Galatians 1:15 Commentary and Bible Study

Paul attributes his conversion entirely to the sovereign will of God and his good pleasure. Nothing which was part of his fallen nature would ever have attracted him to God. Rather, God set his love upon Paul and overcame all the insuperable obstacles that lay in the way of his salvation. He cannot take any credit for believing in Christ. The message was so obnoxious to him in his natural fallen state that he would never have received it without God’s irresistible grace. He did not one day say, ‘I have been unfair in the treatment of these Christians and of the one they follow. I’m going to sit down and consider this matter carefully’; instead, he was flat-out opposed to Christ when God forcibly and overwhelmingly arrested his progress. Paul is still arguing that he received the gospel from God and not from men. God had to forcefully intervene in his life for him to turn to Christ. But God chose him while he was still in the womb and indeed long before that. Long before he acknowledged that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, while he was still violently pursuing believers, while he was still learning at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), while he was still living as a child in Tarsus, while he was still growing in his mother’s womb, before even the creation of the world, God knew precisely what he would do with Paul. All these elements in his life helped by the providence of God to prepare him for the apostleship to which he would be called. The Lord knew how far he would let him go without restraining him, and when he would put a stop to his rebellion. God called him by his grace. This is true of every Christian but in Paul’s case God’s intervention was also linked to his calling to be an apostle. God called him, not with a general call that summons all indiscriminately, and leaves it to them to respond, but with a particular call that singled Paul out from the millions that are on the earth. Paul was far away from God and God called him to come near. He was not converted through hearing the preaching of the gospel, but by an appearance of Christ to him personally. Paul heard the voice of his Creator and recognized it, for he knew who was calling him since Christ identified himself. Certainly at first he was deeply confused, for that voice meant that he had been wrong about all that he had ever thought about Christ and his people. But it was a calling he could not refuse, for although his will was still free to choose, once he realised who was calling and what he was being called to, he greatly desired to come.