Modeled redemption

This week is on Acts 26:9-18:

"I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the saints in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. In my obsession against them, I even went to foreign cities to persecute them.

"On one of these journeys I was going to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. About noon, O king, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions. We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.'

"Then I asked, 'Who are you, Lord?'

" 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,' the Lord replied. 'Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you. I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.'

Back when Paul was called Saul, he spent years unwittingly doing his own thing, thinking he was serving God. He worked long hours, taking extra measures, to be successful in what he was doing. The problem for him was that the thing he was doing wasn't just the wrong thing -- it was downright evil.

Saul claimed to be serving God, and totally believed he was, but was actually working against God's plan. He killed faithful believers. He caused others to actually blaspheme God. Blaspheming is when you say something bad or untrue about God. Trying to serve God by making people badmouth God is like an undercover DEA agent killing a cop in order to prove his dedication to his role as an undercover agent! His actions were basically all evil all the time, and he had no idea. Saul was following every rule he knew to follow, but he was completely missing the big picture.

In our sense of right and wrong, the thing we'd love to hear next is how God destroyed Saul with a lightning bolt, or caused him to get devoured by a lion. For all of the evil Saul did, we'd expect some kind of hideous punishment to befall him. At very least, we'd expect God to put him on some kind of holy probation, maybe telling him that he's not allowed in church, but if he works really hard for the rest of his life, maybe he'll be spared the flames of hell. Fortunately for Saul, none of those were God's plan for him. Our desires to see someone like that punished are evidence of our natural inability to understand redemption.

God saw Saul's natural dedication and desire for righteousness and knew he could make good use of him. That's where redemption starts. Anyone who has ever gone trash picking understands redemption. Sometimes trash isn't completely trash, if you know how to spot the good in what's there, and you have the means to repair it. I, myself, have a few things in my house that were once thrown out by people who were unable to see their value. I have a number of friends like that too. It's easier to throw something out than it is to fix it. That works great, until we're the ones about to be thrown out.

God took hold of Saul, but he didn't punish him. He didn't throw him out of the synagogue or even tell him that he was a bad man. He pointed out that Saul had made some mistakes, and offered him a job. That's it. That's so unfair! Saul did everything wrong and still got offered salvation, just like he was someone who never did anything as bad as he did. That's redemption: Being taken out of the trash and put to use, as if there was never anything wrong with you in the first place.

Most of the problems with redemption are our problems with recognizing it for what it is. We don't think we're worthy, so we don't listen when God says to get up and get to work. We don't think our friends are worthy, so we ignore them when they try to get on with their lives after doing something bad. We don't think anyone is really worthy, so we yell at them with megaphones about their sin, or require that they study theology or spend a certain period of time in our church before we accept that they're accepted and clued-in. God chooses who he will choose, and his standards for selection are way better than our own. Still, it's not natural for us to see that way, and we often miss the mark because of it.

For someone like "Paul" to be as useful as he was to God, how can we ignore anyone? This was a super-churchy "hater" with a life mission to destroy the church! How do you turn around after that? If this happened in the church today, people would still be bringing up his persecution of Christians thirty years after he stopped. Nobody would let him preach. His career would be ruined. "How can he be a Christian after he did that?" It would be like Adolf Hitler converting to Christianity at the end of the war, instead of killing himself. How many churches would honestly give the guy a leadership role in their church, even twenty or thirty years later?

God has bigger plans than we can understand. It is better for us to give everyone the benefit of the doubt than it is to risk closing our minds to something God may want to do. Redemption is the greatest gift God has for us. It would be incredibly foolish for us to let our own sense of right and wrong prevent us from receiving it.