I. Zeal is a certain fervency of spirit arising out of a mixture of love and anger, causing men earnestly to maintain the worship of God and all things pertaining thereto, and moving them to grief and anger when God is in any way dishonoured.
II. Paul was zealous for the outward observance of the law and for Pharisaical unwritten traditions.
III. He himself condemns his zeal because it was against the Word, and tended to maintain unwritten traditions, and justification by the works of the law, out of Christ. What Paul did in his religion we are to do in the profession of the Gospel. 1. We are to addict and set ourselves earnestly to maintain the truth of the Gospel. 2. We are to be angry in ourselves and grieved when God is dishonoured and His Word disobeyed. 3. We are not to give liberty to the best of our natural affections as to zeal, but mortify and rule them by the Word.—Perkins.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 15–19.
The Imperative Claims of a Divine Commission—
I. Are independent of personal merit.—“But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace” (ver. 15). From the beginning the apostle was Divinely destined to fulfil his high vocation. His Hebrew birth and Hellenistic culture combined to prepare him for his future work. When he developed into a hot persecutor of the Christian faith he seemed far away from his life-mission. But a change took place, and it soon became apparent that, not on the ground of any merit of his own, but because it pleased God, the training from his birth was the best possible preparation for his lofty calling. We cannot see far into the future or forecast the issue of our own plans or of those we form for others.
“There is a Divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough hew them as we may.”
The Divine element in our lives becomes more evident as we faithfully do the duty imposed on us. Joseph recognised this when he declared to his brethren, “It was not you that sent me hither, but God” (Gen. xlv. 8).
II. Are based on an unmistakably Divine revelation.—“To reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen” (ver. 16). The dazzling appearance of Christ before his eyes, and the summons of His voice addressed to Saul’s bodily ears, formed the special mode in which it pleased God to call him to the apostleship. But there was also the inward revelation of Christ to his heart by the Holy Ghost. It was this which wrought in him the great spiritual change and inspired him to be a witness for Christ to the Gentiles. His Judaic prejudices were swept away, and he became the champion of a universal Gospel. The same revelation that made Paul a Christian made him the apostle of mankind. The true preacher carries within his own spiritually renovated nature evidence and authority of his Divine commission.
“This is what makes him the crowd-drawing preacher,
There’s a background of God to each hard-working feature;
Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced
In a blast of a life which has struggled in earnest.”