From Season Five/Episode Three of the Blessed Hope Podcast
As a servant of Christ and an apostle, Paul has been set apart by God for God’s purposes. Since Jesus Christ is Lord, Paul is his servant—literally his “bond-servant.” This is an image his Roman audience would easily understand, but one about which they might miss the full biblical background and significance. “Those who spoke for the Lord, such as Moses and the prophets, were sometimes called `slaves’ of the Lord, and that is probably how Paul uses the term here. He is a slave of Christ because he speaks for Christ.”[1]
Paul was called to the office of Apostle to the Gentiles nearly twenty-five years before composing this letter, while traveling along the Damascus Road on his way to hunt down and arrest Christians (cf. Acts 9:1-19). As John Calvin describes Paul’s conversion, God took a cruel wolf [Saul] and not only made him one of his sheep [Paul], but then transformed Paul into a shepherd and assigned to him the office of apostle of the Gentile flock.[2] Paul was not a dissatisfied Jew seeking something better. Rather, Paul was an avowed enemy of Jesus Christ and was, at the point of his conversion, fully confident in his own righteousness due to law-keeping (cf. Phil. 3:4-6). But Jesus suddenly appeared to him, blinded him, called him to faith, and then transformed him into an apostle.
Paul’s calling to faith in Jesus and to his apostolic office originates in the will of God—not some foreseen good in the sinful human heart which God sees and to which he responds. The verb “to call” (καλειν – kalein) refers to God’s gracious call of sinners to faith, life, and salvation through the preaching of the gospel. In this case, Paul no doubt has in mind the prior calling of God’s servants to a divine purpose, such as that experienced by Abraham (Gen. 12:1-13), Moses (Ex. 3:10), and prophets such as Jeremiah (1:4-5) and Isaiah (49:1b), when the latter writes, “the Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name.” Paul stands in the line of divinely appointed prophets and servants of YHWH.
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