The Radical Saul/Paul
January 23, 2022
When Saul experiences the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus, it poses a bit of a problem. The first problem is that Jesus was crucified as a messianic pretender, but he was actually the Messiah. Saul had strict views of what it took to be righteous in God’s sight. Jesus’ life looked like a rejection of many of those notions, but apparently Jesus knew what he was doing better than Saul did! After all, which one was at the right hand of God?
There’s another problem as well—in the Scriptures, the Messiah is tied to the resurrection and the new age, the age where finally what God wants to be done will be done. This is the age in places like Isaiah 2, where all the nations stream to Jerusalem and learn God’s ways. This is the age in Isaiah 25, where God will judge the unrighteous, uphold the lowly, lay out a feast in Zion, and put an end to death. This is the age in Isaiah 65, the “new heavens and a new earth,” where Jerusalem will be at peace and will prosper, where God’s people will not labor in vain, where the “wolf and the lamb shall feed together,” a reference back to Isaiah 11 where the vision is tied to the Messiah.
Other prophets tie God’s future work directly to the Spirit. Jeremiah 31.31 and following talks about a “new covenant” with Israel and Judah, when God will put the “law within them,” and “will write it on their hearts.” The law will no longer be something external to them, something they have to learn to follow—they will be so shaped by God that following the law will become natural, a very part of their being. Or who can forget the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37, where the people of Israel and Judah only really come alive when they receive the Spirit of God. And let’s not forget the emphasis Acts places on Joel 2.28-29, where the sign of the end times is the Spirit of God poured out on “all flesh.”
The prophets envisioned God’s reign through the Messiah as a distinct break in history. Before the Messiah comes, the world functions one way; after the Messiah comes, as a result of the reign of the Messiah, the world functions a different way, a way in accordance with the will of God. “The world” is not merely humans either—creation itself will function in accordance with the will of God, becoming a place of abundance and life, because death itself will be undone. But the Messiah has come and gone, and the result is not as clean a break a Paul might have expected. God reveals to Paul that the break is clean, that he really is doing something new, that the world really is beginning to function the way it should. This reign is to be clear in the way the people of God, those in Christ, live, and should be manifest in everything they touch, because of the work of the Spirit within them. Thus, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” (2Cor. 5.17). Paul is called by God to see the subtle ways in which God is working. He is called to believe in faith that the radical break in history he was expecting has happened, and that God’s people are to live in light of it, regardless of what they see around them.
—John Coffey
