16. Seeing the Light in Damascus
The story of the apostle Paul's conversion is repeated several times in the Book of Acts, first as told by Luke (Acts 9), and then twice more in the words of Paul himself (Acts 22, Acts 26). In each telling of the story we learn new details, but the constant elements repeated in each are: the appearance of Christ in a blaze of light to Saul/Paul outside of Damascus, the statement that Saul was persecuting Christ himself; the resultant darkness or blindness Saul suffered for three days; and the commission of Saul to do Christ's work which, as we will see, involved the concept of light as opposed to darkness.
It is easy to think of Saul's conversion as occurring instantly within however many minutes it took for the incident on the Damascus road to take place. But despite the fact that he must have come to near-instant realization that he had been terribly wrong in persecuting Christians, true and deep repentance usually takes time – and time is what Christ gave Saul at this point. Like Christ's three days in the grave, Saul was left for three days in darkness, just as we participate in Christ's death (Philippians 3:10, Romans 3:8) in the process of repentance.
It was doubtless during the three days of physical blindness and inner soul-searching that Saul came to see the ultimate truth about his own nature and what he had done. Christ did not send his servant Ananias to baptize Saul till three days after his appearance to him, so we can presume that it was in that time without light that Saul came to truly understand the spiritual darkness of the human heart left to itself and its need for spiritual light.
This motif of seeing the light is not only the theme of Saul's experience of the radiant glory of Christ, but it is also at the very center of the work Saul was given to do – as we see in the words of Christ Himself:
"I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen and will see of me ... I am sending you to them to open [the Gentile's] eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me" (Acts 26:16-18).
Why did this revelation of the light and the need to carry it to the Gentiles occur to Paul at Damascus and not in Jerusalem? Damascus, called the "eye of the whole East" in ancient times, sat on the intersection of two main highways and was the chief city of the Decapolis, the ten cities of the Roman Province of Asia. The city contained many Jews, but also many Gentiles, and it was, in effect, a major portal to the Gentile world. It was fitting that at Damascus Saul, the one who saw his own blindness after seeing the light of Christ, came to conversion and a desire to fulfill the task he was given – to carry the light into the darkness of the Gentile world.
We still see the centrality of that commission – to take the light to the Gentiles – in Paul's words many years later to the Corinthian church:
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God … For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4-6).
The change from darkness into light as a metaphor of taking truth to the Gentiles as well as a metaphor of personal repentance was one Paul personally understood well from his experience of blindness, then coming to see. It was a symbolic image he also doubtless knew from the Book of Isaiah (Isaiah 9:2), the very scripture quoted by Christ at the beginning of his own ministry:
"… the people who were sitting in darkness saw a great light, and those who were sitting in the land and shadow of death, upon them a light dawned." From that time Jesus began to preach and say, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:16-17).
There is also a lesson in Paul's conversion that we should not miss. Sometimes people think that conversion is just "seeing the light," that it is, in effect, just a warm, positive, glowing experience of enhanced understanding. But the biblical description of Paul's conversion is in a sense a type of what conversion must be for all of us. As one commentary has put it, Saul's blindness is a kind of "parable" of repentance. It teaches us that it is only as the light brings us to see the darkness within ourselves for the first time that we find true repentance and can then turn to the light. Paul saw what we must all learn, that if we have never seen the darkness in which we sit, we cannot understand what the light is or choose it.