God's Problem (21 page)

The idea that God can bring good out of evil is behind much of what the book of Acts has to say about the missionary activities of the early Christian church. Even before Paul appears on the scene—he is converted from being a persecutor of the church in chapter 9—the Christians are portrayed as preaching the message that God reverses the wicked actions of others. One of the key refrains of the apostolic sermons in the book is that the Jewish people are responsible for Jesus’ death (this has been read as anti-Jewish, and understandably so), but that God acted on his behalf by raising him from the dead. The people should therefore feel remorse for what they have done, repent, and turn back to God. In other words, a very bad thing—the rejection of Jesus—can lead to a very good thing, salvation through repentance. A clear expression of this view comes in an early speech placed on the lips of the apostle Peter:

For Luke, God reverses rejection and brings redemption out of suffering.

Luke shows this theme more subtly in his account of the persecution of the Christians. At the very beginning of Acts, Luke narrates a scene in which Jesus, after his resurrection and before his ascension, directs his disciples to be his “witnesses, in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). You might think that the disciples would take his direction to heart and would start fanning out, telling people everywhere the good news of the resurrection. But they don’t, at least at first. The disciples do start acquiring followers—in droves, in fact. Thousands of Jews in Jerusalem are said to have converted to belief in Jesus. But that’s where the apostles and their converts stay—until they are driven out of town by persecution.

Persecution, of course, entailed a good deal of suffering—floggings, imprisonments, even executions, as indicated in Acts itself. But the author of Acts has a theological view of the progress of the early Christian mission, one in which suffering has a purpose. In particular, Luke thinks that the entire mission was driven by God through his Spirit, so that nothing that happened to the Christians could slow their progress. In fact, everything that happened simply contributed to the spread of the gospel. When the apostles Peter and John are arrested and taken before the Jewish council, they are released for lack of evidence of wrongdoing, and the disciples are emboldened to proclaim their faith more forcefully (chapter 4). When the apostles are imprisoned and flogged for causing trouble, they “rejoiced that they were considered worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name” and preached the message all the more (chapter 5). When the first martyr, Stephen, is stoned to death for his blasphemous words about Jesus (chapter 7), he dies with a prayer on his lips. A very observant Jew standing nearby—Saul of Tarsus—will himself convert while on a mission to persecute the Christians, two chapters later.

Most significant, when persecution becomes severe in Jerusalem, all the believers scatter throughout Judea and Samaria (Acts 8:1). In other words, rather than shutting down the Christian mission, the persecution forced the followers of Jesus to do what they had been directed to do—take the message outside Jerusalem to other parts of Judea and north into Samaria. The mission is furthered by the suffering inflicted on those who believe. This is Luke’s way of saying that suffering can be redemptive, that good comes from evil.

The same theme drives the narratives of Paul’s missionary activities in Acts. For this book’s author, the mission was to spread not only geographically but also ethnically: the salvation brought by Christ was not simply for Jews; it was for all people, Jew and Gentile. But how did the new religion breach the divide, how did it leap from being a strictly Jewish sect of Jewish followers of Jesus to become a religion of both Jew and Gentile? In no small measure it happened, according to Luke, because the Christian missionaries were rejected by the Jewish crowds, and so were more or less driven to take their message elsewhere. This is made explicit in several places, none more clear than in chapter 13, where Paul delivers a lengthy sermon to the Jewish congregation of a synagogue in the city of Antioch of Pisidia (Asia Minor).

When the Jews sponsor a persecution against the apostles, they take their message to other lands. And so it goes. Rejection and persecution work to spread the gospel. For the author of Acts, God brings good from evil.

What did the historical Paul himself think?

Rejection and Salvation in Paul

As mentioned earlier, when recounting the things that Paul said and did, the book of Acts does not always agree with Paul’s letters. In his own descriptions of his missionary work, for example, Paul never mentions going to the synagogues in the various cities that he visited; and he does not talk about preaching to Gentiles only after Jews had rejected his message. This appears to be Luke’s understanding of how the mission proceeded, but it may not be historically accurate. What is accurate is that Paul was principally a missionary to the Gentiles, and that he faced rejection by Jews who did not take kindly to his declaration that Gentiles who believed in Jesus—not Jews descended from Abraham—were the heirs of the promises that God had made to the patriarchs of Israel. Sometimes Paul is quite heated in speaking of the Jewish rejection of his message that Jesus’ death is what puts a person into a right standing before God. As he says in his very first surviving letter:

Historically, this presents an interesting, but completely understandable, situation. Paul’s message was that the crucified Jesus was the messiah sent from God for the salvation of the world. Most Jews—I’m speaking historically now—considered this message ludicrous. Many Christians today have trouble understanding what the problem was. Doesn’t the Hebrew Bible talk about the suffering messiah? Doesn’t it describe the crucifixion in such passages as Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, looking forward to the fulfillment brought by Jesus? Wasn’t the messiah
supposed
to be crucified and raised from the dead? Why can’t Jews see that Jesus must be the messiah?

This is a source of genuine confusion among many Christians, but it doesn’t really need to be. The fact is that if you simply read Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, as I pointed out in my earlier discussions of these passages, you see that the word
messiah
never occurs. Jewish readers of these passages in antiquity did not think that they referred to the messiah. They may have been referring to someone who was dear to God who suffered horribly, but this person was not the messiah. And why not? Because the messiah was not supposed to be someone who suffered and died, but someone who ruled in glory.

The term
messiah
comes to us from the Hebrew
mashiach,
which means “anointed one.” The Greek equivalent is
christos,
from which we get the term
Christ.
I sometimes need to remind my students of this, that Christ was not originally Jesus’ name. He was not “Jesus Christ, born to Joseph and Mary Christ.” “Christ” is a translation of
messiah,
so that if someone says Jesus Christ they are saying “Jesus the messiah.” But why was the term
anointed one
used of a future deliverer? It is probably because the kings in ancient Israel were anointed with oil during their inauguration ceremonies to show God’s special favor upon them (see 1 Sam. 10:1; 16:12–13). For many Jews, the messiah would be God’s
future
king, the one who, like King David, would rule Israel in a time of peace, undisturbed by rival nations, happy and prosperous.

Other Jews had other ideas of what the messiah would be like. Some anticipated that the future ruler would be a cosmic judge sent from heaven in judgment on the earth, come to overwhelm God’s enemies with a supernatural show of force. Others thought that the future ruler would be a great man of God, a priest empowered by God to deliver the authoritative interpretations of his Law by which the nation would be governed.
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Whatever various Jews thought of the messiah, they agreed that he would be a figure of grandeur and power, one obviously chosen and favored by God. And who was Jesus? A crucified criminal. For most Jews, calling Jesus the messiah simply made no sense. He never raised an army, never attacked the Romans, never established his throne in Jerusalem; he certainly never came from heaven in a blaze of glory to overthrow God’s enemies. Rather than defeating the enemy, Jesus was squashed by the enemy. He suffered the most humiliating and painful death the enemy could devise, reserved for the lowest of the low. Jesus was precisely the
opposite
of what people thought the messiah would be like.

Paul himself understood the problem full well—he indicates that the crucifixion of Jesus was the greatest “stumbling block to Jews” (1 Cor. 1:23). Nonetheless, as discussed earlier, for Paul, Jesus actually was the messiah, not despite the fact that he was crucified but precisely because he was crucified. He bore the curse of the Law (since he was hanged on a tree); but since he was God’s chosen, he bore this curse not for any wrong he had done but for the wrong done by others. It is through his crucifixion, therefore, that one can escape from the curse of the Law and be set free from the power of sin that alienates people from God. For Paul, Jesus is not a messiah in a mere political sense but in a deep spiritual sense. He is the one favored by God who puts people into a right standing before God.

Still, most Jews didn’t buy it, and this was a major source of pain to Paul. As he himself says: “I have great sorrow and endless anguish in my heart. For I would wish myself were accursed from Christ if it could help my own people, my kindred according to the
flesh” (Rom. 9:2–3). Paul would rather suffer God’s wrath himself than see his compatriots, the Jews, cut off from God. But in his view, cut off they were, because they rejected Christ. And this caused him deep emotional agony.

But even here, for Paul, the anguish could turn to joy. For eventually Paul came up with an explanation for why Jews had rejected the messiah, Jesus. This explanation is spelled out, in rather complicated fashion, in chapter 11 of his letter to the Romans. Here Paul reaffirms his belief that the gospel of Christ brings salvation to all people, Jew and Gentile. And why have the Jews rejected the message? For Paul, it is because this allowed the message then to be taken to the Gentiles. And what, for Paul, would be the net effect of the message of salvation going to the Gentiles? In one of his stranger arguments, Paul claims that when Jews see that Gentiles have come into the people of God, it will make them “jealous” (Rom. 11:11). That is why “a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And thus all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:25–26). In other words, despite his agonizing over his compatriots who do not yet believe, Paul believed that God would bring something good to pass. Out of jealousy the Jews will eventually flock into the gates of salvation, and the entire world will be saved. Out of something bad, God makes something good.

Other Suffering and Its Benefits

Paul has a lot of things to say about suffering and its benefits. Remember, he thought that it was only by suffering that he could be a true apostle of Jesus.
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Rather than complain about suffering, then, Paul reveled in it. For one thing, Paul thought that suffering could build character:

So, also, he thought that by suffering he was better equipped to console others who suffered.