Transcript
Stephen
You know, who is this man Saul? What's so dramatic about his life and its conversion?
Joel
Yeah, I mean, we first encounter him. You could describe him as an abusive, violent zealot. In Acts chapter seven, he stood consenting at the death of Stephen, Stephen stoned for his faith in Christ.
When he is converted in Acts chapter nine, he is on his way to persecute, to imprison Christians. He's gone from Jerusalem. He's on his way to Damascus. And when a person is marked by that kind of attitude, in those kind of conditions, you see someone who is deeply dissatisfied with life.
And yet, as a result of what happens in Acts chapter nine, his life is dramatically converted, totally transformed. I think in the Philippian epistle about learning in whatever situation that he is in, to be content in his life before he, you know, peace.
But now, because of this encounter with the risen Christ, he's totally changed. And he encounters peace. He goes from the chief antagonist against Christianity to the, probably with the exception of the Lord, the most influential person in terms of Christianity in the whole history of the church.
Stephen
So we get his conversion story in Acts chapter nine. So basically, Paul had previously been in Jerusalem, literally going house to house, dragging out Christians, imprisoning them.
He then gets letters from the high priest and he heads up to Damascus, where there seems to be this large company of Christians that are living in that city, and he's on his way there to do the same.
And it talks about how he's breathing out threatenings and slaughter. What a great description of a man set on the end of Christianity. He wants this thing to stop.
But on the way, a number of things happen. There's a light from heaven. There's a voice from heaven, and he encounters the risen Jesus.
Joel
Yeah. So, he's obviously overpowered by it, by this, and he loses his vision, which again shows that this is not a hallucination. The people were with him. They didn't see and hear everything that he saw, but they saw something. So it wasn't just in the mind of Saul. He loses his sight.
Stephen
Three days he's blind.
Joel
Exactly. But he asks this question: "Who are you, Lord?" And he gets back the most inconvenient answer that you can think of: "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting."
Again, this shows us something about the nature of the Christian message. It's something that confronts us, takes a sledgehammer to our preconceived notions about how the world works.
And there's a lot of things in the Bible that we don't want to hear. Told that you're a sinner, separated from God, worthy of judgment, on the way to hell. No one likes to hear that.
But that's actually a really reassuring thing to me as a Christian. Number one, it demonstrates to me that this must be true because no human being would write this. It cuts against all of our sensibilities, all of the philosophical ways of thinking that we have. It clashes with all of them.
So what human being would come up with this by themselves?
But that also spills over into something that is actually very practical. And it's this: we can trust what the Bible says because it is willing to confront us.
So here, let me give you an example. Whenever my wife is buying new clothes, she often comes and asks me, "What do you think of the top that I've got on?"
I have no idea what I think of the top that she's got on. And I'm always trying to gauge from the way that she asks the question how I should respond. If she asks it in a certain way, I know that she likes it, so I'll say, "Oh yes, that's lovely." And if she asks that in a different way, I also, "I'm not too sure about that."
But it means that she, at least in that regard, can't really trust my judgment because it's compromised. I'm telling her what she wants to hear.
The Bible is not like that. It's not going to tell you what you want to hear. That's convicting. But it's also comforting because then, when it comes to truths like the fact that there is salvation, there is deliverance, that we can be saved through faith in Christ, then because we know that we can trust it in relation to the things that we don't want to hear and the things that almost seem too good to be true, we can actually rely on it in that regard as well.
So that is the nature of the Christian message. It's one that confronts us and yet does death to our preconceived notions of how the world ought to work.
Stephen
Yeah. And the encounter that Saul has with Christ, there's obviously a lot of things that, number one, as you were saying, it kind of blows up his worldview. But also his pride.
You touched on this as well, just how that it brought Paul down. So when he has Paul writing to the church in Philippi, he talks about all the things that he was proud of, and really, he had lots of reasons to be a proud man.
And he was this kind of proud young man. And he talks about how that, you know, he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. He was a Pharisee, which was one of the well-respected parties of the Jews. In other places, we read about how he was taught at the feet of Gamaliel, and he speaks about touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.
And he had all these reasons to be proud. But he says, "All these things I counted loss that I may gain Christ" now.
And it's almost like that day he just, you know, he saw the end of himself and he saw that there was one who was worthy of everything. And his life transforms, and it's so sudden and so immediate.
The man Ananias, who is in Damascus, who is sent to Saul to heal him and to speak to him, he's fearing. This is a Saul that there's so much evil in Jerusalem.
But when we meet Saul, he is a man very to trust the Lord and to follow the Lord and to suffer for the Lord, which is a massive part. On that day, he knew the Lord had called him to suffer for his name's sake, and that's what he's going to do.
And so Saul is this transformed man in an instant.
Joel
Yeah. And he goes from being almost the chief cause of Christian suffering to being the 'chief' Christian that is enduring and experiencing suffering because he went through horrendous experiences for the sake of the gospel.
And he is willing to do that because his eyes have been opened. He was, in many senses, living for the things, the religion of this world, for his status in terms of this world. And in one sense, on the Damascus Road, he lost his sight physically, but spiritually his eyes were opened.
He understood things as they truly were, and the suffering that he was going to experience for the sake of Christ, for the name of Christ, he's willing to embrace that because he sees the other world.
He sees what lies beyond, and he's prepared to do whatever it takes to honour the name of Jesus.
