These we conceive to be the feelings and views expressed by the apostle in the beginning of this chapter—­but that he should wish to be put into the place of Christ; or madly with evil to himself, from which nobody could be benefited, cannot be suspected; unless with Festus, we suppose him to have been “beside himself,” and not to have known what he wrote, when he expressed himself as in the text.

REFLECTIONS

I. In Paul’s conversion how wonderfully apparent are the wisdom and power of God?  When we view Saul of Tarsus making havoc of the church in Judea, and soliciting permission to pursue its scattered members even into exile, we consider him as a determined enemy of Christ.  Who then would suspect that he should be made to feel the power of divine grace?  That he would become a Christian?  Yea, a prime minister of Immanuel!  But lo!  For this cause did God raise him up!  For this work was he training while drinking at the fount of Science, and learning the Jews’ religion in the school of Gamaliel!  While unsanctified he was a destroyer; but when melted by divine influence into the temper of the gospel, all his powers and all his acquisitions were consecrated to the service of God and the Redeemer.

To affect this change in Paul, however unexpected, was not beyond the power of God; and it was done of God!  Neither was it delayed till Paul had spent his best days in the service of Satan.  At setting out to destroy, he was met of the ascended Savior, transformed by the renewing of his mind, and from that time devoted to the service of God; and continued faithful unto death.  Many were his trials—­severe his sufferings for the gospel which he preached; but “none of these things moved him; neither did he count his life dear to himself, that he might finish his course with joy, and the ministry which he had received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God.”

II.  The temper manifested by St. Paul when contemplating the state of his nation, how worthy of imitation?  Like his divine Lord, “when he beheld them he wept over them.”  Neither was the view unprofitable.  It served to remind him of his own past guilt and danger, and the mercy which had been exercised toward him.  His guilt and danger had been great.  In high handed opposition to heaven, he had even exceeded “his kinsmen according to the flesh.”  Witnessing their state brought these again to his remembrance, and the grace of God which had stopt him in his course, and saved him from destruction, causing him at once, to rejoice and tremble!

Many of the children of God when they witness the security of sinners; how they neglect the great salvation, and harden themselves in sin, may remember when they did the same themselves and some of them, in a higher degree than most of those who appear to be walking the downward road.