To whom did God turn after Israel rejected the Messiah?
After Israel rejected and crucified the Messiah, God immediately turned through the Apostle Paul to the heathen or Gentile. Paul received a revelation from Jesus Christ and was sent to the Gentiles, not to Jerusalem to check with Peter and the twelve.
Les explains that after Israel rejected and crucified their Messiah, God immediately turned through the Apostle Paul to the heathen or Gentile. This was not a message from man; Paul says in Galatians 1:11-12 that the gospel he preached was not after man, and he neither received it of man nor was taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. At Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, the Lord said He would send him far hence to the Gentiles. Paul did not immediately return to Jerusalem to check in with Peter and the twelve; instead, the Lord sent him the opposite direction down into Sinai and Arabia, where evidently for three years the Lord laid on him a whole revelation of things never hinted at in Scripture. Les emphasizes that the term 'the Body of Christ' never appears in the Old Testament, the Gospels, or the early book of Acts—it is not seen until Paul.