Mar 28, 2010
From Persecutor to Preacher
Paul's autobiography in Galatians 1:11–24 is not self-promotion but a defense of the divine origin of his gospel and apostolic authority. Working through Paul's former conduct as a practitioner, persecutor, and professor of Judaism, the sermon argues that no man so deeply invested in Judaism would have invented or received the gospel of free and sovereign grace from merely human sources — it came by direct revelation of Jesus Christ on the Damascus road. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus is thus a monument to sovereign, particular grace: God saved His chief enemy and commissioned him to preach the very gospel he had tried to destroy. The sermon calls the unconverted to see in Paul's transformation the sufficiency and willingness of Christ to save the most wretched sinners, and summons believers to tenacious defense of justification by faith alone.
