Footsteps #4 

Paul Knew that the white ashes of a religion which had smouldered into formalism lay thickly scattered over his own heart, but God knew that the fire of a genuine sincerity burned below. But what confusion! – Stephen stood before the Sanhedrin and said that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah! To suppose that all the splendid prophecies of the patriarchs, seers, and Kings, from the divine voice that spoke to Adam in paradise to the last utterance of the angel to Malachi –all pointed to and centred in the One who had been the carpenter of Nazareth, who had been crucified between two criminals! To say that their very Messiah had just been ‘hung’ by gentile tyrants at the prompting of their own priests! Was there not one sufficient and decisive answer to it all in the one verse of the law that said, “Cursed by God is the one who hangs on a tree.” 

Yet this was the thesis of Stephen – no ignorant Galilean – but a learned Hellenist. He proved it with such power as to produce at first silence, and then hatred from a deep-down conviction. Saul was convicted, but he fought with it. A suffering, as well as a triumphant Messiah? Resurrected? 

Acts.7:58 tells the end; foiled in argument, they appealed to violence and Stephen became the first Christian martyr in AD 34. Whenever people have no reason, they often resort to violence. This was AD34 the end of the Jewish probationary period marked out in Daniel 9. 

Saul was about 35. He sought to swallow his conviction by wiping out the convictors. In sorrow and remorse, he reflected 8 times on this in his writings. He began making inquisitorial visits from house to house, dragging men and women to judgment and prison. So thorough was his search and so deadly were its effects that in referring to it, the Damascus Christians speak of Saul as “he that devastated in Jerusalem them that call upon this name.”(Acts.9:21.). The word used is the strong Greek word which is usually applied to an invading army that scathes a conquered country with fire and sword.