Rom.10:20 – And Isaiah is very bold and says,
“I WAS FOUND BY THOSE WHO DID NOT SEEK ME,
I BECAME MANIFEST TO THOSE WHO DID NOT ASK FOR ME.”
The gospel is so different from what the natural man thinks, the Lord takes pleasure in changing the most miserable humans of all. He proved it in His ministry when He radically changed prostitutes, suicidal and homicidal demoniacs, and common beggars and thieves. Paul himself had tasted of God’s grace himself, being delivered from anger, religion and violence. The Lord had His eyes on the Gentiles and that would be Paul’s mission. In Paul’s world it would have been a culture filled with every kind of deviant sin and he knew their only hope was the grace of God found in the message of the cross. Here is how Luther describes this verse.
“As Christ expresses it in the Gospel in the parable of the older son who turned away from his prodigal brother and did not want him to come in, and also in the parable of those men who when they had received the denarius for the whole day’s work complained because the master treated the last comers equally with the first. But the really foolish ones are those who are presumptuous only about themselves and do not rejoice over the salvation of others. And by the same token they prove that they are seeking God not for the sake of God but for their own sake, that is, because of the love of sexual sin and their comfort (that is, impurely) and they are even proud of this impurity and loathsomeness of theirs; that is, they are twice as loathsome as the people whom they despise. For were they really seeking God, they would not look down on the salvation of others but would rejoice in it and find pleasure in it, because they would see that they pleased God, and his pleasure must be desired more than anything else.”
When someone drinks deeply from the cup of God’s grace his eyes are thrown wide open. He suddenly sees the ugliness of his own sin and the infinite mercy available in Christ. From that moment you have to want others to taste what you tasted. Nothing else could possibly explain the life Paul lived, he had become consumed with a desire to see sinners saved by God’s grace. This is why the chief of sinners endured everything that he endured even to his death, he only wanted to see sinners saved by the grace of God.