Paul Learns About the Body of Christ

from Lesson 206 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charles Clough

In Acts 9, another passage you should keep in mind, the Damascus road experience of Paul. What did Jesus Christ say to Paul on the Damascus road? Here Paul is going along, what does he have in his hand? He has police orders to put Christians in jail; he’s killing Christians here. So here he is on the road to Damascus, the Lord appears to him and what does the Lord say? It blows his mind; “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?” Wait a minute, he’s looking up in heaven and he sees the Lord in heaven and the Lord in heaven is saying, “you’re persecuting Me.” Paul isn’t reaching into heaven, who was Paul persecuting physically? Believers down here.

I believe that the Damascus road experience in chapter 9 is the source of the whole idea that Paul got about the body of Christ. I believe that’s how God revealed the body of Christ to Him. I think it started right from the very first day that he saw the Lord Jesus Christ, that when he thought about it… Paul’s a brilliant person, and he’s sitting there reflecting on what the Lord said to him. And he says how can I be persecuting You? You’re in heaven, so if I’m persecuting You in heaven when I touch a believer on earth, what does that mean about the union between that believer on earth and the Lord in heaven? It means that somehow believers physically here on earth are in union with Jesus such that when somebody lays a hand on a believer they’re laying their hand on Jesus Christ. How’s that for unity? That’s Acts 9.

Now if you were Satan, how would you take advantage of this? You can’t get Jesus because He’s far above you, but if Jesus is unified with believers on earth, how can you get at Him? How can you make Jesus feel pain? By persecuting believers.

So in the Sudan where we have black Christians being slaughtered by black Muslims, where we have white atheists persecuting white Christians in various places on earth (it used to be communist states where that went on), where you have Semitic Arab Muslims killing off Arab Christians, wherever you see this it is a satanic attempt to hurt, to inflict pain and to cause grief to the person of Jesus Christ.

That’s how serious martyrdom is on the earth. There’s more to it than just people dying; there’s more to it than this. There’s a big chess game going on behind the scenes. In one sense we as Christians can be very thankful for that.

So I want to turn to how Christians experimentally handle that problem. This is a neat example of early Christians dealing with this martyrdom issue. Turn to Acts 4…