{"id":2784,"date":"2022-02-03T03:42:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-03T03:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=2784"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:34:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:34:12","slug":"the-anti-missionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=2784","title":{"rendered":"THE ANTI-MISSIONARY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I love irony. Don&#8217;t you?<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think God loves irony too. There&#8217;s a lot of it in the Bible.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One instance of irony I had never noticed before this morning: Saul&#8217;s conversion story in Acts 9.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The disciples had been scattered outward from Jerusalem because of widespread persecution following the stoning of Stephen.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Saul, after thoroughly terrorizing the believers around Jerusalem, was now traveling to Damascus.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why go there?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Damascus was the next big city outside of Jerusalem, about 150 miles away. Quite a few Jews lived there.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It seems reasonable to assume that, knowing quite a few believers had fled Jerusalem, Saul had left the city and was headed to the next likely hub in an effort to stop the spread of the Christian faith.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The New Testament&#8217;s most successful missionary started out failing as its greatest ANTI-missionary!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love irony. Don&#8217;t you? I think God loves irony too. There&#8217;s a lot of it in the Bible. One instance of irony I had never noticed before this morning: Saul&#8217;s conversion story in Acts 9. The disciples had been scattered outward from Jerusalem because of widespread persecution following the stoning of Stephen. Saul, after [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2784"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2785,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784\/revisions\/2785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}