The Story of Paul

From Saul to the serpent incident

This guy whose name was Saul (named after the mighty Jewish king) was a pretty good guy - very religious and observant of what he thought was right. He thought the followers of Jesus were dead wrong and dangerous and he went around collecting them and taking them back in chains to be thrown to lions or made gladiators etc. On his way to do this he was struck by a great light. He was knocked down and heard a voice say, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" Amazed, he asked, "Who are you", and the answer was "I am Jesus that you are persecuting". So Saul asked what he was supposed to do and the voice told him to get up and go to a certain place. The people standing by saw the light, but did not hear a voice. They had to lead Paul by the hand because he seemed to be blind now.

About that time, a certain Christian called Ananias got the message to go to this certain place because there was a man named Saul who was praying and was expecting someone to come. Ananias was afraid because he knew that this Saul was taking Christians away in chains. But the message came to him that this man was to be a special messenger of the Christ. So He went to where Saul was waiting and he healed him in the name of Jesus. When Saul could see, he realized how wrong he had been and he changed his name to Paul, which means, "small". Right away he began to tell people about Jesus.

All this telling and preaching got Paul into trouble with the Romans and the other powers that be.
At one point he and a colleague who were preaching together, Silas, were jailed and beaten. It was against the law to do this to a Roman citizen, which Paul was. Anyway, Paul and Silas were not put off. They sang and prayed loudly in their prison cell, and the other prisoners listened. At one point that night, while they were doing this, there was just enough of an earthquake to break their chains and open the prison doors. But Paul and Silas didn;t leave. When their jailers came they asked "Is it lawful for you to have done this to a Roman citizen?". That made the jailers afraid and they just wanted Paul to go away.

You might remember from your grade 7 social studies class, that any Roman citizen who disagreed with his sentence had the right to appeal directly and personally to Caesar.

Well Paul continued to tell people about Jesus and some people did not like it because they didn't want to change anything and they didn't want their places of power to be lessened.

This got him in LOTS of trouble and eventually, he said that he wanted to appeal his case to Caesar himself. The lower powers at that point wanted to let him go but he had already appealed to Caesar so off he went to Italy on a ship with other prisoners. There was a huge storm and for days they could not even see anything. Finally the ship was wrecked, but as Paul had foretold, no one died. Part of the boat stuck fast on an island and the rest of it broke up. Some swam and some used boards to get to land.

The native people were very nice to them. They made them a fire. But a poisonous viper crawled out of the wood in the fire and fastened on to Paul's hand. The natives said to each other "Ah, this must be a very bad person and even though he has escaped the sea, he will still die". But Paul just shook off the viper into the fire and nothing happened to him. The people watched to see him fall down dead, but when nothing happened, the Bible says, "they changed their minds and decided that he must be a god"..... ;o)