Recently, while reading the book of Acts, I was struck by the parallels between the two most famous Sauls in the Bible—King Saul in the Old Testament and Saul of Tarsus in the New.
What hit me so strongly was that both men were trying to do what they honestly thought was right. King Saul pursued, persecuted, and strove to take David’s life; and Saul of Tarsus imprisoned, persecuted, and slaughtered early Christians.
Both men were filled with a zealousness and animus that could probably be called insanity—indeed, the Bible describes King Saul as being possessed by an evil spirit (see I Samuel 16:14, 15). And Saul of Tarsus was so zealous to protect the Pharisaism that he was raised in, and so blinded to the goodness and truth that Christianity represented, that he thought it was his obligation—even his God-ordained mission—to expunge what he obviously considered a dangerous heresy to the Judaism he so revered.
