7. The conversion of Saul
Now that Stephen and Philip have contributed their pioneer preparations for the world mission of the church, Luke is ready to tell the story of the two notable conversions which launched it. The first was of Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle to the Gentiles, and the second, of Cornelius the centurion, who was the first Gentile to be converted. Saul’s conversion belongs to this chapter, and Cornelius’s to the next.
Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus is the most famous conversion in church history. Luke is so impressed with its importance that he includes the story three times, once in his own narrative and twice in Paul’s speeches.
As we read it, however, a crucial question forms in our minds. Does Luke intend us to regard Saul’s conversion as typical of Christian conversion today, or as exceptional? Many people dismiss it as having been altogether unusual, and as having no possible relevance for conversion today. ‘I’ve had no Damascus road experience,’ they say. Some features of it were certainly unusual. On the one hand, there were the dramatic, supernatural events, like the flash of lightning and the voice which addressed him by name. On the other hand, there were the historically unique aspects, like the final resurrection appearance of Jesus (9:17, 27 and 1 Cor. 15:8), and Paul’s commissioning to be an apostle, and more particularly to be the apostle to the Gentiles. In order to be converted, it is not necessary for us to be struck by divine lightning, fall to the ground or hear our name called out in Aramaic, any more than it is necessary to travel to precisely the same place outside Damascus. Nor is it possible for us to be granted a resurrection appearance or a call to an apostleship like Paul’s.
Nevertheless, it is clear from the rest of the New Testament that other features of Saul’s conversion and commissioning do apply to us today. For we too can (and must) experience a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, surrender to him in penitence and faith, and receive his summons to service. Provided that we distinguish between the historically particular and the universal, between the dramatic outward accompaniments and the essential inward experience, what happened to Saul remains a helpful case study in Christian conversion. Moreover, Christ’s display of ‘immense patience’ towards him was meant to be an encouraging ‘example’ to others.
Another kind of assault on the story of Saul’s conversion has to be considered, however, namely the attempt to eliminate its supernatural element altogether. In the nineteenth century, some commentators speculated that Saul was overcome by sunstroke or by an epileptic seizure. More recently a partly psychological and partly physiological explanation of his conversion has been proposed, especially by Dr William Sargant in his book Battle for the Mind. Subtitled ‘A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing’, the book’s aim is ‘to show how beliefs . . . can be forcibly implanted in the human brain, and how people can be switched to arbitrary beliefs altogether opposed to those previously held’, while the conclusion of the book is ‘that simple physiological mechanisms of conversion do exist’. Basing his thesis on Pavlov’s experiments with dogs and on his own wartime treatment of patients who had broken down under ‘combat exhaustion’, Dr Sargant suggested that something similar happened to Saul. After ‘his acute stage of nervous excitement’ came ‘total collapse, hallucinations and an increased state of suggestibility’, made more intense by three days of fasting. In this condition new beliefs, the exact opposite of those he held before, were implanted in him first by Ananias and then by ‘the necessary period of indoctrination’ by the Christians in Damascus.
We have no quarrel with Dr Sargant’s general analysis of the terrible technique of brainwashing, in which the mind is incessantly bombarded with alien ideas until it breaks down and becomes totally docile and suggestible. Nor do we deny that something of this kind happens both through the rhythmic drumming and dancing of primitive religious cults and even through some forms of manipulative, emotional evangelism. Our disagreement is with Dr Sargant’s artificial attempt to fit Saul’s conversion into this pattern. For the facts do not support his reconstruction. There is no evidence of any ‘technique’ having been used by anybody to ‘bombard’ Saul until he collapsed, unless it was Jesus himself. But that would mean a supernatural explanation, which would undermine Dr Sargant’s thesis. Also, the conversion experiences in Acts are so varied that they cannot all be explained away in physiological or psychological terms.
In complete contrast to the attempts by unbelievers to discredit Saul’s conversion, I would like to mention an eighteenth-century letter from Baron George Lyttelton to Gilbert West, which was published under the title Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of Saint Paul. He was so convinced of the authenticity of Saul’s conversion that he believed it was in itself, aside from other arguments, ‘a demonstration sufficient to prove Christianity to be a divine revelation’. Drawing attention to Paul’s references to his conversion in both his speeches and his letters, he worked out his case in considerable detail. Since Saul was neither ‘an impostor, who said what he knew to be false, with an intent to deceive’, nor ‘an enthusiast, who by the force of an over-heated imagination imposed on himself’, nor ‘deceived by the fraud of others’, therefore ‘what he declared to have been the cause of his conversion, and to have happened in consequence of it, did all happen, and therefore the Christian religion is a divine revelation’.
So then, accepting the fact that Saul’s conversion did take place because of an intervention by Jesus Christ, and accepting the need to distinguish between its essential and its exceptional features, we are now in a position to examine its cause and its effects. We shall look successively at Saul himself in his pre-conversion state, at Saul and Jesus in their encounter on the road, at Saul and Ananias who welcomed him into the church in Damascus, and at Saul and Barnabas, who introduced him to the apostles in Jerusalem.
1. Saul himself: his pre-conversion state in Jerusalem (9:1–2)
If we ask what caused Saul’s conversion, only one answer is possible. What stands out from the narrative is the sovereign grace of God through Jesus Christ. Saul did not ‘decide for Christ’, as we might say. On the contrary, he was persecuting Christ. It was rather Christ who decided for him and intervened in his life. The evidence for this is indisputable.
Consider first Saul’s state of mind at the time. Luke has already mentioned him three times, and each time as a bitter opponent of Christ and his church. He tells us that at Stephen’s martyrdom ‘the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul’ (7:58), that ‘Saul approved of their killing him’ (8:1), and that then ‘Saul began to destroy the church’ (8:3), making a house-to-house search for Christians, dragging men and women off to prison. Now Luke resumes Saul’s story by saying that he was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples (9:1). He had not changed since Stephen’s death; he was still in the same mental condition of hatred and hostility.
Worse than that, Saul had evidently hoped to contain the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem, in order to destroy them there (8:3). But some had escaped his net and fled to Damascus, where several synagogues served a large Jewish colony. Determined to pursue these fugitive disciples to foreign cities, Saul hatched a plot for their liquidation and persuaded the high priest to support it (9:1b–2). This self-appointed inquisitor then left Jerusalem, armed with written authority to the Damascus synagogues that, if he found any there who belonged to the Way [a very interesting early description of Jesus’ followers, which we will consider later], whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem (2). To use a modern expression, the high priest issued him with an extradition order.
Some of the language Luke uses to describe Saul in his pre-conversion state seems deliberately to portray him as ‘a wild and ferocious beast’. The verb lymainomai, whose only New Testament occurrence is in 8:3 of Saul’s ‘destroying’ the church, is used in Psalm 80:13 (lxx) of wild boars devastating a vineyard; and it especially refers to ‘the ravaging of a body by a wild beast’. A little later the Damascus Christians depicted him as having ‘caused havoc in Jerusalem’ (21), where the verb is portheō (as in Gal. 1:13, 23), which C. S. C. Williams translates ‘mauled’. Continuing the same picture, J. A. Alexander suggested that Saul’s ‘breathing out murderous threats’ (1) was ‘an allusion to the panting or snorting of wild beasts’, while later God’s grace is seen, according to Calvin, ‘not only in such a cruel wolf being turned into a sheep, but also in his assuming the character of a shepherd’.
This, then, was the man (more wild animal than human being) who in a few days’ time would be a converted and baptized Christian. But he was in no mood to consider the claims of Christ. His heart was filled with hatred and his mind was poisoned by prejudice. If we had met him as he left Jerusalem and (with the benefit of hindsight) had told him that before he reached Damascus he would have become a believer, he would have scoffed at the idea. Yet this was the case. He had left the sovereign grace of God out of his calculations.
2. Saul and Jesus: his conversion on the Damascus road (9:3–8)
The second piece of evidence that Saul’s conversion was due to God’s grace alone is Luke’s description of what happened. We will draw from all three accounts in Acts, although in a later chapter we will compare and contrast them. Saul and his escort (we are not told who they were) had nearly completed their journey of about 150 miles. It would have taken them approximately a week. When they approached Damascus, a beautiful oasis surrounded by desert, at about noon (22:6), suddenly it happened: a light from heaven flashed around him (3), brighter than the midday sun (26:13). It was such an overwhelming experience that it both blinded him (8–9) and knocked him over. He fell to the ground (4), ‘prostrate at the feet of his conqueror’. Then a voice addressed him personally and directly (in Aramaic, 26:14): Saul, Saul [Luke preserves the original Aramaic Saoul], why do you persecute me? And, in answer to Saul’s enquiry about the speaker’s identity, the voice continued: I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting (5). At once Saul must have grasped, from the extraordinary way in which Jesus identified with his followers, so that to persecute them was to persecute him, that Jesus was alive and his claims were true. So he promptly obeyed the order get up and go into the city (6), where further instructions would be given him. Meanwhile, the men travelling with Saul stood there speechless, for they heard the sound, but they did not see anyone (7), nor did they understand the invisible speaker’s words (22:9). Nevertheless, they led him by the hand into Damascus (8). He who had expected to enter Damascus full of pride and power, as a self-confident opponent of Christ, was actually led into it, humbled and blinded, a captive of the very Christ he had opposed. There could be no misunderstanding what had happened. The risen Lord had appeared to Saul. It was not a subjective vision or dream; it was an objective appearance of the resurrected and now-glorified Jesus Christ. The light he saw was the glory of Christ, and the voice he heard was the voice of Christ. Christ had interrupted his headlong career of persecution and had turned him round to face in the opposite direction.
The third piece of evidence which attributes Saul’s conversion to God’s grace is the apostle’s own later references to the event. He never mentioned his conversion without making this clear. ‘God . . . was pleased’, he wrote, ‘to reveal his Son in me.’ God took the initiative according to his own will and pleasure. And this truth Paul went on to illustrate by at least three dramatic images. First, Christ ‘took hold of’ him, or ‘seized’ him, the verb katalambanō perhaps even suggesting that Christ ‘arrested’ him before he had the chance to arrest any Christians in Damascus. Second, he likened his inward illumination to the creative command ‘Let there be light’ or ‘Let light shine out of darkness.’ And third, he wrote of God’s mercy ‘poured out on [him] abundantly’, overflowing like a river in flood, filling his heart with faith and love. Thus God’s grace arrested him, shone into his heart and swept over him. This variety of images reminds me of another series of metaphors which C. S. Lewis uses in the last chapters of his autobiography. Sensing God’s relentless pursuit of him, he likens him to ‘the great Angler’ playing his fish, to a cat chasing a mouse, to a pack of hounds closing in on a fox, and finally to the divine chess player manoeuvring him into the most disadvantageous positions until in the end he concedes ‘checkmate’.
To attribute Saul’s conversion to God’s initiative can easily be misunderstood, however, and needs to be qualified in two ways, namely that the sovereign grace which captured Saul was neither sudden (in the sense that there had been no previous preparation) nor compulsive (in the sense that he needed to make no response).
First, Saul’s conversion was not at all the ‘sudden conversion’ it is often said to have been. Yes, the final intervention of Christ was sudden: ‘Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him’ (3) and a voice addressed him. But this was by no means the first time Jesus Christ had spoken to him. According to Paul’s own later narrative, Jesus said to him: ‘It is hard for you to kick against the goads’ (26:14). By this proverb (which seems to have been fairly common in both Greek and Latin literature) Jesus likened Saul to a lively and obstinate young bullock, and himself to a farmer using goads to break him in. The implication is that Jesus was pursuing Saul, prodding and pricking him, which it was ‘hard’ (painful, even futile) for him to resist. What were these goads with which Jesus had been pricking him and against which Saul had been kicking? We are not specifically told what they were, but the New Testament gives us a number of hints.
One goad was surely his doubts. With his conscious mind he rejected Jesus as an impostor, who had been rejected by his own people and had died on a cross under the curse of God. But subconsciously he could not get Jesus out of his mind. Had he ever seen him, met him? ‘There are those who categorically . . . deny the possibility,’ writes Donald Coggan, but ‘I cannot be among their number.’ Why not? Because it is ‘more than likely that they were contemporaries pretty close in age to one another’. It is therefore probable that they both visited Jerusalem and the temple at the same time, in which case ‘is it not possible, indeed highly likely, that the young teacher from Galilee and the younger Pharisee from Tarsus would have looked into one another’s eyes, and that Saul would have heard Jesus teach?’ Even if they did not meet, Saul will have heard reports of Jesus’ teaching and miracles, character and claims, together with the persistent rumour from many witnesses that he had been raised from death and seen.
Another goad will have been Stephen. This was no hearsay, for Saul had been present at his trial and his execution. With his own eyes he had seen both Stephen’s face shining like an angel’s (6:15) and his courageous non-resistance while being stoned to death (7:58–60). He had also heard with his own ears Stephen’s eloquent speech before the Sanhedrin, as well perhaps as his wisdom in the synagogue (6:9–10), his prayer for the forgiveness of his executioners, and his extraordinary claim to see Jesus as the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand (7:56). It is in these ways that ‘Stephen and not Gamaliel was the real master of St Paul’. For Saul could not suppress the witness of Stephen. There was something inexplicable about those Christians – something supernatural, something which spoke of the divine power of Jesus. The very fanaticism of Saul’s persecution betrayed his growing inner uneasiness, ‘because fanaticism is only found’, wrote Jung, ‘in individuals who are compensating secret doubts’.
But the goads of Jesus were moral as well as intellectual. Saul’s bad conscience probably caused him more inner turmoil even than his nagging doubts. For although he could claim to have been ‘faultless’ in external righteousness, he knew that his thoughts, motives and desires were not clean in God’s sight. In particular, the tenth commandment against covetousness convicted him. He could obey the other commandments in word and deed, but covetousness was neither a word nor a deed, but an attitude of the heart which he could not control. So he had neither power nor peace. Yet he would not admit it. He was kicking violently against the goads of Jesus, and it was hurting him to do so. His conversion on the road to Damascus was, therefore, the sudden climax of a long-drawn-out process in which ‘the Hound of Heaven’ had been pursuing him. The stiff neck of the self-righteous Pharisee bowed. The ox had been broken in.
If God’s grace was not sudden, it was not compulsive either. That is, the Christ who appeared to him and spoke to him did not crush him. He humbled him, so that he fell to the ground, but he did not violate his personality. He did not demean Saul into a robot or compel him to perform certain actions in a kind of hypnotic trance. On the contrary, Jesus put to him a probing question: ‘Why do you persecute me?’ He thus appealed to his reason and conscience, in order to bring into his consciousness the foolishness and evil of what he was doing. Jesus then told him to get up and go into the city, where he would be told what to do next. And Saul was not so overwhelmed by the vision and the voice as to be deprived of speech and unable to reply. No, he answered Christ’s question with two counter-questions: first, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ (5) and second, ‘What shall I do, Lord?’ (22:10). His response was rational, conscientious and free. Kyrios (‘Lord’) could have meant no more than ‘sir’. Yet, since he realized that he was talking to Jesus, and that he had risen from the dead, it must already have begun to acquire the theological overtones which it was later to have in Paul’s letters.
To sum up, the cause of Saul’s conversion was grace, the sovereign grace of God. But sovereign grace is gradual grace and gentle grace. Gradually, and without violence, Jesus pricked Saul’s mind and conscience with his goads. Then he revealed himself to him by the light and the voice, not in order to overwhelm him, but in such a way as to enable him to make a free response. Divine grace does not trample on human personality. Rather the reverse, for it enables human beings to be truly human. It is sin which imprisons; it is grace which liberates. The grace of God so frees us from the bondage of our pride, prejudice and self-centredness as to enable us to repent and believe. We can only marvel at the grace of God, that he should have had mercy on such a rabid bigot as Saul of Tarsus, and indeed on such proud, rebellious and wayward creatures as ourselves.
C. S. Lewis, whose sense of God’s pursuit of him has already been mentioned, also expressed his sense of freedom in responding to God:
I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armour or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say ‘I chose’, yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, ‘I am what I do.’
3. Saul and Ananias: his welcome into the church in Damascus (9:9–25)
Following the story as Luke tells it, we turn from the causes to the consequences of Saul’s conversion. It is wonderful to see the transformation of his attitudes and character which began to be apparent immediately, and especially of his relationships to God, to the Christian church and to the unbelieving world.
First, Saul had a new reverence for God. Ananias, instructed to go and minister to the new convert, was told he is praying (11). It was three days since his encounter on the road with the risen Lord, during which he did not eat or drink anything (9). Presumably, then, he spent those days in fasting and praying, that is, abstaining from nourishment in order to give himself without distraction to prayer. Not that he had never fasted and prayed before. Like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, he will have gone up to the temple to pray, and like him too could probably have claimed, ‘I fast twice a week.’ But now through Jesus and his cross Saul had been reconciled to God, and consequently enjoyed a new and immediate access to the Father, as the Spirit witnessed with his spirit that he was the Father’s child. What was the content of his prayers? We can guess that he prayed for the forgiveness of all his sins, especially his self-righteousness and his cruel persecution of Jesus through his followers; for wisdom to know what God wanted him to do now; and for power to exercise whatever ministry he was to be given. No doubt also his prayers included worship, as he poured out his soul in praise that God should have had mercy on him. The very same mouth which had been ‘breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples’ (1) was now breathing out praises and prayers to God. ‘The raging lion has been changed into a bleating lamb.’
Still today, the first fruit of conversion is always a new awareness of the fatherhood of God, as the Spirit enables us to cry ‘Abba, Father’, together with a gratitude for his mercy and a longing to know, please and serve him better. This is ‘godliness’, and no claim to conversion is genuine if it does not issue in a godly life.
Second, Saul had a new relationship to the church, into which Ananias now introduced him. No wonder William Barclay calls Ananias ‘one of the forgotten heroes of the Christian church’. At first, however, when told to minister to Saul, Ananias objected. He was very reluctant to do any ‘follow-up’ (to use a modern phrase), and his hesitation was understandable. To go to Saul would be tantamount to giving himself up to the police. It would be suicidal. For he had heard many reports about this man and all the harm he had done to Jesus’ people in Jerusalem (13). Ananias also knew that Saul had come to Damascus with authority from the chief priests to arrest all believers (14). But Jesus repeated his command Go! and added that Saul was his chosen instrument to carry his name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel (15) – a ministry which would involve him in much suffering for the sake of the same name (16).
So Ananias went to Straight Street (11), which is still Damascus’s main east–west thoroughfare, and to the house of Judas, indeed to the very room where Saul was. There he placed his hands on him (17), perhaps to identify with him as he prayed for the healing of his blindness and for the fullness of the Spirit to empower him for his ministry. Even more, I suspect that this laying-on of hands was a gesture of love to a blind man who could not see the smile on Ananias’s face, but could feel the pressure of his hands. At the same time, Ananias addressed him as Brother Saul. I never fail to be moved by these words. They may well have been the first words which Saul heard from Christian lips after his conversion, and they were words of warm welcome. They must have been music to his ears. What? Was the arch-enemy of the church to be welcomed as a brother? Was the dreaded fanatic to be received as a member of the family? Yes, exactly. Ananias explained how the same Jesus, who had appeared to him on the road, had sent him to him so that he might both recover his sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit (17). Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again (Dr Luke uses some medical terminology here). After this he was baptised (18), presumably by Ananias, who thus received him visibly and publicly into the community of Jesus. Only then did he take some food, so that after his three-day fast he regained his strength (19a). Did Ananias prepare and serve the meal, as well as baptize him? If so, he recognized that the young convert had physical as well as spiritual needs.
The next thing we are told is that Saul spent several days with the disciples in Damascus (19b). He knew that he now belonged to the very company which he had previously been trying to destroy, and he showed this plainly by beginning to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God (20). It is amazing that he was accepted. Indeed, the people who heard him preach were astonished (‘staggered’, jbp), asking if he was not the man who caused havoc in Jerusalem among believers and who had come to Damascus to take them as prisoners to the chief priests (21). Luke does not tell us how their anxious questions were answered, but perhaps Ananias helped to reassure them. Meanwhile, Saul himself grew more and more powerful as a witness and apologist, to such an extent that he baffled the Jews . . . in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah (22).
But Saul did not settle down with the Damascus Christians for any length of time. Luke goes on to describe how he left the city after many days had gone by (23a). It is an intentionally vague time reference, but we know from Galatians 1:17–18 that these ‘many days’ actually lasted three years, and that during this period Saul was in Arabia. He need not have travelled far, because at that time the north-west tip of Arabia reached nearly to Damascus. But why did he go to Arabia? Some think he went on a preaching mission, but others suggest more persuasively that he needed time to be quiet, and that Jesus now revealed to him those distinctive truths of Jewish–Gentile solidarity in the body of Christ which he would later call ‘the mystery made known to me by revelation’, ‘my gospel’ and ‘the gospel . . . I received . . . by revelation from Jesus Christ’. Some have even wondered whether those three years in Arabia were a deliberate compensation for the three years with Jesus which the other apostles had had but Saul had not. At any event, Saul returned to Damascus after his time in Arabia. Not for long, though. For there was a conspiracy among the Jews to kill him (23b), and day and night they kept close watch on the city gates in order to kill him (24). Somehow or other Saul learned of their plan, and in the end his followers [an interesting indication that his leadership was already recognized and had attracted a following] . . . lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall (25), so that he escaped to Jerusalem.
4. Saul and Barnabas: his introduction to the apostles in Jerusalem (9:26–31)
Saul’s experience in Jerusalem was similar to his experience in Damascus. On his arrival in the capital city, he tried to join the disciples, since he knew he was one of them, but they were filled with scepticism and fear: they were all afraid of him, not believing that he really was a disciple (26). Presumably they had not heard of him for three years. But this time Barnabas came to the rescue. True to his character and his name, he took him and brought him to the apostles (in particular to Peter and James, according to Gal. 1:18–20), and told them how Saul had seen the Lord and that the Lord had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had preached fearlessly in the name of Jesus (27). As a result of this endorsement, Saul was accepted as a Christian brother. He stayed with them and moved about freely in Jerusalem (28) during the two weeks we know that he spent there.
In this way Saul was clear about his membership of the new society of Jesus. First in Damascus, then in Jerusalem, he sought out ‘the disciples’ (19, 26). It is true that both groups hesitated, but their initial doubts were overcome. Thank God for Ananias, who introduced Saul to the fellowship in Damascus, and for Barnabas, who did the same thing for him later in Jerusalem. Had it not been for them, and the welcome they secured for him, the whole course of church history might have been different.
True conversion always issues in church membership. It is not only that converts must join the Christian community, but that the Christian community must welcome converts, especially those from a different religious, ethnic or social background. There is an urgent need for modern Ananiases and Barnabases who overcome their doubts and hesitations, and take the initiative to befriend newcomers.
In addition to his new reverence for God, and new relationship to the church, Saul recognized that he had a new responsibility to the world, especially as a witness. According to his own account of his conversion, it was already on the Damascus road that Jesus appointed him ‘as a servant and as a witness’ and indeed as the apostle to the Gentiles (26:16ff.). Jesus then confirmed to Ananias that Saul was his ‘chosen instrument’ (15), and Ananias passed on to Saul Jesus’ commission to ‘be his witness to all people’ of what he had seen and heard (22:15). Several characteristics of his witness are worth noting. First, it was Christ-centred. In Damascus Saul both ‘preached’ that Jesus was the Son of God (20) and ‘proved’ that he was the Christ (22). The arguments from Old Testament Scripture and from his own experience coincided. They both focused on Christ, and this is the task of the Christian witness. Testimony is not the same as autobiography. To witness is to speak of Christ. Our own experience may illustrate, but must not dominate, our testimony.
Second, Saul’s witness to Christ was given in the power of the Holy Spirit (17), so that he ‘grew more and more powerful’ (22). This should come as no surprise, for the supreme function of the Spirit is to bear witness to Christ.
Third, his witness was courageous. Luke refers to the ‘boldness’ of his preaching twice, first in Damascus (27), in the very synagogues to which the high priest had addressed letters authorizing Saul to arrest Christians (2, 20), and then in Jerusalem itself (28), the base of the Sanhedrin from whom the authority had come. He also debated with the Grecian Jews or Hellenists (29), like Stephen and perhaps in the same synagogue (6:8ff.).
Fourth, Saul’s witness was costly. He suffered for his testimony, as Jesus had warned that he would: ‘I will show him how much he must suffer for my name’ (16). Already in Damascus he went in danger of his life (23–24) so that, when all the city’s exits were sealed, he had to make that ignominious escape in a basket (25). In Jerusalem too some Hellenists tried to kill him (29), so that Jesus warned him to leave the city immediately (22:17–18). So his Christian brothers and sisters personally took him down to Caesarea on the coast and from there sent him off by ship to Tarsus, his home town (30), where he stayed incognito for the next seven or eight years.
So the story of Saul’s conversion in Acts 9 begins with him leaving Jerusalem with an official mandate from the high priest to arrest fugitive Christians, and ends with him leaving Jerusalem as a fugitive Christian himself. Saul the persecutor has become Saul the persecuted. And in the rest of the Acts story Luke tells us more of his hero’s sufferings: how he was stoned in Lystra and left for dead, beaten and imprisoned in Philippi, the centre of a public riot in Ephesus, arrested and imprisoned in Jerusalem, shipwrecked in the Mediterranean and finally held in custody in Rome. Witness to Christ involves suffering for Christ. It is not an accident that the Greek word for witness (martys) came to be associated with martyrdom. ‘Suffering, then, is the badge of true discipleship,’ wrote Bonhoeffer.
Yet the world’s opposition did not impede the spread of the gospel or the growth of the church. On the contrary, Luke ends his account of Saul’s conversion, which led to his providential escape from danger, with another of his summary verses (31). He describes the church, which has now spread throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria, as having five characteristics: peace (free from external interference), strength (consolidating its position), encouragement (enjoying paraklēsis, the special ministry of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete), growth (multiplying numerically) and godliness (living in the fear of the Lord).
5. Conclusion
We have been considering the cause and effects of Saul’s conversion. Our overall impression has been of the grace of God which could be so powerfully effective, laying hold of such an obstinate rebel and completely transforming him ‘from a wolf to a sheep’. Luke’s story should persuade us to expect more from God in relation to both the unconverted and the newly converted.
As for the unconverted, there are many Sauls of Tarsus in the world today. Like him they are richly endowed with natural gifts of intellect and character; men and women of personality, energy, initiative and drive; having the courage of their non-Christian convictions; utterly sincere, but sincerely mistaken; travelling, as it were, from Jerusalem to Damascus instead of from Damascus to Jerusalem; hard, stubborn, even fanatical, in their rejection of Jesus Christ. But they are not beyond his sovereign grace. We need more faith, more holy expectation, which will lead us to pray for them (as we may be sure the early Christians prayed for Saul) that Christ will first prick them with his goads and then decisively lay hold of them.
But we should never be satisfied with a person’s conversion. That is only the beginning. The same grace which brings a person to new birth is able to transform him or her into Christ’s image. Every new convert becomes a changed person, and has new titles to prove it, namely a ‘disciple’ (26) or ‘holy person’ (13), newly related to God; a ‘brother’ (17) or sister, newly related to the church; and a ‘witness’ (22:15; 26:16), newly related to the world. If these three relationships – to God, the church and the world – are not seen in professed converts, we have good reason to question the reality of their conversion. But whenever they are visibly present, we have good reason to celebrate the grace of God.