God Comes to Those Who Want to Do What Is Right
Have you ever felt like God plays favorites? Sometimes, it feels like God has some he likes and some he dislikes.
Acts 9-10
Today's Scripture Passage
A Few Thoughts to Consider
Have you ever felt like God plays favorites?
Sometimes, it feels like God has some he likes and some he dislikes. God has his favorite people, the Jews, but then he has those who are afterthoughts. But Acts 9-10 reveals this is clearly not the story.
In these chapters, we have two dramatic conversion stories. The first is Saul, who becomes Paul, and the second is Cornelius. Acts 9 opens with these words: 1 “Now Saul was still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord. He went to the high priest 2 and requested letters from him to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any men or women who belonged to the Way, he might bring them as prisoners to Jerusalem.”
The first Christians were known as people who belonged to “the way.” As F.F. Bruce writes, “It was evidently a term used by the early followers of Jesus to denote their movement as the way of life or the way of salvation.”[1] It was people who were committed to living as Jesus lived. In Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer says, “Transformation is possible if we are willing to arrange our lives around the practices, rhythms, and truths that Jesus himself did, which will open our lives to God’s power to change. Said another way, we can be transformed if we are willing to apprentice ourselves to Jesus.”[2]
These were the people Saul wanted to abolish. He tried to rid the nation of anyone who followed in Jesus’ ways. How could he do this? F.F. Bruce explains: “When the Jewish state won its independence under the Hasmonaean dynasty of ruling priests (142 B.C.), the Romans, who patronized the new state for reasons of their own, required neighboring states to grant it the privileges of a sovereign state, including the right of extradition.”[3]
But on the way, God reveals himself to Saul. Some Biblical scholars like N.T. Wright surmise that as a dedicated Pharisee, Saul might have been practicing a form of “throne-chariot meditation” based on Ezekiel 1. If that was the case, Wright believed this is how things would have unfolded.
