Q. Luke tells us in Acts that Saul of Tarsus, who later became known as the apostle Paul, “was breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples.” Why did he want to kill them?
Later in the book of Acts, as Paul is on trial before King Agrippa, he explains that before he became a follower of Jesus, “I was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the Lord’s people in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. I was so obsessed with persecuting them that I even hunted them down in foreign cities.”
So basically, as Paul himself describes here, he did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah. He specifically did not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, which his followers claimed was proof that he was the Messiah. Paul felt that anyone who made these claims about Jesus was a threat to true religion, and he was so zealous for the Jewish religion that, as he describes, he hunted down followers of Jesus and persecuted them.
But Jesus revealed himself personally to Paul, and from then on Paul knew that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead. This made him a committed follower of Jesus. He always regretted how he had harmed believers, but he trusted that God’s grace could nevertheless make him an effective worker for Jesus. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “I am the least of the apostles, and I do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”
Good Question 