When we first encounter Saul of Tarsus in the book of Acts, we meet a fierce enemy and persecutor of the ancient church. In this sermon, R.C. Sproul introduces us to Saul, known also as Paul, describing how the Lord transformed this man into an Apostle and one of the greatest missionaries the church has ever known.

And they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. And they stoned Stephen as he was calling on God and saying, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, do not charge them with this sin.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep.

Now Saul was consenting to his death.

At that time a great persecution arose against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him.

As for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering every house, and dragging off men and women, committing them to prison.

Who Was the Best?

I was recently on vacation and had an opportunity to relax and read. I read some theology but not much. Most of my time was taken up reading fiction and a book some people in the church gave me a couple weeks ago called the Summer of ’49. It was a vivid chronicle of one of the most fascinating and dramatic pennant races in major league baseball history between the Boston Red Sox, with their great star, Ted Williams, and the New York Yankees, with their superstar, Joe DiMaggio.

The season went down to the final game of the year, wherein the Yankees prevailed over the Red Sox to win the pennant. Of course, that was also the year Joe DiMaggio missed almost half of the season due to serious bone spurs and surgeries to correct them. The Boston Red Sox also suffered the loss of some of their best pitchers with sore arms, most notably Boo Farriss. I mention Boo Farriss because I met him fifteen years ago when he was the pitching coach at Delta State in Cleveland, Mississippi. He was present at a church where I was preaching, and he was a devout Christian throughout his major league career.

During that season, a newspaper writer came to Joe DiMaggio and asked, “Mr. DiMaggio, what do you think about Ted Williams as a ballplayer?” DiMaggio looked at the writer and said, “Ted Williams is the best left-handed batter in the history of baseball.” The reporter said, “Sir, but I asked you what you thought of him as a baseball player?” DiMaggio said, “I think Ted Williams is the best left-handed hitter in the history of baseball.” That was all that Joltin’ Joe was willing to give Williams.

After the season was over and the Red Sox were devastated by the loss in the final game, the newspaper writer asked Ted Williams, “How do you account for the loss of the pennant to the Yankees when Joe DiMaggio spent almost half the year on the bench with injuries?” Ted Williams responded, “I can answer that in two words: Joe Page.” Page was the fireman of the Yankees bullpen, the first bona fide relief pitching star in major league history. He is significant because he lived in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, so I had to work him into this sermon this morning.

In those days, everybody asked in the hot stove league during the winter, Who is the better player, Williams or DiMaggio? It happened then and continues every year today: Who is the greatest baseball player that ever lived? You’ll end up with arguments forever. Who was the best running back in the NFL? People who have never seen Jim Brown run argue that other people may have been better. Then people argue about who the greatest basketball player is. We are always arguing about who the best is at any given thing.

I want to ask some questions of my own this morning about who the best was. First, I will ask this: Apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, who was the greatest theologian to walk the earth? That is a no-brainer: the greatest theologian to walk the earth was the Apostle Paul. He was the theologian par excellence.

Who was the greatest missionary in the history of the church? That is simple too: the Apostle Paul. Who was the greatest evangelist to ever grace the church of Jesus Christ? My nomination, of course, would be the Apostle Paul. Let’s narrow it and ask this: Who was the greatest pastor that ever lived? Again, it is no contest; it is the Apostle Paul.

Let me take it one final step further. If you were to ask me, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate, who was the greatest man to grace this planet with his life? I would not hesitate in answering: the Apostle Paul. What God wrought in and through the life of Paul, whom He gifted so graciously and who performed so valiantly and gallantly on behalf of the gospel, staggers the imagination.

So much of what we will have in front of us as we continue our study of Acts will be a profile of Paul and his life, ministry, suffering, and faithfulness to his Master. But when we first meet him in the text I read this morning, we do not meet the greatest pastor, missionary, evangelist, or man. We meet the early church’s public enemy number one. We meet a man filled with hostility and hatred towards Christ and Christ’s church, whose consuming passion at this time in his life was to eradicate Christianity from the face of the earth.

A Meteoric Rising Star

Let me give you some background on Paul before we look at the text. He was born, according to tradition, the same year Jesus was born. He was born in Asia Minor, in the city of Tarsus, hence he was called Saul of Tarsus, and Paul was the name he used in gentile circles. His father was a Roman citizen and a respected merchant. He must have done something significant to be awarded Roman citizenship.

Because Saul’s father was a Roman citizen, Saul was born a free man and inherited that citizenship from his father. If you look at the maps at the back of your study Bible, you’ll find that Tarsus was at the extreme southeastern tip of Asia Minor. If you have geography in mind, you can look down the coast and see Tarsus close to Antioch, just north of Jerusalem.

Tarsus was on the trade routes where all the merchandise was moved from Europe and Asia to the south across the Middle East and then down into Africa and back. Tarsus was also one of the wealthiest cities of that region in antiquity. The city’s claim to fame was that it had the largest university in the world at that time, bigger than the two competitors, which were the universities found in Athens and in Alexandria, which was in Egypt in north Africa.

Tarsus was a cosmopolitan city in which merchants, scholars, intellectuals, and travelers mingled and spoke of things taking place around the parts of the world from which they came. It was in that environment that young Saul grew up.

At first, Saul followed a tradition commonplace in Tarsus and other places in the region of learning a trade by becoming an apprentice. One of the most lucrative trades in that day and region was the trade of tentmaking. As a young man, Saul learned the trade of making tents, which served him well throughout his entire life.

At age thirteen, because of the prowess and brilliance Saul had already displayed, he was sent away from Tarsus to Jerusalem to go to seminary, as it were, to study under the tutorship of the leading theologian in the world of that time. His name was Gamaliel. We were introduced to Gamaliel in Acts 5, as you may recall.

Saul studied under Gamaliel for seven years. By the time Saul was twenty-one, he earned the equivalent of two PhDs in theology. It has been said that Saul of Tarsus, by the time he was twenty-one, was the most educated Jew in Palestine. He had mastered the Old Testament and all the rabbinic interpretations of the Old Testament, and his star had risen in meteoric fashion.

Complicit with Evil

Saul was well-known in and around the academic circles of Jerusalem by the time the episode we read in Scripture today takes place, in which we are told he was still a young man and was present at the stoning of Stephen. Let us remember how he was introduced in the text. We read: “And they cast him”—that is, Stephen—“out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul.”

The first thing for which Saul is known in biblical history is as the one who took care of the clothes of those who murdered the first Christian martyr, Stephen. The Bible does not tell us why they laid their clothes at the feet of Saul, but it is not hard to guess if we read between the lines.

Everybody in that crowd was breathing fire against Stephen and wanted to take his life, and they did not have to ask Saul of Tarsus, “Are you with us or against us?” Not only was his scholarship known to everyone around, but his profound hostility to Christianity was also well-known. There was no doubt that Saul would at least acquiesce in this act.

If Saul was not going to pick up rocks himself and throw them against Stephen, at least he would be present there, standing guard, giving his approval, being complicit in this action, and certainly not raising any protest. He took on the task of the escape driver or the lookout for the crime happening as he stood there and watched the clothes. Two verses later, Luke tells us that Saul was consenting to the death of Stephen.

One of the things that frightens me about the judgment recorded in the book of Revelation is that the first group of people who will be thrown into the lake of fire at the last judgment will be the cowards. A coward is a person who, when evil is being done, does nothing, says nothing, sees no evil, and hears no evil. The coward says, “I am not going to participate in it myself, but what other people want to do is their own business.”

In this case, Paul was not a coward, because he agreed with what was being done. But how many times in our lives have we seen evil taking place right in front of us, but we did not say a word? We would not take a stand.

The philosophy of relativism has so infected our culture that is still okay for Christians to say, “I believe in the resurrection of Christ,” but if somebody else in the church says, “I don’t believe in the resurrection of Christ,” many are tempted to say: “To each his own. I’m not going to get embroiled in that controversy. I’m not going to get in trouble or get into a heated argument about something so insignificant as the resurrection of Christ or justification by faith alone.”

We have come to the place where we are willing to say what we believe, but we will not raise our voices against the antithesis of the truth of Christianity. If there is anything that characterizes the spirit of our age, it is antipathy toward falsehood. It is rooted and grounded in hearts that are cowardly.

Be Sure You Are Right

Paul knew that Stephen’s execution was unjust. Paul knew the execution was against the law of Moses, in which he was an expert. He let it happen, held the clothes, drove the getaway car, and was aiding and abetting a capital crime. That is our introduction to Paul. He probably—almost certainly at this time in his life—thought he was doing the right thing.

There are people who genuinely believe that women ought to have the right to kill their own babies, and they say: “I wouldn’t do that myself, but that’s not my business or anybody else’s. Every woman should have that right.” Nobody was given the right to do what is wrong, but there are people who believe it is right to do wrong. At this point in his life, Paul was one of those people. I think he believed Stephen’s execution was right.

I remember an event that occurred when I was a counselor at a Jewish boys’ camp in Ohio. A terrible storm came one day. The land was dark at two o’clock in the afternoon, and everyone headed for the shelter of the dining hall. We took the customary headcount, and there were two campers missing, which is the scariest thing that can happen as a counselor. We went out and found them. They were caught at the end of the lake, and I had to go out in a canoe and try to rescue them in the midst of the strong blowing wind.

There was another episode we had at that camp. One of our campers, certainly the most eccentric camper, went by the nickname Rock. I do not know how he got the nickname Rock, but that was what everybody called him, and that was what he called himself. One day, we took a headcount in the dining hall, and one of the campers was missing. This time there was no storm, just one camper AWOL. We had no idea where he was, but we knew who it was. It was Rock. He was gone. We were terrified. We set up search parties to go to different areas around the camp and outside the camp in the wilderness to find Rock. I was sent up the mountain, and I was by myself as a point person in that search party looking for Rock.

I came through a thick grove of trees, and there I saw him sitting on a rock with his head in his hands. I was enormously relieved that I had found him. I asked, “Rock, what are you doing?” He said: “I’m just sitting here. I didn’t want to be at the camp anymore.” I said: “But you know you’re not allowed to leave the campgrounds like this without telling anybody where you’re going. What were you thinking?” Rock looked at me with all the seriousness he could muster, and he said, “A famous man once said, ‘Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.’” I asked, “Who was that?” He answered, “Davy Crockett.” I do not know whether Davy Crockett ever said that, but I have never forgotten it.

That has come into my mind many times when I was not sure about the right thing to do, and I would be uncertain about two opinions I was weighing: “Be sure you are right first, before you make your move.” I learned something that day from that eccentric boy. Paul was sure he was right, but he could not have been more wrong than to be complicit in the murder of a saint.

The Chief of Sinners Transformed

In our prayer of confession today, we used the words whereby we confessed our sins, and at the end we personalized and said, “of which I am the chief,” borrowing that phrase from the Apostle Paul, who to his life’s end considered himself the chief of sinners.

If Paul were present with us this morning, and instead of asking who was the best, we had asked “Who was the worst man that ever lived?” Saul of Tarsus would have raised his hand. He was not just being dramatic or humble, he really did believe that he was the chief of sinners. If anyone should have known better on that day in Jerusalem, it was Saul of Tarsus.

Luke goes on to tell us that not only did Saul give consent to the murder of Stephen, but then he wreaked havoc on the early church. He was like the head of the Gestapo, who at midnight would knock at the door. Without even waiting for an answer, Saul and his agents would sweep into the home and grab the father, mother, and any kids and herd them off to prison because they were Christians.

Until the day Saul died, even though he knew what it meant to have every sin in his life forgiven by the blood of Christ—and no one ever had a better understanding of the atonement than Saul of Tarsus—I believe that when he put his head on the pillow at night and closed his eyes, he could see Stephen on his knees, bleeding from every part of his body, looking up into heaven with his face like an angel, saying, “I see the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” Maybe he looked at Saul when he said, “Lay not this sin to their charge.”

After Saul met the risen Christ, and Christ turned his life upside down and blinded him by the radiance of His own glory, this man who wreaked havoc against the body of Christ became the greatest champion that the church of Jesus Christ has ever known.

As we study through the rest of the book of Acts and see activities of the Apostles, especially of Paul, let us never forget his introduction, his starting place. Let’s remember what kind of a man he was before the Lord of glory touched his soul and transformed him to the greatest Christian the church has ever known. Let us pray.

Father, how often we have consented to sin, and how often we have worked against Your kingdom. Change us the way You changed Saul, so You would make our consuming passion not the eradication of the church, but the triumph of the church and the exultation of Christ. For we ask it in His name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.