Galatians 1:15

15. Pleased God Not the divine will blank and bare of all reason or reasons, but the divine will according with the wisest of reasons. Why Paul was then selected there is no difficulty in conjecturing. Divine providence selects its instruments from a recognition of their fitness, and a pre-recognition how they will in full freedom fulfil their mission. See notes on Romans 9:10-11.

Separated Set me apart, individualized me, as the duly endowed and fitting instrument. Nevertheless, it should be carefully noted that St. Paul, in all this passage, speaks not of his predestination to salvation, but of his providential fitting for his apostleship.

From my mother’s womb Meyer says: “Not in the womb, as Wieseler; nor ere I was born, as Ruckert; but, from my birth.” Comp. Psalms 22:10; Isaiah 44:2; Isaiah 49:1; Isaiah 49:5; Matthew 19:12; Acts 3:2; Acts 14:8. The very elements of his physical and mental being were such as to point him out. To be an apostle he needed to be a Jew; to be an apostle of the Gentiles, he needed to be a Gentilized Jew. He needed a powerful vitality, a piercing intellect, and an iron will. He needed to be one moulded before birth for this wonderful future. Yet we are not to suppose that Paul’s generative process or formation was supernaturally interfered with. God, as divine nature, wrought him in the course of nature. His selection and call were fixed upon him on account of the endowments and qualities that met in him.

Called Note, Romans 1:1.

Grace Favour, but not compulsion. Note, Romans 3:27. Our whole existence is based in grace; our hopes of glory are based in higher grace; the privilege of being God’s apostle on earth was based in highest grace. Paul narrates the whole to show that he is not a man’s apostle, an apostle’s apostle, but solely, God’s apostle.

Professor Lightfoot, however, entirely misses Paul’s point: which is not to show “the sole agency of God as distinct from his own efforts; but the sole agency of God as distinct from any man, as the source, either of Paul’s gospel, or his apostleship.