Jesus Appears to Saul – Acts 9:1-31
So, there’s Saul, the Pharisees bully boy, well actually he had soldiers who did the bullying, he just gave the orders. A nod of his head and his henchmen would rough you up a bit, lock you up or simply make you disappear!
He’s on his way to Damascus to do that city a favour by dealing with any followers of Jesus, Christians, there.
Then Flash, and he’s on the ground, and a voice from nowhere is speaking to him. His bully boys heard it too but it was directed at Saul. As Supernatural as this event was to them, it was cataclysmic to Saul.
We refer to this ‘Damascus Road’ experience as Saul’s conversion. It was more like a volcanic eruption, earthquake, thunderstorm and tidal wave all coming together. The Christian Killer becomes a Christian himself!
Last week when looking at The Ascension of Jesus into Heaven we referred to Daniel’s vision of the Ancient of Days. There are many of these visions in our OT, which were the Hebrew Scriptures of which Saul was a scholar.
Ezekiel is famous for having a heavenly vision coming out of the clouds and God speaking to him and commissioning him to do god’s bidding. I wonder how often the zealous Saul had meditated on these scriptures, desiring such a vision and commission to do what he was doing, ridding the earth of these Jesus people, the followers of the way.
In this moment on the road to Damascus, all the ancient promises of God gathered themselves up, rolled themselves into a ball and came hurtling through that open door of Pauls heart and out into the wide world beyond.
This incredible event showed Saul that the God whom he had studied, the God that he had served, prayed too, meditated on, the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob had done what he always said he would, but done it in a shocking, scandalous, horrifying way. In the person of Jesus.
So says the newly named Paul
Everything that Paul did and wrote about flowed from that moment of seeing the risen Christ for himself on that Damascus Road.
The Jesus People, he was persecuting, dragging off to prison and to death were the body of Jesus, the family of Jesus he was about to join, his brothers and sisters in Christ.
– That has got to be hard to account for!!!
Many people have come to faith in a similar way. It wasn’t like that for me. I was born into a Christian Family and brought up to know and love Jesus, and I have to say he is so very real to me. But for others coming to know Jesus later in life changes everything in their lives.
John Newton (1725–1801) was a militant atheist, bully and blasphemer. He was a wild and angry young man. He was press-ganged into the Navy at the age of eighteen where he broke the rules recklessly and was publicly flogged for desertion. He was hated and feared by his crew mates and became a slave trader.
At the age of twenty-three, Newton’s ship encountered a severe storm off the coast of Donegal and almost sank. He called out to God as the ship filled with water and on that day, 10 March 1748, God rescued him. He began a new life. He started to pray and read the Bible. Eventually he joined William Wilberforce in the campaign to abolish the slave trade and became a leading light in that campaign.
Newton is best known as the author of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’:
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now I’m found,
Was blind, but now I see.
I had a friend who when backpacking on the drugs trail of South America was kidnapped, managed to escape and was hiding in a ditch with the feed of machete holding thugs inches above his head looking for him. He prayed that prayer, Lord Jesus if you are there and you get me out of this I will follow you the rest of my life. Jesus did, and my friend did!
Interview with Martyn who was a keen rugby player and a keen drinker!
All who come to faith only do so because of the Holy Spirit but some seem to involve only him
We must pray for this to happen
Do you know anyone who is very antagonistic towards Christians and the Christian faith? Paul was like that. John Newton was like that. ??? my friend was like that. When we read the account of Paul’s conversion it gives us hope that God can change the most unexpected people.
In this passage we see a double rescue. The church is rescued from the darkness brought about by Saul’s attacks, and Saul is rescued from his own inner darkness (13:9). God’s transforming power changed Saul from a persecutor of the church into the great church leader, evangelist and apostle Paul.
He’d had a privileged background. He was a Roman citizen from Tarsus. He was a highly educated intellectual. He was a qualified lawyer. He was a deeply ‘religious’ man with a strong belief in God.
Yet, Saul was living in darkness on a road that led to destruction. He was ‘out for the kill’ (9:1, MSG). He was trying to arrest Christians and put them in prison (v.2). He had a terrible reputation among the Christians because of ‘all the harm he [had] done to [them]’ (v.13) and the fact that he wreaked ‘havoc’ among followers of Jesus (v.21).
On the road to Damascus, Saul ‘was suddenly dazed by a blinding flash of light’ (v.3, MSG). Jesus appeared to him and said, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ (v.4). As Saul had never met him before, how could he be persecuting Jesus? In that moment, he must have realised that the church is Jesus. It is his body. In persecuting Christians, he was in fact persecuting Jesus. Later, he was to develop this understanding that the church is the body of Christ (see 1 Corinthians 12–14).
Saul’s physical blindness symbolised the spiritual darkness in his life at that point. When Ananias laid hands on him, his sight was restored and he was filled with the Spirit (Acts 9:17): ‘Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again’ (v.18). He was rescued from physical and spiritual darkness.
Not only did Jesus rescue Saul from darkness, but he also appointed him as his ‘chosen instrument’. He said to Ananias, ‘Go! This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel’ (v.15).
Pretty quickly Paul is preaching that Jesus is the Son of God (v.20). He grew ‘more and more powerful… proving that Jesus is the Christ’ (v.22). Like a lawyer, he produced the evidence to show that something had in fact happened in history. Jesus had been crucified, raised from the dead and is the Christ.
Through the rescue of Saul, the church was also rescued: ‘Things calmed down after that and the church grew spectacularly. All over the country – Judea, Samaria, Galilee – the church grew. They were permeated with a deep sense of reverence for God. The Holy Spirit was with them, strengthening them. They prospered wonderfully’ (v.31, MSG).
When God rescues any one, it will have the knock on effect of rescuing others. It spreads amongst family and friends.
Jackie’s Mum, then her sister, then years later her brother ….
When anyone becomes a Christian we expect their testimony to have an effect on others around them, but when the most unlikely person has that ‘Damascus Road’ experience it is likely to lead to more dramatic experiences of people coming to faith as they give testimony to the incredible change in their life, to what God has done for them in Jesus Christ.
We need to take every opportunity to share what Jesus has done for us, but I also want to encourage you this morning to pray for an increasing number of people to be met as Paul was by the risen Christ. Pray for people who right now don’t have any consideration of Jesus or are antagonistic towards His people. Pray that they too would have their own vision, their own revelation of the risen Christ.
Take time to do that, right now.