3 But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison.
The folly of people who think they can destroy what God is doing amazes me. How can we stand against God? Saul, later to be called Paul, is doing what he thinks a good religious person should do. He is trying to stamp out what he considers a dangerous false teaching. He tries to use force to stop the power of God working through people. He in essence is taking on God in a fight to the death. Saul goes around and grabs Jesus-followers and throws them in prison. Hasn’t he been listening to what has happened before? Every time they have arrested Jesus-followers they get out of prison with a greater boldness for sharing what they have seen and experienced. Prison acts like a super-charger of their faith. It has exactly the opposite effect the religious leaders want. They want to intimidate them into not preaching about Jesus and the resurrection. They want to shut them up. But instead, they talk all the more. When we lived in Massachusetts we had a vine that took over our back yard. If you just cut or pulled the vine up, it would come back with many more shoots. The only way to get rid of it was to pull every root, every last strand of root, out of the ground. It was a painstaking process. You couldn’t take the easy path and just cut what you saw above the surface, you had to continue over the course of months to pull the roots. The problem with Saul’s approach is that he could not pull the root of truth out of them. They had seen and experienced the freedom found in Jesus. They had seen the power of His resurrection at work in themselves and in others. No mere prison could get rid of that root. Has the Lord’s root taken hold in your life? Have you let the truth sink deeply into the fiber of your whole being? Or are you only allowing the Lord to work at your surface?
The Arnold Journey 