Clough Acts Lesson 22

Saul’s Conversion – Acts 9:1-9

Acts 9 is the most cited chapter in the annals of literature for the greatest conversion experience of all time. And because it’s such a critical chapter it behooves us to go back and again remember the structure of Acts. During the early part of Acts in Acts 2-7 we have stage one in the great commission. During stage one in the great commission you have the gospel going out only to the city of Jerusalem; that was by God’s desire but it was not God’s desire that the gospel continue in Jerusalem and so God therefore had to work on the Church to guide it to stage two of the great commission, chapters 8-9 when the gospel would go to Samaria and Judea. One of the principles that we have learned from the book of Acts is that God’s guidance is mostly unconscious. We normally think of divine guidance as conscious divine guidance, that is we are concerned with what God’s will is and we pray about it and we study Scripture and we think about applying Scripture to certain areas of our life and then we come out with a conscious decision to follow God’s revealed will as we understand it for some particular area.

And yet when you study the book of Acts this is just not the way it works. The disciples were not thinking of mission fields; they were not thinking about filling the great commission, they were not thinking about the second stage of the gospel. And what God did was use a widow’s dispute to move the Church into its second stage. Now that is unconscious divine guidance and so actually there are two systems of divine guidance in Scripture. And it’s like an ice berg; as a new Christian probably 95% of our divine guidance is unconscious and 5% is conscious, and we can improve the percent a little bit in favor of conscious as we mature but in most cases the Holy Spirit continues to guide us unconscious, separate from what we think. That’s Romans 8:14, “Whosoever is not led by the Spirit of God is not of God,” and that’s simply saying that every Christian is led by the Holy Spirit. Now there are certain areas where we reject the leading but the Holy Spirit is constantly leading us because of the principle of sanctification. He’s interested in bringing sanctification about and turning the imperative mood into the indicative mood.

Now the way the Holy Spirit works in history is also shown in the book of Acts. And that is something that I least expected to find in this book as we studied it and that was His emphasis on doctrine. To move from the first section of Acts to the second section, the critical chapters were chapters 6-7 because in 6 and 7 God prepared a doctrine man, Stephen. It was Stephen who first outlined the Bible doctrine of missions. And it was not until Stephen outlined the Bible doctrine of missions, it was not until he did that that the Church began to move out and we had a genuine moving of the Holy Spirit.

Now the Word of God is always the sign that the Holy Spirit is working. The Holy Spirit is not said to be working just because somebody is having an emotional experience or going through things, or even miracles. These are often cited in our generation but it’s wrong; the classic orthodox Christian position is that you spot the work of the Spirit by whether the issues of the Word of God are being clarified. On the back side of the bulletin you see a statement of a Lutheran you’ll see a statement of a Lutheran scholar that sums this principle up and I frequently use this device just so you won’t think that Clough made this up in the last three months. This is a position that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years in the Christian tradition and I read this statement and it’s a very good summary of the issue:

“How can maturity be arrived at? We must begin where the evangelicals are; we must go back through their history to the real source of their strength, leaving by the wayside the regrettable accretions and sociological hang-ups that have obscured the basic evangelical message. In a word, in order to reverse the great evangelical heresy, heresy mind you of experience first, Bible second, we must go back not only beyond the American frontier but even beyond the period of the English evangelical revival to Reformation sources. The Reformers whose teachings were at the heart of the Puritan faith, that gave substance to the American mind in its formative years insisted upon God first, man second, the exact reverse of modern humanism. Revelation first, response second, the exact reverse of much of the charismatic movement. The gospel first and faith second, the exact reverse of devotionalism within fundamentalist circles. Justification first, sanctification second, exactly the reverse of many of the deeper life movements of our time. In other words, the Bible in first position and man’s religious experience secondarily related to it, that is the classic norm and standard of the Church Age.”

So when we come to Acts it’s not surprising that before God made the big move He always prepared some man who saw the issue. In this case it was Stephen, the Hellenistic Jew, who saw the results of the fact that Word of God would apply to people beyond the state of Israel, and he prepared the way. And then when we move from Acts 8 and 9 to Acts 10 and following, the second doctrine man appears on the scene in Acts 9 and that’s Paul.

So isn’t it interesting that before the Spirit moves out and before there’s a lot of missionary activity there is always the thinker who has got the issues down and moved out. And of course this is why in many of our missionary areas today we are weak and we are weak because no one has thought through what the Church ought to be doing in certain mission fields, and the fact is that many missionaries have simply led to a rebirth on the mission field of what they’ve been used to at home and that is some place where the Bible is relegated to private devotional life and ethical issues and they have learned from the American home church that the Word of God has nothing to say politically, the Word of God has nothing to say geologically, the Word of God has nothing to say biologically and so forth, and therefore the Bible is to be trapped in its own little box of ethics only. And this is what’s happened on the mission field so this is why we have in Africa for example, the neo-paganist movement led by graduates of missionary training schools, who have learned very carefully in the missionary training schools that the Bible is not relative to political structure, the Bible has nothing to say to economic structures, the Bible is only in the area of ethics so therefore we can paganize all of society and perfectly be born again Christians. And that’s a weakness because we have very, very few doctrinal theoreticians working with missionaries today.

Paul is the man of the hour and it was Paul more than any other man that moved Christianity out into the ancient world, this third state in the great commission, they will go into the uttermost part of the world; it is a movement that hinges on this man Paul, from the human point of view. So this conversion of Paul is the most critical point in the book of Acts as far as we are concerned. We stand here today simply because we were evangelized by people who were evangelized by people who were evangelized by people who were evangelized by Paul ultimately. And this means that when Luke records Paul’s conversion experience in Acts 9 he records it again in chapter 22, he records it again in chapter 26, that the Holy Spirit is emphasizing through Luke the importance of this conversion experience. Paul was converted from an outright persecutor of the Christian church to its most brilliant theoretician. Dr. A. T. Robertson, who was one of the great grammarians at the turn of the century said, (quote), “Luke, evidently attached great importance to the story of Saul’s conversion as the turning point, not simply in the career of the man but an epic in the history of apostolic Christianity. Now this should encourage some of you; some of you have people in your own family, some of you are married to non-Christian, others have children who are non-Christians some have parents who are non-Christians and you have prayed, sometimes very despondently for their conversion. Be encouraged by chapter 9 that if God the Holy Spirit can work this kind of a conversion on the sort of man that Saul was, then He surely can convert anyone else.

This is a model conversion and it is a conversion of the most radical sort because Saul was an older man. It’s nice when young people become Christians, when they trust the Lord Jesus Christ but that is not as radical conversion as when an older person trusts in the Lord Jesus Christ for this reason. Old people have long-standing habits, they have a far more developed way of thinking about the world; they have had years and years and years of practice in living in a certain lifestyle and when all of a sudden this is rooted and challenged to its very core by the Lord Jesus Christ you have a radical conversion thing; a type of radical conversion that is not often observed. If you want to do some study on your own go to the public library and get Augustine’s book, The Confessions and read about his conversion. Augustine was a North African playboy of his time and he’d had enough of that type of lifestyle and finally became a Christian. All during the time that he was raising hell and having his good times, his mother, who was a Christian constantly prayed for him, and the book, The Confessions is a story of how Augustine finally trusted in Christ; an amazing story and once again Augustine became one of the Church’s great theologians. The conversion of Luther is another great epic in church history. So we have had these men, not in every generation, but we have had great men down through history brought to Christ later in life and it has turned out that these men have been very, very productive. So there’s no such thing as somebody whose life is so useless that they can’t possibly be of service to the Lord.

Now we might caution you that throughout this chapter 9, particularly the first 9 verses that we’ll be looking at, we are entering territory of Scripture that is under heavy attack because the modernist minister trained in humanism will very gladly speak of our vocabulary words and if the not observant listener sits there and thinks oh yes, this man really loves the Lord, he’s talking about Paul’s conversion, when in fact most modern ministers do not accept this account of Paul’s conversion. To them, trained in anti-supernaturalism all that happened on the Damascus Road to Paul was a combination of nervous breakdown and sunstroke. And out of the nervous breakdown and sunstroke, called conversion, so we don’t spill all our beans and let everyone know what we really believe we call that sunstroke nervous breakdown a conversion, and out of this conversion came Biblical Christianity as we know it. Do you see the absurdity of it, the guy has a nervous breakdown and it leads into the generation of the world’s greatest religion. But nevertheless, this is exactly the way the modern person will read the book of Acts and don’t be snowed by someone tells you all about how he believes in the conversion of Paul until you understand what the man means by conversion.

So as we read through this passage I will spend a lot of time pointing out to you the highly supernatural effects described by Luke so that you’ll be on your guard against the false human viewpoint interpretation of this passage.

Acts 9:1, where we read, “And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest. [2] And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.” Now the first clause there is a Greek participle and it’s the idea that Saul is preoccupied, his soul is filled with, as it says “threat,” singular, “threat and murder,” he breathes it, you’ve heard of the expression, so and so eats, lives and sleeps football, or something like that. We use that as an expression it consumes their life. Well, that’s exactly the expression used here of Saul. His whole life is constantly consumed with the destruction of Christians.

Now right away in verse 1 you’ll notice certain things about Saul, certain things about him naturally speaking, that God the Spirit is going to use later after conversion. You see, each person has certain natural talents; these are given to you at birth. Some people have the ability to sing, they have great musical ability, and then there are those like myself who couldn’t carry a tune in a sack, and these people who have natural talent in the area of music may misuse this until the point is reached when they become Christians and then if they stay in the Word of God and they learn what music is from the standpoint of the Word of God, and they learn how to use it, then they can be used by Christ. All right, that’s a natural talent; the talent doesn’t change from one side of the conversion to the other, the orientation of the talent changes. And so here it is that we pick up a natural talent of Paul that has negative orientation. The natural talent is that this man is an intellectual who is an issue-centered man. Saul doesn’t give two hoots for a person’s personality. This is why when he has an order he doesn’t mind murdering women. It’s emphasized, both here in chapter 9 and Acts 8:3, that Saul was just as soon seize some beautiful blonde blue-eyed girl who looks up and says now Saul, you couldn’t do that to me, and Saul says you wanna’ watch because Saul was not impressed with the kind of people he was dealing with.

Saul was impressed with the issues. Now here he’s impressed with the wrong issue but nevertheless he’s an issue-centered man and God is going to use this later on in his career, but not right here. It’s brought out by another thing in verse 1 and that is that Luke uses the word for the disciples of the Lord. Notice he doesn’t use the word the believers, he uses the word which means the taught ones; this has emphasis on the fact that it was the doctrines of these believers that most antagonized Saul. Saul was intensely hostile in a philosophic way to Christians and he expressed that by the concrete act of physical destruction. It’s like communism; communism is a Christian heresy. The eschatology or the future in history that communism has was borrowed through Hegel by Daniel. And so ironically it turns out that the Marxist future is a distorted version of the Christian gospel. It doesn’t stand on anything else than that, and this is why communism is so hostile to Christianity. This is why we have the blood baths in Cambodia, why we have had and are beginning to have the blood baths in South Vietnam, that everyone told us would never happen, the communists who took over South Vietnam were the good kind of people and now they’re getting rid of the western correspondents out of Saigon, ready for the purge, and we will watch people slaughtered by the tens of thousands, the baby evangelical church that was just beginning to form in South Vietnam will either have to flee or be simply be physically eliminated. And that’s the horror. The news won’t report that; they just report when American GI’s miss a village or something and hit a few people. So we have situations where the Christians bear the brunt of people who do understand the issue. Communists do understand; Solzhenitzyn has made that extremely clear; they understand but we don’t. They do. And that’s why they express their philosophy in concrete acts of physical destruction.

Now we said that Paul is an issue-centered man, and we have to go back and find out what issue? What was this great issue that burned in Saul’s soul? It goes back to Acts 6 and 7; remember the speech of Stephen and remember the Word of God says that Paul, as Saul, was sitting there watching this whole thing go on and he listened very carefully to Stephen and he knew what the issue was. The issue was three-fold. First Stephen had argued that Israel was not the end all of God’s plan of salvation in the human race and therefore the two key institutions of Israel, with which Saul was so concerned, the Torah or the Law and the temple, these were not ultimately important in God’s program. They were important, undeniably they were important but they were they were steps on up that would go up to a higher goal; they were only points on the road, not the termination of the journey. And therefore, because Stephen made this point that angered Saul deeply, because for him as a Pharisee these were not points on the road, this was the terminus of the road, this was the end of the journey, nothing higher could be conceived than Torah and temple. This was the extreme of God’s revelation in history until, of course, the end time. Well, Stephen challenged that and that was one part of the issue that really bugged Saul.

And then to add insult to injury, you remember that Stephen did something else. He went back to the pre-Abraham Gentile period and said that God’s program would ultimately curve back to blessing the nations of the world, that Israel was not the highest point in history; the highest point in history would be when the Word of God would bless Gentiles. And so very obviously the next thing that followed very quickly from those two premises in Stephen’s position was that the gospel would then expand and you have missionaries expand. After all, this is why the Holy Spirit used Stephen.

Now we know as we compare Acts 9, Acts 22, Acts 26, that it was precisely these three points that most irritated Paul. Why? Because when Saul did his persecuting work he didn’t stay inside the city of Jerusalem. Isn’t it interesting, he’s going outside the city of Jerusalem. You would think that if he simply wanted to destroy the Christian faith he would concentrate on the heartland of the Christian faith which was, in fact, the city of Jerusalem. But no, where does Saul go? It says very clearly in Acts 22 and 26, I went to foreign cities by the dozens, all over the ancient world I went, everywhere, seeking the Christians. Why these Christians? Why not the Christians that stayed at home? It’s very simple; it was these Christians who were taking Stephen’s doctrine and philosophy and operating with it. They, by their mass movement were making the doctrine unavoidable to Saul. He had to deal with this and so here’s the irony. The greatest persecutor the Church had even seen up to this point was a man desperately concerned to wall in its missionary tentacles, as one tentacle extended to Damascus Saul would say I’ll chop it off; another tentacle would extend to Antioch and Saul would say I’ll chop it off, but then after his conversion what was the one mission that Saul had? To extend the tentacles that he was before chopping off. And this shows you the tremendously radical shift in this man’s thinking and in his life.

Now as he began to do this it shows you something else about the Word of God. What antagonizes the world is not Christians talking about the Word of God. What antagonizes the non-Christian world is when Christians put the Word of God into effect. That really brings down the wrath of the world system. And this is good; when you see the wrath of the world system come down upon you because of an application of the Word rejoice, because that’s the testimony that you’re really effective. Consider for example the creationist movement. All during the 30s, all during the 1940s, all during the 1950s men had written creationist literature by Christians for Christians. And then in 1961 the head of the civil engineering department at Virginia Poly Tech and Institute wrote a book on the Genesis flood, and now here was a man high up in the world system of academic endeavor writing from a major science oriented campus, a man who had already established his credentials. Now he, of all people, professes belief in a flood and that’s where the mud hit the fan and has been hitting the fan ever since. As Morris and Gish and their followers debate on campuses across the nation, causing debate after debate, people get irritated, thousands of people get in arguments over this thing. You see, we’re seeing action now because men are taking the Word of God out daring to challenge the system. And so here we have Saul getting angry because the Christians are moving out, daring to challenge the system.

Now let’s see what happened. It says in Acts 9:2, he “desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues,” now Paul went to many places besides Damascus. Obviously Damascus was the last city he went to but to get a little feeling for why Damascus became important let’s look at a few slides and get the geographic perspective we need to help us understand Acts 9. This map shows the eastern end of the Mediterranean and the Jewish Diaspora at the end of the first century. Up here we have the Seleucid dynasty but generally speaking all that area, this is Turkey, this is Greece and this is what is now Israel, the modern state of Syria, with Damascus right there. You see that this is the area where the Jews had spread and so this Diaspora or the Hellenistic Jews living outside of the land became the seed bed from which Christianity sprang. On this map we see the great trade routes in the ancient world. The most famous trade route in the ancient world left the Egyptian area, traveled along the edge of the Mediterranean Sea and hence had the Latin name, Via Maris or the way of the sea. This road went along the coast until a place right up in here near the Mount Carmel area and it turned inland by a famous fort, the fort of Megiddo. It went across Galilee where Jesus had His ministry and then finally wound up at Damascus. From Damascus one road went north to Turkey and from Damascus another one went across the desert over to the Mesopotamian valley.

So Damascus, besides being a very ancient city, by the way, it was there before Abraham, it was also a very important commercial city. Now the road to Damascus that Paul took, he obviously had to join the Via Maris in Galilee, but from Jerusalem up to Galilee, to a place where he joined the road, started right here, this is a map of the city of Jerusalem, the old city, and to the north side of that temple is what is called the Damascus gate. Today the Damascus Gate is right here; it’s large enough to drive quite large trucks through, but this is the Damascus Gate of Paul’s time, that’s the Herodian Gate dating from that period of history. It shows you how the debris piles up over the centuries and therefore the modern walls of Jerusalem are very much higher than the walls in Saul’s day. But that shows you how much smaller the gate was, obviously they didn’t have Mac trucks in Saul’s time so they didn’t have any problem getting through; it’s big enough for a few men to go through and their camels and that’s all they needed. They didn’t want a large gate in case of a siege. Looking more closely at the gate you see something off to the left of that gate; at first it looks like a mere Roman statute and that indeed is what it is but it’s also something else. That gate was known as the gate of the mile marker and the Romans, during history, marked their highways like we mark our interstates with mileage markers. And this was one mileage marker that began right there, outside and went all the way up to Damascus. We’ll meet the importance of that mileage marker in the text in just a little bit.

All right, he goes to the high priest and demands letters to prosecute Christians, to arrest them and to bring them to trial in Jerusalem. Notice in verse 2 the early name of the Christian faith: it’s called “the way,” sort of like in the modern orient we have the religion called Pao, that means the way. Here it was called “the way” because Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes unto the Father but by Me.” And so Christianity took Jesus’ saying and out of it developed its own title. The first title for Christianity in the book of Acts is the Nazarenes when it was very heavily Jewish and as more Hellenistic Jews came into the system it gradually adopted the title, “the way.” Christianity was not the original title of the Christian faith, in fact, it was given to Christians by the world system. Notice again in verse 2 it says that Paul would arrest and destroy “men or women,” this was typical of this man, he was an issue-centered man, he doesn’t particular care about sex, personality or anything else.

Acts 9:3, “and as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shone round about him a light from heaven; [4] And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice, saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me? [5] And he said, Who are you, Sir?” The word Kurios here would mean Sir. “And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest.” If you have the King James the last part of verse 5 and the first part of verse 6 are not in the original text, [“it is hard for thee to kick against the goads. [6] And he, trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him…”] they’re in Acts 22 and 26 but not here, [6b] “Arise and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what you must do.” Now there, in a very, very few verses is the most famous conversion of history. We want to carefully study this conversion and out of this study, by contrasting what modern men think is happening here, we get a new appreciation for what God’s Word says about revelation.

Up until the 6^th century it was said that outside the city of Damascus on the road that goes all the way down, the Via Maris, all the way down and then splits, comes all the way down, that north gate that I showed you with that mileage marker, there were mileage markers all the way up to the very gate of Damascus. There was a tradition as late as the 6^th century that the conversion of Saul took place at the second mile marker outside the gate. And at that second mile marker was a plaque that Christians had erected centuries and centuries before that time saying this was the spot. Why bother to mention this? We are fighting the psychologization of this passage, that is the humanist, the non-Christian today always wants to interpret this in psychological categories. And so I’m going to consciously, as we work through now attack that position.

This is not a psychological conversion only; it includes that but it’s a lot larger than a mere psychological conversion. This is not sunstroke and it is not a nervous breakdown. The idea would be on the part of the unbeliever that here is Saul and he’s had this slaughter, the blood on his hands of these men and women and these children and he’s got this tremendous guilt in his soul and he grapples with the guilt of his soul and out of this, all of a sudden as he walks up to this gate of Damascus, he’s only two miles away from the gate, suddenly it dawns on him he’s got to face blood again, he’s got to haul innocent men and women, and it begins to prey on his conscience and suddenly something inside snaps and he this nervous breakdown. Moreover, say these critics, we have it in Acts 22 and 26 that it happened at midday, when the sun was at its highest, and if you’ve been on the Golan Heights and the plateau, it’s like some places here with just this light colored soil, the sun gets overhead and you get a fantastic glare; in fact, the inhabitants of this region, even to this day have some of the poorest eyesight of any people on the face of the earth simply because of the glare on their eyes day after day and they don’t have shade even to this day so it affects their vision after a while. So out of this tremendous heat, with the sun at max, plus all of this nervous working in Saul we can explain, they say, this conversion in terms of a nervous breakdown and sunstroke.

Let’s look and see if we can do that and see if that really answers all the issues, answers all the data. It says that this light in verse 3 “flashed round about him,” it’s not shined, the Greek verb is more violent than that, it “suddenly flashed,” much like with a nuclear burst you have a flash. If a nuclear bomb went off, even if it weren’t close by for a blast you’d see a tremendous flash and you know down in your mind that something happened, and it’s long before you hear any roar, any explosion, there’d be this fantastic flash; in fact if you happened to be looking at it you’re probably be permanently blinded. So whatever this was, was a massive flash phenomenon that was seen not just by Saul but by the entire group of people with him. So if you’re going to hold to the idea this was a psychological breakdown and a sunstroke combined you must hypothesize that for every other member of this particular party; they all observed the flash. That’s corroborated fro us in Acts 22 and 26.

But now something more; it says in verse 4, “he fell to the earth, and heard a voice, saying unto him,” and in the Greek, this obviously comes to us in Greek, but it comes to us in such a way in the Greek that we know it originally wasn’t spoken in Greek, it was spoken in Aramaic. It says “Saoul, Saoul, why do you persecute me,” and the pronunciation is the Aramaic pronunciation of Saul. So Jesus is appearing to Saul speaking, not in Koine Greek but in Aramaic, a known language, Saul knew it, Jesus knew it. It’s a known human language. And with that we must go to our doctrine of revelation. What is revelation in Christian orthodoxy. It is this that is under attack. As I have said, if you want to read the book that’s raising eyebrows all over the country right now it’s Harold Lindsell’s book, The Battle for the Bible, in which he shows that in several major, even conservative denominations the battle for the Bible goes on at this hour. So right here we get in line with the doctrine that’s coming under discussion.

What is the orthodox position on revelation. First of all we say and have said over the centuries, that revelation is verbal. That means that means that revelation consists of words spoken by God to us. God is not in an elaborate game of Charades. Those of you who have been raised in Christians homes probably aren’t aware that this is really what’s going on because you’ve never heard this, but if you listen, and hear me out, it’ll sharpen you to see why you can sit in a chair and talk to somebody about Christ and you get the feeling that you’re talking to them on another frequency and this is just not plugged in to what’s going on in their minds. The reason is that they have an utterly different idea of revelation than you have and you don’t understand this because you’ve been in the Christian circle all your life and you’ve never met creatures like this before of if you’ve met them you haven’t understood exactly what they’re saying. And if they, in turn, or some of you have lived in a non-Christian environment for a while, you’ll understand very well what I’m saying to you. Now what we’ve got here are two people using the same word and meaning two entirely different things. So my suggestion to you is, when you are in a serious conversation with someone with whom you really want to communicate, be sure, by all means, that you clarify what the Christian position is in the area of revelation. If you don’t you’re never going to get to first base with them; never, because everything you say is going to go filtering through their grid and come out all screwed up.

The first thing you want to emphasize is that by revelation you do not mean this: the idea that most modern theology has is that when you have Mount Sinai, or something like this where God speaks, what happened was that Moses went up the mountain and there was a thunder storm that night or there was a volcano or something and there was all this weird phenomenon, and Moses had this very deep, and they’ll use all sorts of pious words, had a profound religious experience on Mount Sinai. And they’ll talk about this great religious experience that Moses had on Mount Sinai but ultimately what they have said is simply this: Moses went up, he had an experience, a crisis experience of some sort and while in the crisis experience Moses thought huh, it’d be a good idea that we have law for this nation, so I will think up the Ten Commandments and so Moses writes out the Ten Commandments; in other words, the Ten Commandments are a product of Moses thinking as he is surrounded by this crisis experience. The ultimate origin, then, is Moses’ heart, not something outside of Moses’ heart.

And so here, on the Damascus Road most modern people who read this, and you’ll but Paul says, why the Bible says and you wonder why people aren’t impressed when you say the Bible says something. Because do you know what the people are thinking when you say that? Huh, what’s the Bible, it’s just written by a few men who had religious experiences, just people that got under pressure and this was kind of flash illumination to them and they just learned this; that’s their idea of revelation. And Saul, you know, he was tired, and he was guilty and the sun was hot that day and he had a crisis experience and out of that came Christianity as we know it, the New Testament epistles. Verbal revelation does not mean that!

Verbal revelation means that if God Himself showed up here this morning and talked to us he would talk to us in our language, Texas English, and He would communicate in the context with which we are familiar. We could have a dictionary if He used a three syllable word we didn’t know we could look up in the dictionary and that would be the meaning of the word that God spoke to us. There would be a verbal communication and that is the orthodox Christian position. And this is why we say that the charismatic movement is a heresy because it is making it appear that the Holy Spirit communicates with an ah, ooh, ugh, ou aul ou kind of thing and this is very much related to what is going on in the Orient; this is Buddhism, this is Zhen, this is the whole catalogue of the religions; it’s always some non-verbal experience. The drug people with their LSD experience is the same thing. I go into my experience, I go on the drug and I have all this experience, but it’s non-verbal experience, its symbolic experience; symbols don’t tell me nothing; what’s a symbol; I’ve got to be told what the symbol means. And I can only be told what the symbol means if somebody speaks to me. So don’t give me this symbol stuff but that’s what modern theology is full of. One Hindu teacher said there’s no difference between [can’t understand word] and myself, we both speak the same thing, and he’s right. There is no difference.

It’s only the orthodox conservative evangelical who is fighting for an inerrant Bible who holds to verbal revelation. Once you hold to the fact that God speaks words inerrancy quickly follows. Do you really seriously think that the God of the universe looks down upon us and He says something to us and He says oops, I meant to say this, oh, I’ve got to be corrected, I meant to say this or ou ooh ah ugh. Is that the way the God of the universe speaks. That’s the way apparently many people think who hold to an errant Scripture. People think that God has problems with language; He only created language but somehow He has problems with it.

Now we come to the second characteristic of revelation which must be understood to correctly see what happened to Saul’s conversion. And that is that all revelation is personal. What do we mean by that? We mean that you cannot be neutral. Someone says I love you, that puts you on a spot because you’ve got to reject that statement, reject that overture, or you’ve got to accept the overture, you can’t be neutral with that kind of an overture made to you. And when the infinite person who created the universe speaks a word to you, you can’t sit there and say well now I’ll trot out my ontological proof for the existence of God and see if you’re really there. I mean do you seriously believe that in a situation where God speaks to men that we’re going to be concerned with the philosophical discussions of whether He’s there or not? Obviously not; we’re going to be concerned as to whether we’re going to bow our knee to His authority or whether we’re going to defy His authority. That’s the only issue. So the second characteristic is threatening, it’s a very ominous characteristic about revelation and that is you can’t get out from under the thing. When Jesus says to Saul, “Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” Saul has no retreat; he can’t dig a hole like a mole and crawl in under the sand and hope it’s going to go away; he’s committed.

The third characteristic of revelation that is also being very subtlety undermined in our day is the fact that revelation is historical; that means comes discontinuously in history. It comes in Moses time, it comes in Elijah’s time in between, and then there’s a 400 year silence at the end of the Old Testament to Christ, then it’s Christ to the apostles, then it’s a 1900 year era of silence from then on. Revelation comes historically so that it comes at one time, we memorialize it for the rest. Now you couldn’t have a better illustration than what every single church of every denomination has at least once month: communion service. What’s the communion service? Isn’t it a memorial, at least, you argue whether you believe the sacramental theory or not but at least you’ve got to agree that it’s a memorial to a revelation that occurred once in the past which was memorialized by this repetitious, repetitious, repetitious communion, communion, communion, communion, over and over and over and over. We don’t believe there’s new revelation going on. This is just a recurring monument to a past revelation that was once and for all. And so here, in our modern day we have the cry that we must have revelation in every generation, we must have revelation in every person’s heart. No, that’s not the Christian position. We have revelation to Saul on the Damascus Road and out of his revelation, out of this episode we can learn many things, God doesn’t have to have Damascus Roads all over the world for each one of us.

The fourth characteristic of revelation, also coming under attack today, is the fact that it is comprehensive; that means that if God in the course of speaking to me or to you and Scripture he happens to say that I created the world in six days, and since we know God had a Hebrew vocabulary which included the word for aionos or age, we know therefore that He had the vocabulary to say, if He wanted to say long ages He would have said long ages. He said days, I’m not going to argue with Him, I wasn’t there. He was there; if that’s the way He says it was, that’s the way it was. That’s the implicit authority of God’s Word; God is comprehensive. If He speaks in the area of geology, if He speaks in the area of history, then that word is inerrant also. Why do we mention this? Because there’s one seminary on the West Coast called Fuller Seminary from which many good men graduate still; that seminary has become very weak on its idea of inerrancy and they say oh, God’s Word is God’s Word and its speaks inerrantly and that is a revelation. But what about in matters of history. Well, we’re not so sure about that. Oh, what about in matters of science? Well, we can’t make the Bible a textbook of science. And so therefore the Bible becomes authoritative only in the religious area. There’s only one little problem with that if you think of it. If I go to the Bible and I find out that, in fact, it’s wrong in some historical matter, and everywhere I can check it, how can I trust it to be speaking the truth in areas where I can’t judge it. If the Bible says that thus and such happened on the Damascus Road, say at the second milepost outside the city of Damascus, it better have happened outside the Damascus Road because later on when the Bible says your sins are forgiven, how can I check that out. Do I take a time machine to heaven, look in the books to see in the records if in fact that’s the way it is? No, there’s no way I can check the second claim. So I can only build credibility on the Word of God by testing it in precisely the areas of history and science. So thus, if the Bible is erroneous when it speaks in these areas it can never be trusted in the areas for which it cannot be tested. So then, we have the comprehensiveness.

And finally the fifth thing, the Word of God is prophetic, and that is it will speak in terms of things beyond our vision at any point in history. Prophecy, for example; our sins are forgiven is another example. These are statements about things that are gone on outside of the realm of history and therefore we have to take it on the faith and trust in God’s character alone. Having said that, just understand that when most people read these verses this is now what they believe. This is not what the thinking world today believes. And you’ve got to consciously know this and you’ve got to consciously slice against it; deliberately slice against it.

So now let’s read the dialogue between Jesus and Saul, in Acts 9:4. “Saoul, Saoul, why are you persecuting Me?” The present tense is used. Now if Saul was thinking he might have suddenly shook his head and said well, Jesus, I can’t be persecuting you, I never saw you, you were raised from the dead before I had my career, before I started, I never laid a hand on you, now I’ve laid a hand on a lot of these other people but I certainly haven’t laid a hand on you. Well, this statement, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me” is the seed from which grows all of Paul’s theology about the body of Christ. Here is where it all started. Paul didn’t dream that up in the middle of a sunstroke; Paul had it revealed to him that when he touched these people, these men and these women and murdered them and dragged them into jail for trial, when he did all this he was in fact touching the Lord Jesus Christ. Augustine said it was the head in heaven crying out on behalf of the members who were still on earth. And so right in this one statement it suddenly clicks with Paul, there is a mystical unity between Christ and the born again believers.

Then Paul responds, Acts 9:5, “ Who are you, Sir?” Paul at this point does not understand the reality of Christ; he sees Jesus’ face, apparently in this vision, but since he never saw Jesus in the flesh, or if he did he probably doesn’t remember, he just doesn’t recognize the personage; obviously it’s a divine personage but he doesn’t recognize who the divine personage is, something connected with Jehovah God, he knows that by the way it’s happened but he doesn’t know the particular features. That’s why, when Jesus replies to him here He doesn’t use the word Christos, or Christ, He used the word Yeshua, or Iesous, Jesus. Notice what Jesus said. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” Why doesn’t he say I am Jesus Christ whom you are persecuting? For this reason, the word Iesous stresses the humanity of Christ. Now God the Son in His eternal career is first known as God up to the point of the virgin birth. At the point of the virgin birth His deity joins humanity and so you have God-man. At the point of the death and resurrection you have Him continuing as God; God is immutable and God is eternal, and His humanity continues in glorified form.

I heard somebody say the other day that they didn’t believe that when Christ rose from the dead He was any longer human, He reverted back to pure deity. That’s not true, that’s not true at all; I hope most of you don’t believe that because the logical result of that is we’ve lost our whole priesthood. Christ continues today as a man. Let me just put it quite bluntly. Christ is sitting on a chair and He has fingernails, hair and flesh. That’s what we mean by the humanity of Christ; it’s a glorified humanity and you’d be overpowered to see it, but He has flesh, fingernails, clothes, hair, and scars on His hands. His humanity continues; that’s what the whole breakthrough is in the Christian faith; at the helm of the universe is not a Martian, with all due respect to NASA. At the helm of the universe is the God-man-Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. When all is said and done, after Stanley Cooper has done his famous series, Space 1999, still the form of life is not going to be a blob out in the middle of Galaxy 764.

It’s going to be the same Jesus who walked the face of the earth. He runs the universe today. In other words, said another way, in terms of modern vernacular, we have a friend in a very high place. That’s what we mean by the continuation of the humanity of Jesus. There’s a tremendous truth to this continuity. The same Jesus that we meet in the Gospels who is mediated to us today by the Holy Spirit, is the same person when you, if you are a born again believer, when you die, when you go into the presence of the Lord, Jesus Christ, He is not going to be a stranger to you. There’ll be some things you’ll be interested in, like how tall is He, what does His face really look like, what do those scars look like on His hands; those are details, but when He talks to you in the form of a person you’re going to recognize the voice as the voice that you heard somewhere else before; it was the voice of the Spirit confirming this to you. So you already know Him; you know Him in fact a lot more than you think you do. So there’s that tremendous continuity between now and the future, tied together by this continuation of the God-man.

So He says to Paul, “I am Jesus,” He identifies Himself as one who has fingernails, hair and flesh. “I am Jesus,” risen from the dead. And now, skipping for a moment the rest of verse 5 and the first part of verse 6, if you have a modern translation it should be a note to say that that’s just a verse that crept into the text at a later point. [6b] “Arise and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what you must do.” Have you ever thought about that command, verse 6. You know, one of the things you want to learn to teach yourself to do as you read Scripture, it’ll pay you big dividends, just in your private reading, is to question the text; your mind ought to be going like this all the time when you’re reading the Word of God, saying hey, why is that there, what’s it doing this way, and when you come to a thing like verse 6 you ought to say hey, wait a minute, why doesn’t Jesus tell him what to do? You know, He’s got Paul where he can’t move. He’s got him isolated, He’s got him in a place where He’s got all his attention; certainly the Lord Jesus Christ standing there, Saul, now I want you to do this, this and this.

Why doesn’t Jesus just say that to Saul? Why does He go this round about way of saying well now Saul, I’m going to disappear, in a few minutes you’re not going to see Me, and you’re going to be led into that city, and in the city, then someone will tell you what to do. Do you know why He’s doing that? To reinforce the lesson from verse 5 and that is the continuity between Jesus Christ as the head and all Christians as the members of the one body. The head suffers when the members are hit by Saul. And so also in verse 6, the head can give out instructions and so can the members give out instructions. Said another way, has Jesus Christ really been silent for 1900 years? Not at all; every time in fact you have personally opened your mouth and spoken the Word of God in some format to some person, that was Christ speaking. That’s the close relationship because later on certain Christians in Damascus are going to get together and say Saul, here’s what you ought to do, you ought to do this, this and this. We’re going to have that reference later on. Now those are just ordinary believers, they’re not apostles, they’re not great preachers, they’re jus ordinary born again believers and they’re just telling Saul the doctrine that they know. And yet Jesus says here that that’s equivalent to His own command. You see what He entrusts you with; do you see how important you are as members of the body of Christ?

Let’s summarize this; four truths have come to Paul in this conversion experience. And we know these truths came to Paul because we can compare chapter 9 with chapter 22, chapter 26, Galatians 1, 1 Corinthians 15, combining all these passages of Scripture which all speak of the conversion experience, and we can say okay, here’s what Saul learned during this crisis period in his life. First, he learned that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. This had been a doubt in his mind for a long time, simply because he thought when Messiah came the kingdom would immediately be established. The kingdom wasn’t immediately established, Messiah taught things that were kind of hostile to the Torah, and so therefore Jesus really couldn’t be Messiah. Somehow his intellectual doubts were erased in a few split seconds, when in fact the Messiah talked to him.

The second thing that Saul learned, which must have been shocking to him, was that the Christians were the Messianic people, not all Jews. He, a Pharisee, who thought that my acceptability, my rightness with God was a result of my keeping the Law, doing this, doing that, doing all my goodie things, being a proud ethical member of the community, adhering to all these high ethical and moral standards; that certainly would produce the rightness or the righteousness with God. And all of a sudden he finds out, hey, you know what, all these Pharisees that have not trusted in Christ aren’t part of Messiah’s people; only those who have accepted Messiah Jesus are the Messianic people. That was the place from which Saul got the doctrine of the righteousness of Christ in Romans. My rightness with God does not depend upon my good works; it depends upon Christ’s good works and that was recovered by Luther, injected into the Protestant mainstream and today we’re still battling to get that truth across. Evangelicals, fundamentalists, don’t even realize this, still trying to get their points by doing things. You get your points by just responding to what He’s already done.

The third truth that Paul found, and this one explains why his epistles. Of all the writings in the New Testament his epistles concentrate on what is called the musterion, or the mystery of the body of Christ. Paul emphasizes this and you wonder, can we understand why he emphasized this? Yes we can, because Paul had this problem. Here’s the problem: okay, Jesus is the Messiah, great. Okay, these people are Messianic people, fine. But here’s the problem: when Messiah comes he is supposed to bring His kingdom in; where’s His kingdom. This kingdom isn’t here, obviously it isn’t here, so Paul had to grapple a long time in his life with how he could reconcile his trust that Jesus was the Messiah, yet the kingdom was somehow postponed and in its place was this weird thing call the Church Age. And that’s the third great truth and that’s why so much of Paul’s writing is emphasizing the body of Christ, the Church Age, why it’s here, etc. etc. etc. It’s his reconciliation of how an absent King-Messiah can really be the long-awaited Messiah.

And finally the fourth thing that Paul emphasized and learned is that the people are saved by grace, kind of [can't understand word] the second point. It was a gracious gospel and who is the apostle of grace in history? The apostle Paul. All of that was learned in its seed form in a few minutes. It took him many years to think out the results of it.

So in Acts 9:7 we read, after the short dialogues, “And the men who journeyed with him are standing speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.” Now verse 7 is a verse where a lot of critics like to taut and say aha, Christian, we’ve got two contradictions for you. How are you going to handle these two contradictions because verse 7 says the men are standing and they’re hearing and if I go to chapter 22 and 26 it says they’re lying on the ground and they don’t hear a thing. Aha, contradictions, how can you Christians claim your Bible is inerrant, how can you say that that’s really authoritative. It’s very simple to solve the first objection, the objection that these men here are standing with the later on note that they are lying down by the fact that it’s talking about different time in the process. Obviously when the thing flashed they were flattened. It doesn’t take you too long to get up off the ground and stand up, does it. So why while this dialogue that’s going on couldn’t men just stand up, it’s not a terrible great intellectual effort to get on one’s two feet.

And the other objection is equally simple to solve. It says here the men heard something, but then it says they didn’t hear or understand. Well it’s very obvious what happened. Turn to John 12:29, exactly the same thing happened in the Gospel of John and the whole thing is very easily seen. Some people must think that Dr. Luke who wrote this epistle was somehow stupid. Now the same guy that wrote chapter 9 wrote chapter 22 and if tradition is to be believed he wrote Luke and Acts as a two volume court brief for the apostle Paul’s trial. Do you expect Dr. Luke to sit here writing a document that would be subject to the careful examination of a group of jurors and a judge to make deliberate contradictions in the text that would discredit the whole point of the book? Not at all; obviously Luke couldn’t have had an interpretation [problem] here.

In John 12:28-29, this is a theophany or God appearance, Jesus is saying, “Father, glorify Thy name. Then came a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” So there’s the sound and there’s the words. But verse 29, “The people, therefore, that stood by and heard it, said that it thundered.” You see how they’re interpreting the sound; it’s just that to everyone else around it’s kind of like this roar, they hear and objective sound but it’s just kind of a rumble; they don’t hear the detailed word sounds. So that’s what happened o the Damascus road. The men heard but they didn’t hear; they heard the roar of the sound but they didn’t hear the particular points, the fine intimations of the words.

And finally Acts 9:8-9, after this episode in Acts 9, “And Saul arose from the earth, and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man; but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.” How ironic; how had Saul come to Damascus? As the grand inquisitor, as the persecutor of the Christian church; you could see Christians trembling up on the walls, oh-oh, look who’s coming down the road, you know what’s going to happen tonight? We’re not going to have any Bible class tonight because he’s going to be here watching so we dare not assemble. And then as they watch, here comes a blind man who has to be led by the hand through the gate. The enemy of the Church totally crippled and humbled. God just yanked the tooth out of the wolf that was about to eat His sheep, and has turned the wolf into a sheep himself. See the power of the Holy Spirit against the persecutors of the Church. Graphic demonstration of it.

And it says in verse 9, “And he was three days without sight, and neither did he eat nor drink,” one of those technical footnotes on Scripture. It seems that Scripture insists the absolute maximum for fasting in an absolute sense, that is fasting, not only not eating food but also not drinking water, the absolute your body can stand is 72 hours. This is repeated at least three times in Scripture, here in Acts 9:9; it’s repeated in Esther 4:16, and it’s repeated in Ezra 10:6-8. So it seems to be conclusive evidence that someone can survive for up to 72 hours with neither food nor water in spite of what some military survival manuals say.

Let’s pull it together; what have we learned from the first nine verses? We’ve watched the unconscious leading of the Holy Spirit, preparing the Church for it’s next stage. Application: the Holy Spirit unconsciously guides you if you are a Christian. Second, the Holy Spirit always prepares for His future work by clarifying a point of doctrine, getting someone who can teach doctrine and thus He gets men like Stephen and Paul at the very beginning of the work. Finally, we just watched a man who was the intense enemy of the faith turn a 180 and become the greatest theologian the Church has ever seen. Why? He just met Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ is His own argument and once Paul saw Christ he didn’t have any more intellectual problems, they were answered, not buried as some Oriental religions would have it. They were answered in this person.