14-8-2 Paul And King Saul: An anti-hero

Various expositors have noticed the links between Saul and Paul. " Is Saul also among the prophets?" was directly matched by 'Is Saul of Tarsus also among the Christians?'. The way Paul was let down through a window to escape persecution was surely to remind him of what King Saul had done to David (1 Sam. 19:12). They were both Benjamites, and perhaps his parents saw him as following in Saul's footsteps. And it seems Paul was aware of this. The implication is that Paul consciously changed his name from Saul to Paul ('the little one'). It is difficult to avoid seeing the link with 1 Sam. 15:17: " When thou wast little (Heb. 'the littlest one') in thine own sight" , God anointed Saul and made him the rosh, the chief, over Israel. Maybe Paul's parents intended him to be the rosh over Israel; and it seems he would have made it had he not been converted. I suggest that 1 Sam. 15:17 rung in Paul's mind. He saw how he had persecuted Christ, as Saul had David. He saw the self-will within him as it was in Saul. Yet he went on to see the tragedy, the utter tragedy, of that man. He saw how pride had destroyed a man who could have achieved so much for God. And he determined that he would learn the lesson from Saul's failure (as he determined to learn the lessons from those of John the Baptist and Peter). So he changed his name to Paul, the little one. What influence his sustained meditation on one Old Testament verse had upon him! It affected some basic decisions in his life; e.g. the decision to change his name. There was a time, according to the Hebrew text of 1 Sam. 15:17, when Saul felt he was 'the littlest one' (as demonstrated in 1 Sam. 9:21; 10:22). This was so, so pleasing to God. Saul at that moment, captured as it were in a snapshot, as the obvious, anointed King of Israel hid among the baggage, knowing in his heart he was no way suited to be the leader of God's Israel, was Paul's hero. And Paul alludes to it when he says he is less than the least of all saints, least of the apostles, chief of sinners (1 Cor. 15:9; Eph. 3:8; 1 Tim. 1:15- note the progressive realisation of his sinfulness over time). He earnestly resolved to be like Saul was at the beginning. When he describes himself as " anointed" (2 Cor. 1:21) he surely had his eye on 1 Sam. 15:17 again; when Saul was little in his own eyes, he was anointed. Paul tried to learn the lessons from Saul, and re-apply Saul's characteristics in a righteous context. Thus Saul was jealous (1 Sam. 18:8; 19:1), and Paul perhaps had his eye on this when he describes himself as jealous for the purity of the Corinthians (2 Cor. 11:2). " I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision" (Acts 26:19) is surely a reference back to Saul's disobedience (1 Sam. 15:22).

Conclusion

It should be evident from the above that Paul consciously modelled his life upon Moses and John: among others. But above all, he modelled himself upon the Lord Jesus. There are others who exhibited this characteristic of modelling their lives around faithful Biblical characters. Saul and Jonathan modelled themselves on Gideon, Jeremiah upon Job (Jer. 20:14-18), Jeremiah upon Micah (Mic. 7:8 = Lam. 3:2 etc.), Jeremiah upon David (Jer. 20:10 = Ps. 31:13; 38:17; 41:9; 56:6; Jer. 20:12 = Ps. 54:7) . Jeremiah also has far more allusions than average to isaiah and Deuteronomy; as if these books were his favourites. And David's final psalm of thanksgiving (2 Sam. 22) is shot through with allusion to so many faithful men who were obviously his heroes (just follow up the marginal references). At the end of his life, he felt so close to those who had gone before. This idea of consciously modelling, of having some characters as your heroes, your inspiration towards a closer following of God, was very much in Paul's thinking. Not only does he do it himself, but he encourages others to do it. He doesn't use the word 'modelling'; he uses the word 'mimicking', Greek 'mimicos', normally translated " follow" in the AV. This Greek word is used almost exclusively by Paul:

" Ye became followers of us and of the Lord....ye know how ye ought to follow us...an ensample unto you to follow us" (1 Thess. 1:6; 2 Thess. 3:7,9; the implication is that in the gap between 1 and 2 Thessalonians, they stopped following Paul as they initially did straight after his conversion of them).

" Be ye followers of me" (1 Cor. 4:16; 11:1)

" Whose faith follow (i.e. that of your ecclesial elders)" (Heb. 13:7)

Be " followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises" , e.g. Abraham (Heb. 6:12)

" Ye, brethren, became followers of the churches...in Judea" (1 Thess. 2:14). 

So Paul encourages them to mimic him, to mimic Abraham, to mimic the persecuted ecclesias in Judea, to mimic the faithful elders in the Jerusalem ecclesia (e.g. Peter), so that they would be better mimickers of the Father and Son. But the idea of mimicking involves a child-likeness, an intellectual humility, a truly open mind. Why Paul used that word rather than a word which simply meant 'to copy' or 'to follow' was perhaps because he wanted to stress that this kind of conscious modelling of your life on someone else involved a real need for openness of mind to the word, resulting in an unfeigned, uncontrived, child-like mimicking. Paul is really encouraging his readers to get involved in this 'mimicking' of faithful examples, of absorbing their spirit into our own by careful, sustained meditation. Will we rise up to it? Or are we still on the level of whizzing through our Bible reading in 10 minutes / day, giving little thought to what we've read throughout the next 24 hours?