Role of Ananias in the life of St Paul.
DAILY QUOTE:
(Acts((9:11-18.22:6-17 and Gal1:1,11)
Role of Ananias in the life of St Paul.
Our Lord used many in the life of Paul for the accomplishment of his great apostolic call. The first one was Ananias. He was Paul’s first friend after his conversion. He was the first Christian to greet him as a brother, who till that time was persecuting the Church. He was the first person who faithfully bore the Lord’s commission to him.
Though in the epistle to the Galatians, Paul is at pains to deny in the most unqualified terms that he received his apostolic commission from any man, even though any man :he received it ,he asserts, immediately from Christ .(Gal 1:1.11).
How does this square with part of Ananias’s role in Acts? as F.F Bruce a great Bible scholar noted.
Ananias was the spokesman of Christ-as His very mouth-piece of –that he went to Saul. Ananias had nothing to say beyond the words that the Lord had put in his mouth. As Ananias did so it was Christ Himself who commissioned Saul to be His Ambassador.
Ananias laid his hands on Saul, but it was the power of Christ that in the same moment enlightened his eyes and filled him with the Holy Spirit. Such filling with the Holy spirit was an indispensable qualification for his apostolic commission. The apostolic commission of Paul, and the part played by Ananias in it, must now, as in N T times, remain a stumbling block in the path of those whose conception of apostolic ministry is too rigidly formal.
Really his commission was done in such an “irregular “way.
Ananias has an honoured place in sacred church history, and a special claim upon the gratitude of all who in one way or another have entered into blessing that stems from the life and work of the great apostle