was full of prophecies which said that Christ must suffer. He began to think more carefully about these passages—especially the one in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah: “He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.” ”

“ From Paphos the little band of travellers struck out for a new field of work. They had been so successful in Cyprus that they now decided to attack a still larger and more difficult region of the earth. They sailed almost north from Paphos, to the shores of the Mediterranean, lying west of the Taurus mountains over which Saul gazed as a boy. They landed in the district of Pamphilia and came to the city of Perga, a little way in from the Sea. From this time on, our hero is never called Saul any more. His name suddenly changes here to Paul. ”

“ If he got his power suddenly, without any 46preparation and without studying in any of the schools, it is probable that some evil spirit, like Beelzebub, has helped him and revealed secrets to him. It is almost certain that he was not sent by God, for the books of the law do not tell about any such Teacher who would come and die for his truth, and the words they bring about his teaching are not at all like what we know of God from our sacred books. ”

“ There are so many things to remember. Now that I have let my pet stork go, I do not feel tempted any more to play with him on the Sabbath day. But sometimes I start off for a 15walk before I think, and I carry things that are too heavy to be lifted on the Sabbath day. I wonder if I shall ever get so righteous, like our great Hebrew saints, that I shall not do anything wrong on the Sabbath day. It is very, very hard to be perfectly good. Do you not think, Mother, that this is the hardest of all the commandments to keep?”
“No, my dear Saul, there is one which you will find much harder to keep. ”

“ Aquila and Priscilla were also tent-makers and part of the time they all worked at this trade to get money to live by. Then they gave all the rest of their time to the main business for which Paul had come to Corinth. It was a very happy group of workers for they all loved and enjoyed each other and they all 127loved and enjoyed their work. As Corinth was a great city close to the sea, people from all countries in the world came there. There were men of many colours and men of many languages. They had not learned how to live good and beautiful lives. ”

“ Christ came only for Jews, they said. If anybody went about teaching that Greeks and barbarians and men of all races and all customs could be Christ’s followers, that man was wrong and was a dangerous teacher. 100What these people said struck right against everything Paul was doing. According to their views most of the people in the church at Antioch were not real Christians. They would have to change all their ways of living. They would need to accept the whole system of Moses and all the sacrifices set forth in the Old Testament before they could have any part in Christ and His “good news.” ”

“ Paul’s old enemies, the Jews, who had heard about his past life, made all the trouble they could for him, but he had 128been through trouble before and he knew how to bear it now. He went straight ahead with his work and was not disturbed by the difficulties. His soul was filled with joy as he saw his little church growing larger every day. New persons kept coming and there were more all the time who were trying to live the new way. All kinds of people came in to form the new church in Corinth. ”

“ They could keep the law more perfectly and more completely than other people could. They thought of themselves as the truly real Jews and as the inner circle of God’s own people. Then, secondly, there were the Jews 50who lived and did business in the great cities of the Roman Empire—cities like Rome and Alexandria, and Ephesus and Antioch and Philippi and Corinth and Tarsus. They could not keep themselves as pure or as perfect as the Palestine Jews could, for they had to meet and mingle with Gentiles who were not pure according to the law and who defiled those that came in contact with them. ”

“ They do not know that he is a hero. He often has to fight alone and he is misunderstood even by his 112friends. Paul had many lonely hours. He could not have stood the strain and struggle if he had not been sure of Christ’s presence and help and if he had not known that he was the champion of the greatest truth in the world.
Now that he had won the victory in this important contest in Galatia, and now that he had settled the question that Christ was the Saviour of all men of all races, he could go out again on another great out-reaching missionary journey. ”

“ Nobody knows just what goes 52on in a young man’s heart when he takes this great venture and pushes out from the home he loves to begin his real life in the strange and difficult world, where some succeed and where some fail, where some keep pure and good, and where some go wrong.
Many things seemed to have changed in Jerusalem during the short period since Saul had left it. Everybody was talking of the strange events that had taken place recently. A new people had appeared in the city. They called themselves “the people of the way,” or “those of the way,” or “those of Jesus’ way.” ”