Set Apart, Trained Apart

Well we have Galatians 1, I've got 15 and 17 here and next week we'll get to continue on with this section and go over 18, 19 and 20. Yesterday while I was talking to Craig I mentioned that it's sometimes difficult to go over a historical passage like this because some historical passages are rather dry details. In this case we have actually a tremendous amount of doctrine that Paul is going to be integrating with the historical text. So I was not short of material and instead I hope that as we have discussion here we don't run out of time. I'm going to go ahead and read a little bit more than 15 through 17 just so we have some context. I'm a big fan of that.

Starting in verse 11, he says, For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the Church of God beyond measure, and I tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions. But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia and returned once more to Damascus.

Then three years later, I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him 15 days. But I did not see any other of the apostles except James, the Lord's brother. Now in what I am writing to you, I assure you before God that I'm not lying." And we'll stop there because that's where we're going to end next week.

Going through this passage here, Paul is continuing to level arguments to counter the arguments and refute the arguments of the Judaizers who had persecuted the name of Paul and tried to slander who he was so that they could come in and preach a false gospel.

One of the things that I think is important as we continue to take a look at Galatians Paul was speaking with the authority, and as we saw starting in verse 15, with an authority that roots back to the critically historical nature of God's sovereignty. God's sovereignty is eternal.

So when Paul is leveling these arguments, what do the Judaizers come with? What's their historical authority? What's their context? Moses, they try to take that but their authority is standing in their traditions and of course that was what Bob went over in part last week when he talks about being extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions.

But Paul goes on and and takes this head-on and says that this is within the eternal sovereignty of God. And so, if the Judaizers could level back to Moses, Paul's going to go further back. This is what we're willing to argue against Paul with. We have this. This is the revelation of God. Paul says, I have the revelation of God, too, and it goes back.

The other thing I have on here in the handout is that Paul taught out of the Old Testament Scriptures. Where did he go first when he went into a town? He went to the synagogue and he taught to the Jews and he taught out of the Old Testament. It would possibly be an entire study, possibly quarters and quarters of time, to go over all of the Old Testament prophecies and details that led up to the New Testament. That is its own study, so we won't do it this morning, and I've only got a few short notes.

I was wondering what the Lord Jesus said to the two men walking along the road. Yeah, the stranger on the road to Aramaeus hears this guy and it's the Lord. And he went through the scriptures and opened their eyes with those scriptures. Yeah, and I think that would actually be a valuable study to go through the Old Testament and we don't know what Christ said, but we have a good idea what prophecies were fulfilled and things that were there.

I would love to see that be a Sunday School study sometime. I'll have to bring that with the elders. But I've got here listed that this message was coming, this message of a new teacher. Moses said in Deuteronomy 18.15, there is a new teacher coming.

So when Paul came to the Jews, he said Moses said a greater one was coming, a new one was coming. When Paul brought that out, he didn't come up, hey, I've got this new thing, you should check it out. He said, look, Moses said it. Here's the Old Testament. So the Judaizers were using the Old Testament, and Paul was using the Old Testament. Paul wasn't saying something that couldn't be validated. That's why we have the Bereans.

Isaiah 53 talks about this suffering Messiah who takes the sins away. It was needed. Paul was not just saying, hey, this was coming, but he was showing them that it was needed. The third thing I hear is that it was consistent with God's revelation. I've only got two of hundreds of passages that talk about the Messiah coming but Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 both talk about someone who is coming and so when Paul comes to Galatia with these messages or these messages this message this single gospel communicating he's doing it from the Old Testament and it's consistent and the Judaizers have to fight against the Old Testament with the Old Testament so they try to bring about contradiction rather than a continuous message with one single author with one single purpose. So that's a long warm-up, that's the introduction.

But the sovereignty of God and the nature and character of Paul's apostleship was important to bring up in the light of the context of eternity. So when we look at verse 15, Paul starts out and he says, But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb and called me through his grace, was pleased, and then he keeps going there. Paul goes back and speaks of being wrought in his mother's womb and called by God even at that point. He was set apart from the womb.

One of the things I think is interesting is that the name Pharisee that we use, the Greek for that actually is where we get, or is rooted in the same word where we get the word set apart. So the Pharisees were the set apart ones. Here's this group. They set their lives aside for God. So the Pharisees, who probably were influencing or part of the Judaizers, understood set apart. So when Paul says, hey, I'm set apart, it's not misunderstood. They don't have any misgivings about what being set apart would mean.

Paul wrote in Romans 1.1, if we flip in our Bibles there, Paul wrote in Romans 1.1 about being set apart. And he's reiterating what I think is interesting is that the logical structure of Galatians and the logical structure of Romans are impressive to a software developer. There's a lot of logic and reasoning that comes through here.

But he has the same emphasis in Romans 1.1. Would somebody mind reading that?

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called the Apostles separated under the gospel of God. He said of Paul, It doesn't say that he was set apart at the womb in Romans 1 there, but he said they were set apart. And Dr. Luke in his account in Acts chapter 13 verse 2 says that the Holy Spirit set apart Paul and Barnabas. So Paul, when he's talking about being set apart, it's not something he just mentions offhand once. the scripture brings evidence of that and and we see that we can we can note that it's not just a unique, you know, well, it's just as one instance.

But instead, we have something that that is repeated consistently through here. One of the things I wanted to point out is there's a difference between how he also which is where we get saint set apart one and the Greek aphorism aphorism annoy Probably obliterated that you'll forgive my Greek pronunciation Which is the other set apart here one is set apart unto a calling and and one is set apart unto holiness. We as saints are the hakiatso. We're the set-apart ones unto God's holiness. But Paul was using a different Greek word to emphasize the uniqueness of his calling. That he was set apart as an apostle even in his mother's womb.

One of the things that I want to take a look at here as we look at this argument of God's sovereignty and setting things in order, what are the common misconceptions that we run into about God's sovereignty in the church? I have two examples, one of hyper-Calvinism and the other one is of pre-liberal Arminianism. And then you can get into really weird things like humanism and stuff like that which we'll try to pretend is not part of this conversation because that could be its own class too.

It was. But what are the common misconceptions about sovereignty? Anybody have any thoughts? They don't look at sovereignty from the same time on a paternal basis. They look at it as something that started and is continuing on from that point. So God kind of makes you, you don't say that he's out of control of things, but he's planned it all in the first place, but they don't take that into consideration. I guess he knew it all before it started. Yeah.

One of the problems with hyper-Calvinism is that basically they describe what I would call a cosmic robot scenario, where God just remote controls us. Everything is in God's control to the point where we really don't do anything but that which God has moment by moment, point by point declared to the point that our will doesn't exist. The other side, Arminianism, basically says that God could have intervened, but chooses not to. entirely, in which case he has abdicated his sovereignty. Both of those are polar opposites and not revealed in scripture. I wanted to, on the next page, on page two of the handouts, I made a little diagram. I apologize that it's black and white so it's not really pretty and all those other things. Right above that diagram, I've got some facets of God's sovereignty.

It is prescriptive. God can be prescriptive of what happens and say, hey, I'm going to make Paul, even from the womb, my apostle, and I'm going to make sure that this takes place. That's sovereignty. It has to be prescriptive. He can't be sovereign and not have that ability to say this is going to happen. Prophecy requires a prescriptive sovereignty. Otherwise, it's like going to Vegas. You know, God says, I'm going to do this. Boy, you know, cross-stringers hope that it works. No. Prophecy is prescriptive or sovereignty is prescriptive and prophecy requires that.

But sovereignty is also purposeful. God's being sovereign without a purpose is illogical and inconsistent. Sovereignty, and these all start with P. I was trying to help with something that would be memorable. Sovereignty can be preventative as well as it can be prescriptive. It can be preventative. You can say, I'm not going to let this happen.

I'm not going to allow Paul or Saul to destroy Christianity. I'm going to preserve Christianity and I'm going to prescriptively use him to do that. Sovereignty is peace-giving. If we're resting in God's sovereignty, I don't have anything to worry about. I can trust him.

We're going to, in just a few moments, we're going to look at what God told Ananias in Romans 9 about Paul's or Saul's purpose. And what he says, when I read it, I was like, oh, it's just crushing. It really, literally, emotionally would be crushing if I wasn't trusting in the sovereignty of God. We'll take a look at that.

The other thing is that sovereignty perpetuates the persistence of God's character. God's character is inclusive of sovereign. You could say sovereignty is part of God's character and his showing that shows us and reveals his character to us as believers. And I think that's important to keep in mind. The last thing I have here, and this is for the diagram, is that God's hand is in the life of every man. It can generally be for all of the universe, for all of the earth. and for all of the details in there. He doesn't have things happen and go, oh shoot, I wish I could have stopped that. It's out of my control. What am I going to do? God doesn't panic.

But it can be more specific, and I've got a third level there, which I have labeled focal. I don't know if that's the best vocabulary word, but it's the one that came to mind, where it can be specific to a group of people. It is not by accident that we're at Holly Hills. It is not by accident that there were 12 disciples. And it can be very specific in the life of Paul individually. And so when we talk about Paul being called from his mother's womb and Paul being called through grace, it is through the control and power and sovereignty of God. At no point does God lose sovereignty despite our perception of too many variables.

As a software developer, one of the programs that's interesting is in Japan. They have this massive supercomputer where they're trying to figure out how to write software that will replicate weather patterns so that they could, in theory, calculate weather patterns far, far into the future with software. And the thing is that, you know, I'm going to be an optimist just for the sake of argument and say that, sure, they can do that. But they can do that with a tremendous amount of computer hardware horsepower and a tremendous amount of software calculations that requires logic that I would just probably pass out if I were to try to interpret all of it because it's so robust. But the honest truth is that it's not 100% accurate and perfect. They're still working on it. And that's just weather.

Or we could talk about earthquakes. Or we could pick something that, to us, we would call natural. This is our environment. Anytime you add lots of variables, like, oh, shoot, how does a volcanic eruption in the Pacific Ocean impact weather patterns? Well, now I've got to study that and try to write software that maps to that. Okay. And so you start the, all these variables come into play and you have computers doing massive zero and one data calculation and it, it's too many variables. We can't handle it.

But God's sovereignty takes that infinitely beyond just weather patterns just here on the earth. And he knows our names. He knows the planets and the stars. I saw a video online that NASA had helped produce of the known universe. And it was a really cool computerized graphic. It was really impressive. I mean, genuinely, I was amazed by the amount of information that we had collected. But they zoomed out really, really far.

And there were basically two triangles. If you were to draw a four triangle, a square, diagram there were two triangles out the side that they knew about and there were these two other triangles going vertically that we had no information about and I thought we know so little and yet God is sovereign over all of that beyond that beyond the scope of our knowledge so when we talk about sovereignty I just that could that could be a whole class obviously but it's an exciting thing to consider that the God of the universe who is sovereign over everything knows us One of the things that amazes me is one of the prevailing structures underlying our Christendom outside of Christ, being taught as Christians, is that God started everything and stepped back, and just let man go his way, and intervenes intermittently to rescue him.

At times in history I'm saying, how can you believe that and still It doesn't reflect love or grace. Those theological concepts don't fit into this intermittent semi-active God. He didn't just start it and step back. He had an active role in Paul's life. Yeah. Well, that active role is shocking if you think about it, and I've written this elsewhere, but I'll say it now.

If you think about how vehemently angry and anti-Christian Paul was, there's no way on an earthly human standpoint that you would say, that guy is going to become a Christian. You know, just as much as one would never have said Adolf Hitler was going to become a Christian or Saddam Hussein. How could somebody so wicked and evil who hates something so much become a Christian?

Because God's sovereign and he loves and he's gracious and he's involved with the universe. It's easy to come up with reasons from a human perspective why things are going to fail or things couldn't work. But Paul is reminding them of a heavenly perspective.

I was looking at the notes from Chester McCauley when he taught through Galatians and he said there's three parts of God acting upon Paul with this special calling. And he set Paul apart. He called Paul through grace and he revealed Christ to Paul. And I thought that that was just a nice listing of the elements of this calling that Paul is talking about.

One of the things I think is important is that this calling was apart from the other apostles. As we continue through 18, 19, and 20, we're going to see, he says, I didn't go up to Jerusalem until years later. But when did Paul see Christ and envision on the road to Damascus?

Was it near Acts chapter 2? Or was it later? It was later. It was significantly later. It wasn't like, oh, you know, a couple of weeks later we got Paul showing up on the scene. It was a tremendous amount of time in comparison. I mean, not tremendous in eons or millennia or something, but it was a good stretch of time that Paul had to grow in his anger and persecute the church. But God called him. He set that time apart.

It reminds me of scientific theory. If you can repeat something and you can have outside sources, when you look at history, it's important if you've got multiple people recording the same thing from different points, that helps you pinpoint the accuracy of the historical thought. And I think it's interesting that what happened in the upper room with the other apostles And what happened with Paul were different, but led to the exact same doctrine and led to the same life showing up. It was from a scientific viewpoint.

It was an external verification. It would be one thing if it was just 12 guys that all said the same thing all together and it all started in one place. You can say, okay, same source. It's homogenous. But you had that group and then you had an outside party. from a different place with different things and it came together.

So you have to forgive me for my little sidestep into science there, but I just think it's kind of an interesting historical phenomenon. Jessica and I took a lot of history classes in college and that's one of the things that I thought was interesting is that what gets taught in history is rarely taught with skepticism. You don't hear a lot of skepticism. You're just like, well, this is what happened.

This is the information we have and this must be true. And then you go to look at validating sources and there are not a lot of them. We don't have a lot of external and multiple and still all in one piece sources for a lot of history that's taught as, well, this is how it happened until you come to the New Testament. And suddenly you have lots of copies.

You have out, because it was such a cultural phenomenon, if you're going to look at it from a humanistic standpoint, there are a lot of outside records that can confirm the validity of the statements in the scriptures. This stuff really did happen. These people did really understand this this way.

We have a historical context, which allows us to read and understand the scriptures more deeply. So this part of Paul being called separately and independently at a different time does, as a believer, allow us just a tiny bit more. It's 100% in God, but it gives us some confirmation that our faith is not just purely mystical, but it's factual. It's in a God who's involved and has done things to help us understand it in a context that is eternal. Yeah. What encourages me here is that When the Lord approached Paul, he said, you've been persecuting me. Yeah. And when I think of that, whenever we are persecuted, it is Christ who is being persecuted, his body. It's identification. Yeah.

And when you come from the perspective of being in Christ, to the scientific evidence of is this true or false, It's like light and darkness. Here's the grey shadows over here about scientific evidence. And here's the light of... God is alive and I'm in Him. It's personal. Yeah, I certainly don't want to emphasize just purely a scientific... No, no, no, I'm not being critical. I'm just saying what a blessing that is to not have to depend on science to reinforce truth, although it helps.

Yeah, well, and the thing that I find interesting is that When I try to discuss Christianity with those who are not believers, who reject Christianity, they don't have that personal relationship at all. They don't understand it. They don't even care about the historical validity of the gospel or anything that might be involved with Christianity. There is a fundamental faith issue that I don't put faith in God. I don't put faith in the idea of God. None of that is of any use. So my attempt to persuade by historical arguments has so far been met with just brick wall, if you will. They're not interested.

It has to be the work of the Holy Spirit. It's the Holy Spirit, absolutely. I'm keeping going here, I can't see the clock and the lights reflecting, but I'm pretty sure that the clock hasn't stopped moving. Paul is going to continue his testimony as he goes through where he talks about being called through grace, but his calling was apart from the other apostles.

One of the things I've run into, and I've written the question on here, but this is something that I've often wondered about. What is the biggest problem with saying a person has a calling in comparison between the book of Acts, where we have the original recording of the calling of Paul, and modern times?

What if somebody tells you, I've got a calling now, how do you validate that? Okay, we've all been called as believers, but somebody says, I've got a calling, I'm a minister. I've got a calling, I need to be a pastor. I'm a calling, I need to be an elder. What is your vocabulary? What are your preferences? Well, all too often, you just check the transcript, okay, is grades really high in certain areas? Okay, then that makes them good. Yeah. Must be.

And the thing that I've wrestled with, and I haven't done a lot of studying in, but I just think it's interesting, is I've heard people say, I've got a calling. And it's, it's one of those things where my immediate response is to just kind of shut down and be quiet.

Cause I can't argue if you, you know, with Paul, certain things came into play that made it very obvious that he was called, but I can't do that. I don't have that same scenario now where some things are so obvious in a group. where somebody just shows up and says, I've got a calling. I've got no way to verify that. It gets awkward. And I'm not saying that because anybody ever tells you that they've got a calling is lying or wrong. It's just something that I think is sometimes used in a hokey way or in a way that kind of, you can't mess with me.

Don't touch me. I've got God's calling and you don't. In seminary over here, one of the things they require you to write down is What is your calling? And you've got to answer that. I'm so glad. I was called to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Yeah, well absolutely. And that's one of the questions I was going to ask is what is the calling of the believer? But you beat me to it, so that's good. No need to be sorry, that's the answer. Everybody take notes.

One of the things I think is interesting, or as we continue on through here, is through grace, dia is the Greek word there, that which intervenes between the act of the will and the effect, and through which the effect proceeds. Paul was called by God's will through grace. Grace was the way. by which Paul was called grace was the thing that brought the act of the will into effect and It was God's will so there was no There was no second-guessing it again. He's sovereign, but but it was through grace, and I think grace When I if you understand grace in a limited definition of just being a God overlooking my sin, which is how in the past I had defined grace prior to the grace series by Chester McCauley being exposed to that. If you have a misdefinition of grace, through grace is either mysterious or confusing, or both, or worse. How can we understand grace so that it can be an agent of change like we see in this context.

It's not just limited favor. Okay. It's not just limited favor. And I think that's the fundamental distinction I had before was that if it's just God overlooking my sin, that's one thing. But it's an agent of change. That gives it more of a quality than just simply, you know, just kind of hiding it from your view.

I don't think we can ever exhaust the definition of grace with words because it's Christ. It is the expression of grace of God. Yeah, it's an infinite expression. Yeah, it's unlimited. I don't know how to say it. Chuck did a really good job in that definition. Yeah, the unlimited unmerited blessing of God due to the totally adequate work of Christ on the cross. It is a tremendous starting definition.

And then what I've enjoyed as a believer is seeing the nuances of that in my own life. Sometimes just in reflecting on the past and sometimes through newer experiences since learning the definition more broadly. But having this opportunity to understand God's grace, it makes you look at Paul when he says, hey, it was called through grace.

He hated God's plan through Christ. Passionately imprisoning and holding the coats while Stephen was a martyr. Going through all those things, hating, hating, hating. And he says, through grace. He had a deep understanding of what grace was to be able to say, through grace. Took a bullet out of the blue to get him off his hobby horse of hate.

Well, yeah, it's easy for It's easy for us to see the impossibility, but grace is beyond, in its infinite nature, beyond our human understanding of the impossibility of somebody ever changing. Why would somebody change? Grace is enough. God's grace, when he shows it to you, wow, it can be a change agent. And I hate to use that phrase, lest it sound trite, but it can be part of what God uses. It can be the environment that God uses to bring about change.

Then Paul continues on, he says that God revealed his son in Paul. Apokalupto is the Greek word there for revelation. It means to remove a veil or expose or open a view that was previously hidden. If you're Saul, if you're a believer or a Jew looking at Saul who's murdering people, Paul was pretty well-veiled. You would never have looked at Saul and seen, hey, this guy's a great believer. He's going to be out evangelizing. He's going to be stoned to death. The believer's going to pray for him. The Lord's going to raise him back up. He's going to go right back into the town and evangelize.

You would never say that. This was a mystery, if you will, of who Paul would become. But God revealed his son Through Paul, God unveiled the eyes of the Jews, the eyes of the Gentiles, as he went into the synagogues and into the towns and preached the gospel through Paul. You wouldn't have seen it, but you see the humbling nature of grace poured out to reveal the very Son of God through a vessel that was once considered vile and incapable of containing such a pure and perfect message. One of the things that I found here in this computer commentary says that it pleased God to reveal His Son, not to me, but in me.

And one author has said, perhaps it could be taken to me, but might be more appropriate because he uses that same phrase several times, in my case, to reveal Christ in my case. in me personally exposing Christ through me. Stepwise, not just one instance. Yeah, and it's like taking me and making me reveal Christ to the world. Yeah.

Well, and it is the murderer nature of Saul that would make the revelation of Christ through the life of Paul so radical. If Saul had been you know, Joe Cool, just plodding along, doing his thing, making tents, whatever else, and not persecuting believers, and not being such a self-righteous Pharisee, that revelation might have been a little less obvious. Yeah, the contrast, and as we continue to read through Galatians, he's going to emphasize, he's going to say, people were amazed to hear that this guy who was once a hater of Christianity was out proclaiming the gospel, spreading Christianity. And that revelation in, and using that word in there, I think is significant. Paul wasn't mincing anything. He was saying this, I was an agent of God to you, Church of Galatia, and you saw Christ in me, Church of Galatia. So when these people are attacking me, they're attacking Christ. There's not an accidental use of the N, I think, in this case, because it would allow Paul to emphasize the nature of God's work through him.

If you were a Jew, it would have been shocking to see this guy who hated Christianity, but if you were a Gentile, it would have been shocking to see someone who had been so self-righteous behaving unlike any other Jew before him that you'd met. graciously versus legally, right? Yeah, that difference, that contrast, again to use the night and day illustration, you would be shocked as a Gentile, especially if you'd met some of the really good pious Pharisees. If Paul came to you and said, I used to be a Pharisee, they probably would have, you know, checked him out and said, really? You? You're so different.

But that was the life of Christ in him. But one of the things I think is interesting is that Paul continues on and he says that he was called to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. He started with the Jews. He always went to the synagogue first. Started with the Jews and then reached out to the Gentiles. What does it mean for Paul to be called to preach the gospel to the Gentiles? Why is that significant? It's an extension of God's grace. That's significant because it was something not really known or let's say to the Jews anyway it was not known but it was in the scriptures. It's just one of those things that their pride hid it from their eyes. Yeah.

Here's the irony, they had this temple in Jerusalem, they had the court of the Gentiles, which was far huger than intercourse for men and women that happened to be Jews. And they just couldn't get it through their thick skulls that you didn't necessarily have to do everything the Jewish way to worship God in the spirit of truth and they missed it completely.

The Jews had been called, even though they were called to separation, they had been called to reach out after they wiped out the Canaanites. That was the first order of business, which they kind of failed on. And after that, things went far off course, but they've been called to be a light to the world, to introduce them to God. You are my people. Not, you're my people and I hate the Gentiles, but instead that they would reach out to the Gentiles.

I mean, the book of Hebrews does a good job of going over the order of the priesthood of Melchizedek. This was before Jews, but he was still considered a very special priest of God. The Jews should have, you know, they had plenty of examples, plus some explicit text in the law to know that they needed to be reaching out to the Gentiles, but they failed.

Now, what I think is kind of funny is that When we get to Acts, how long does it take for the Jewish beginning of the church to reach out to the Gentiles? It took them a while. Some estimates are around 15 years or so. There was a whole lot of stronghold of tradition there.

And so God had to tell Paul explicitly, go reach out to them. The good thing is that the Roman environment had already dispersed Jews, even if they were Orthodox, to Judaism across the known world. And he was a Roman citizen. Yeah. And so Paul would be able to go out and find people that were already active in the community, that had probably developed business relationships and other relationships, and implant the gospel, which suddenly gave them freedom to stop worrying about the trappings of Judaism and evangelize, and it spread across the environment of Rome, the culture of Rome, differently than had he come at a different time, had Christ come at a different time.

So reaching out to the Gentiles was significant though, but God had to kind of, I think of it as breaking the balls at a pool table. I hate to use a pool analogy at church, I know a hundred years ago that might have been frowned upon. But he had to send the cue and break the balls out from their tightly knit nest so that he could reach out to the world. But Rome was the perfect environment for that.

Let's look at Acts chapter 9 verses 15 and 16. This is where we're going to get to the part where at least I was personally pretty shocked. Acts chapter 9, 15 and 16. And the funny thing is that no matter how many times I read it, I still find it shocking. Would somebody mind going ahead and reading out loud Acts 9, 15, and 16? But the Lord said to him, Go, for this man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before Gentiles, kings, and the sons of Israel. I will certainly show him how much he must suffer for my name.

So this is God speaking to Ananias and telling him to go pray over Paul and God would restore the vision of Paul. But Ananias, when he shows up, he's got to tell Paul, hey, God sent me. This is something he's going to do for you. So Paul's first exposure to believers after getting his sight back is this guy who's got to come, who's been afraid of him. I get the impression that Ananias had to tell Paul. This is what God said. He said to come. He said he's going to teach you about suffering.

Now, from the flesh, there's no way you would respond to that positively. At least, I know that my flesh would never be like, yeah, suffering. No way. Where's the lazy boy recliner? Where's the waitstaff to come to my beck and call? Paul had this ministry to the church, ministry to the Gentiles, but a ministry that was going to involve suffering. But he didn't shy away from it. This is your calling. Here it is. There's your calling. I'm going to come teach you.

I'm going to draw you and make you mine, and you're going to be my disciple to the Gentiles, and you're going to understand suffering. If we were to look at his letter, one of his letters to the Corinthians, we would find he lists off, I believe it's 2nd Corinthians chapter 11, where he lists off all of these sufferings to the church in Corinth to say, hey, I've suffered a lot for Christ's name, don't second guess what I'm saying here, I'm serious about this. And as the Sapphira both lost their popularity. They did run into some issues, yes.

I'm not I'm not 100% sure that it's the same Ananias. It may be. I'm not aware of any direct clues. I'm not saying that it isn't, but I'm not sure. Certainly that name does lead us to the other story in Acts where they almost have to say it couldn't be because he was not going to spill the beans to Paul saying, you're going to suffer. He was just doing what the Lord told him and not adding or subtracting to it. Well yeah, I'm sure it wasn't a drama production. It was just simply to state what was going on. I never thought of it that way. There could have been two igneous. And Sophia was attached to the other one. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Nothing duplicitous about this.

No. The other thing that we want to, as we continue on with this passage, that we want to point out is that Paul's immediate training upon becoming a believer, again, he didn't become a believer at the same time as the other apostles, and then his training didn't come from the other apostles.

When we take a look at verse He says, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. They're emphasizing the time difference between when Acts chapter 2 took place and the road to Damascus. But I went away to Arabia and returned once more to Damascus. The interesting thing is that Galatians is the only book that we have any mention of Arabia as far as timing is concerned. There is a good indicator that Acts chapter 9 verse 23 where he says some days and he's unspecific about his timing is probably when he went to Arabia. The thing is that the Arabian Peninsula I think is like 12,000 square miles. of peninsula. It's really massive. It's between Asia and Africa. It's a big, big chunk of land. But part of that actually comes up into the southern part of Israel.

So there's a good chance that when he says, when I went down to Arabia, it was probably not saying, hey, I took this thousands of mile journey. It didn't have to be a significant journey in distance for him to reach it. And in 12,000 square miles, you slipped a few decimals. 12,000 square miles?

Did I say 12? I'm sorry, I've got my miles off here. It's 12 and then a wrong number of zeros apparently here. Is it 120? Anyways, I'll have to look that up. I looked it up and I read it twice this morning and I've already forgotten it. I should have written it down in my notes. That would have been better. I always hate it when I do that. I got my zeros in the wrong place. Don't ask me to tell the time either because I get that screwed up.

But Paul, as he goes down to Arabia, it's there where it appears that the Lord continued to train him and show him personally. There are some theologians that say that Paul was trained by the Lord for up to three years in Arabia based on some other texts, but it's not explicit. So I don't personally believe that's the case. That being said, I'm not sure that's official Holy Hills doctrine.

The thing, as we look at this, is that the Judaizers would have... Let me start at the beginning of the sentence. Another key point against the Judaizers would have been that if Paul had gone up to Jerusalem, he would have been questioning the revelation of God. If God said, hey, why are you persecuting me? Christ comes and reveals himself on the road to Damascus and says, I'm going to send you out to be an evangelist to or an apostle to the Gentiles. And he went immediately up to Jerusalem and said, are you guys sure this is a good idea?

That would have been questioning God's... So the Judaizers, whatever the angle that they could have taken to attack, God had foreseen the events and ordained them to be in the right sequence so that pretty much every argument the Judaizers would have had against Paul was easily counterable. They couldn't second guess Paul's ministry from birth all the way up until he came through Galatia and went through his ministry. God had ordained things in such a way that they just couldn't be second guessed.

That's the end of 17. We're going to keep going next week on 18 through 20. He's going to continue telling the story of his interaction with the apostles, but he's going to point out the limited nature of that interaction. If they were going to argue, as he starts at the beginning of verse one of this book, that he was sent by men, he's going to show them how impossibly awkward that would have been since he did not have interaction with the men that you would suppose would send them off.

So anyways, we should probably close in prayer. That was the second bell, but we can keep talking after that if you've got questions. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this time that we have to look at your word. Thank you for your sovereignty and your grace and the tremendous nature of your love and your work in our lives and that in the life of Paul as well. We just ask that you would Constantly be reminding us about grace and love and your hand in our lives as we go throughout this week and the days between or minutes between now and when you come to take us to be your bride. Praise you in Jesus name. Amen.