HIS CONVERSION
37. Severity of the Persecution.-It
was the persecutor’s hope utterly to exterminate
Christianity. But little did he understand its
genius. It thrives on persecution. Prosperity
has often been fatal to it, persecution never.
“They that were scattered abroad went everywhere
preaching the word.” Hitherto the Church
had been confined within the walls of Jerusalem; but
now all over Judaea and Samaria, and in distant Phoenicia
and Syria, the beacon of the gospel began in many a
town and village to twinkle through the darkness,
and twos and threes met together in upper rooms to
impart to each other their joy in the Holy Ghost.
38. We can imagine with what
rage the tidings of these outbreaks of the fanaticism
which he had hoped to stamp out would fill the persecutor.
But he was not the person to be balked, and he resolved
to hunt up the objects of his hatred even in their
most obscure and distant hiding-places. In one
strange city after another he accordingly appeared,
armed with the apparatus of the inquisitor, to carry
his sanguinary purpose out. Having heard that
Damascus, the capital of Syria, was one of the places
where the fugitives had taken refuge, and that they
were carrying on their propaganda among the numerous
Jews of that city, he went to the high priest, who
had jurisdiction over the Jews outside as well as
inside Palestine, and got letters empowering him to
seize and bind and bring to Jerusalem all of the new
way of thinking whom he might find there.
39. Kicking Against the Goad.-As
we see him start on this journey, which was to be
so momentous, we naturally ask what was the state of
his mind. His was a noble nature and a tender
heart; but the work he was engaged in might be supposed
to be congenial only to the most brutal of mankind.
Had his mind, then, been visited with no compunctions?
Apparently not. We are told that, as he was
ranging through strange cities in pursuit of his victims,
he was exceedingly mad against them; and, as he was
setting out to Damascus, he was still breathing out
threatenings and slaughter. He was sheltered
against doubt by his reverence for the objects which
the heresy imperiled; and, if he had to outrage his
natural feelings in the bloody work, was not his merit
all the greater?
40. But on this journey doubt
at last invaded his mind. It was a long journey
of over a hundred and sixty miles; with the slow means
of locomotion then available, it would occupy at least
six days; and a considerable portion of it lay across
a desert, where there was nothing to distract the
mind from its own reflections. In this enforced
leisure doubts arose. What else can be meant
by the word with which the Lord saluted him:
“It is hard for thee to kick against the goad!”
The figure of speech is borrowed from a custom of Eastern
countries: the ox-driver wields a long pole,
at the end of which is fixed a piece of sharpened
iron, with which he urges the animal to go on or stand
still or change its course; and, if it is refractory,
it kicks against the goad, injuring and infuriating
itself with the wounds it receives. This is a
vivid picture of a man wounded and tortured by compunctions
of conscience. There was something in him rebelling
against the course of inhumanity on which he was embarked
and suggesting that he was fighting against God.
41. It is not difficult to conceive
whence these doubts arose. He was a scholar
of Gamaliel, the advocate of humanity and tolerance,
who had counseled the Sanhedrin to leave the Christians
alone. He was himself too young yet to have
hardened his heart to all the disagreeables of such
ghastly work. Highly strung as was his religious
zeal, nature could not but speak out at last.
But probably his compunctions were chiefly awakened
by the character and behavior of the Christians.
He had heard the noble defense of Stephen and seen
his face in the council-chamber shining like that
of an angel. He had seen him kneeling on the
field of execution and praying for his murderers.
Doubtless, in the course of the persecution he had
witnessed many similar scenes. Did these people
look like enemies of God? As he entered their
homes to drag them forth to prison, he got glimpses
of their social life. Could such spectacles
of purity and love be products of the powers of darkness?
Did not the serenity with which his victims went
to meet their fate look like the very peace which he
had long been sighing for in vain?
Their arguments, too, must have told
on a mind like his. He had heard Stephen proving
from the Scriptures that it behooved the Messiah to
suffer; and the general tenor of the earliest Christian
apologetic assures us that many of the accused must
on their trial have appealed to passages like the
fifty-third of Isaiah, where a career is predicted
for the Messiah startlingly like that of Jesus of Nazareth.
He heard incidents of Christ’s life from their
lips which betokened a personage very different from
the picture sketched for him by his Pharisaic informants:
and the sayings of their Master which the Christians
quoted did not sound like the utterances of the fanatic
he conceived Jesus to have been.
42. Such may have been some
of the reflections which agitated the traveler as
he moved onward, sunk in gloomy thought. But
might not these be mere suggestions of temptation-the
morbid fancies of a wearied mind, or the whispers
of a wicked spirit attempting to draw him off from
the service of Heaven? The sight of Damascus,
shining out like a gem in the heart of the desert,
restored him to himself. There, in the company
of sympathetic rabbis and in the excitement of
effort, he would dispel from his mind these fancies
bred of solitude. So onward he pressed, and
the sun of noonday, from which all but the most impatient
travelers in the East take refuge in a long siesta,
looked down upon him still urging forward his course
toward the city gate.
43. The Vision of Christ.-The
news of Saul’s coming had arrived at Damascus
before him; and the little flock of Christ was praying
that, if it were possible, the progress of the wolf,
who was on his way to spoil the fold, might be arrested.
Nearer and nearer, however, he drew; he had reached
the last stage of his journey; and at the sight of
the place which contained his victims his appetite
grew keener for the prey. But the Good Shepherd
had heard the cries of the trembling flock and went
forth to face the wolf on their behalf. Suddenly
at midday, as Paul and his company were riding forward
beneath the blaze of the Syrian sun, a light which
dimmed even that fierce glare shone round about them,
a shock vibrated through the atmosphere, and in a moment
they found themselves prostrate upon the ground.
The rest was for Paul alone: a voice sounded
in his ears, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou
Me?” and, as he looked up and asked the radiant
Figure that had spoken, “Who art Thou, Lord?”
the answer was, “I am Jesus, whom thou art persecuting.”
44. The language in which he
ever afterward spoke of this event forbids us to think
that it was a mere vision of Jesus he saw. He
ranks it as the last of the appearances of the risen
Saviour to His disciples, and places it on the same
level as the appearances to Peter, to James, to the
eleven, and to the five hundred. It was, in fact,
Christ Jesus in the vesture of His glorified humanity,
who for once had left the spot, wherever it may be
in the spaces of the universe, where now he sits on
His mediatorial throne, in order to show Himself to
this elect disciple; and the light which outshone
the sun was no other than the glory in which His humanity
is there enveloped. An incidental evidence of
this was supplied in the words which were addressed
to Paul. They were spoken in the Hebrew, or
rather the Aramaic tongue-the same language
in which Jesus had been wont to address the multitudes
by the Lake and converse with His disciples in the
desert solitudes; and, as in the days of His flesh
He was wont to open His mouth in parables, so now
He clothed His rebuke in a striking metaphor:
“It is hard for thee to kick against the goad.”
45. Effect on Paul’s Thought.-It
would be impossible to exaggerate what took place
in the mind of Paul in this single instant. It
is but a clumsy way we have of dividing time by the
revolution of the clock into minutes and hours, days
and years, as if each portion so measured were of
the same size as another of equal length. This
may suit well enough for the common ends of life,
but there are finer measurements for which it is quite
misleading. The real size of any space of time
is to be measured by the amount it contains of the
soul’s experience; no one hour is exactly equal
to another, and there are single hours which are larger
than months. So measured, this one moment of
Paul’s life was perhaps larger than all his
previous years. The glare of revelation was
so intense that it might well have scorched the eye
of reason or burnt out life itself, as the external
light dazzled the eyes of his body into blindness.
When his companions recovered themselves
and turned to their leader, they discovered that he
had lost his sight, and they had to take him by the
hand and lead him into the city. What a change
was there! Instead of the proud Pharisee riding
through the streets with the pomp of an inquisitor,
a stricken man, trembling, groping, clinging to the
hand of his guide, arrives at the house of entertainment
amidst the consternation of those who receive him
and, getting hastily to a room where he can ask them
to leave him alone, sinks down there in the darkness.
46. But, though it was dark
without, it was bright within. The blindness
had been sent for the purpose of secluding him from
outward distractions and enabling him to concentrate
himself on the objects presented to the inner eye.
For the same reason he neither ate nor drank for
three days. He was too absorbed in the thoughts
which crowded on him thick and fast.
47. In these three days, it
may be said with confidence, he got at least a partial
hold of all the truths he afterward proclaimed to the
world; for his whole theology is nothing but the explication
of his own conversion. First of all, his whole
previous life fell down in fragments at his feet.
It had been of one piece, and wonderfully complete.
It had appeared to himself to be a consistent deduction
from the highest revelation he knew and, in spite
of its imperfections, to lie in the line of the will
of God. But, instead of this, it had been rushing
in diametrical opposition against the will and revelation
of God, and had now been brought to a stop and broken
in pieces by the collision. That which had appeared
to him the perfection of service and obedience had
involved his soul in the guilt of blasphemy and innocent
blood. Such had been the issue of seeking righteousness
by the works of the law. At the very moment
when his righteousness seemed at last to be turning
to the whiteness so long desired, it was caught in
the blaze of this revelation and whirled away in shreds
of shriveled blackness. It had been a mistake,
then, from first to last. Righteousness was not
to be obtained by the law, but only guilt and doom.
This was the unmistakable conclusion, and it became
the one pole of Paul’s theology.
48. But, while his theory of
life thus fell in pieces with a crash that might by
itself have shaken his reason, in the same moment an
opposite experience befell him. Not in wrath
and vengeance did Jesus of Nazareth appear to him,
as He might have been expected to appear to the deadly
enemy of His cause. His first word might have
been a demand for retribution, and His first might
have been His last. But, instead of this, His
face had been full of divine benignity and His words
full of considerateness for His persecutor.
In the very moment when the divine strength cast him
down on the ground he felt himself encompassed by
the divine love. This was the prize he had all
his lifetime been struggling for in vain, and now
he grasped it in the very moment in which he discovered
that his struggles had been fightings against God;
he was lifted up from his fall in the arms of God’s
love; he was reconciled and accepted forever.
As time went on, he was more and more assured of
this. In Christ he found without effort of his
own the peace and the moral strength he had striven
for in vain. And this became the other pole
of his theology-that righteousness and strength
are found in Christ without man’s effort by mere
trust in God’s grace and acceptance of His gift.
There were a hundred other things involved in these
two which it required time to work out; but within
these two poles the system of Paul’s thinking
ever afterward revolved.
49. Effect on his Future.-The
three dark days were not done before he knew one thing
more-that his life was to be devoted to
the proclamation of these discoveries. In any
case this must have been. Paul was a born propagandist
and could not have become the possessor of such revolutionary
truth without spreading it. Besides, he had a
warm heart, that could be deeply moved with gratitude;
and, when Jesus, whom he had blasphemed and tried
to blot out of the memory of the world, treated him
with such divine benignity, giving him back his forfeited
life and placing him in that position which had always
appeared to him the prize of life, he could not but
put himself at His service with all his powers.
He was an ardent patriot, the hope of the Messiah
having long occupied for him the whole horizon of
the future; and, when he knew that Jesus of Nazareth
was the Messiah of his people and the Saviour of the
world, it followed as a matter of course that he must
spend his life in making this known.
50. But this destiny was also
clearly announced to him from the outside. Ananias,
probably the leading man in the small Christian community
at Damascus, was informed, in a vision, of the change
which had happened to Paul, and was sent to restore
his sight and admit him into the Christian Church
by baptism.
Nothing could be more beautiful than
the way in which this servant of God approached the
man who had come to the city to take his life.
As soon as he learned the state of the case, he forgave
and forgot all the crimes of his enemy and sprang
to clasp him in the arms of Christian love.
Certain as may have been the assurance which in the
inner world of the mind Paul had in those three days
received of forgiveness, it must have been to him
a most welcome reassurance when, on opening his eyes
again upon the external world, he was met with no contradiction
of the visions he had been looking on, but the first
object he saw was a human face bending over him with
looks of forgiveness and perfect love. He learned
from Ananias the future the Saviour had appointed him:
he had been apprehended by Christ in order to be a
vessel to bear His name to Gentiles and kings and
to the children of Israel. He accepted the mission
with limitless devotion; and from that hour to the
hour of his death he had but one ambition-to
apprehend that for which he had been apprehended of
Christ Jesus.