The Top of the List

Most of us trim the worst line before telling the story. The edited version is the self we are asking people to accept — and, if we are honest, the self we are asking God to accept too. Paul leaves his line in: he was once “a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent” (1 Timothy 1:13). He is not clearing the air; he hands the file in as evidence.

“I received mercy,” he says, “and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me” (1 Timothy 1:14). The grace did not top up what was lacking; it broke its banks. Then: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15). Not was the foremost. Am — spoken from inside a verdict already given, not toward one he is still trying to earn.

Why? He tells us: “that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him” (1 Timothy 1:16). Example translates hypotypōsis — an outline, the sketch an artist lays down for everything drawn after it.¹ And foremost, two verses earlier, is prōtos: first in the sense of worst. Christ took the hardest file on record and hung it in the light. Not a private pardon — a public exhibit.

The exhibit cost something. On the Damascus road the voice asked, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4) — not why he hated the church. Every blow had been landing on the Lord himself. He does not trace that road to the cross here; elsewhere he does: God’s forbearance passed over former sins because Christ was put forward as a propitiation by his blood (Romans 3:25). The patience was never a shrug. Mercy did not overlook the record; Paul’s file hangs in the light because Christ hung there first, under its charges.

Back in the letter, Paul breaks into song. “To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:17). The language is older than he is — the synagogue’s doxology, where Israel had long blessed the King of the ages (Tobit 13; Jeremiah 10:10) — and here it is in the mouth of a former persecutor. He can tell the truth about himself because his name is no longer what holds him up. He stays at the top of the list on purpose, so that whoever puts a name on that list finds the patience already there, ahead of them.