Complex Language for Simple Notions

In youth, outside bible study, the world was vast, the texts were dense, and the weight of unanswered questions pressed heavily on my mind. Paulus emerged as both a paradox and a puzzle. He became, for me, the fulcrum of many doubts and, eventually, the engine of my spiritual awakening. What brought me back was Paulus’s honesty and full comprehension, as well as his absolute trust in the constant presence of God being Good. This goodness was true despite all the imperfections of man, and the imperfections of our made up things. In his writings, I found a form of language structure that lived beyond the words themselves and dodged manipulation by later generations, providing an undying testament to the necessity of transformation, for he saw potential beyond the things of men.

The tension between human frailty and divine grace is central to the faith he prescribed to others. He often contrasts the flesh with the spirit, a dichotomy that resonates with the struggle and need to guard oneself. My initial angst over Paulus was not born of malice, but of my misunderstandings. Where I saw contradictions at first, I later came to find nuance and intellectual rigour. The heat of his convictions and the urgency of his mission are most certain. This is evident when he urges believers to present their bodies as living sacrifice (Romans 12:1-2), a call to crucify the lower self attached to material things. This is no abstract ideal; it is a radical invitation to live in alignment with divine purpose, even when the world insists on self-interest.

Paulus was not an ascetic monk meditating in solitude. He was a man who never rejected the principal of stonings and went forth to the nations engaging crowds and individuals alike openly, doing whatever was required to win them, as he put it, even willing to act like other peoples and cultures. Spirit was most important to him, above all other things, plainly. His letters are steeped in this tension between the material and spiritual aspects of life: the weight of past and the fire of new life; humbling the self to be servant of all and, through this, achieving the greatest of freedoms. Paulus’s emphasis on grace over law (Galatians 2:16) confirms the notion that righteousness must be earned immanently through faith: ‘pistis’/trust in God. Regardless any works to come forth from this pistis, it begins based on this internal shift of the self and giving over fully to God, in all that we are and do; complete identity in God. We make of ourselves an instrument, regardless how unfit we may be at the moment. His epistles testify to salvation through surrender to what God wants, through Lord Jesus, in that narrow and moderated path, straight and clear but missed by so many.

We are lost and blind before finding our faith and resultant actual purpose. In an age of existential angst doubting all bases for understanding, Paulus’s teachings offer a counter-narrative to the modern obsession with self. Paulus wrote to empower others, but his words form a mirror revealing the struggles he himself dealt with internally. The issues he wrote about in those congregations were done so through this mirror of himself and his own experiences. When he spoke of distrust, division, and the temptation to return to old ways, these were things he himself had prayed on and struggled over, subsequently used as clay for shaping good. His words are living wisdom. Find comfort in the recognition that even the most flawed of men can be used as vessels for divine truth.