not logged in
Acts 9:3-4
As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
One of the things which most strikes me about Saul’s conversion, of which we read the first stages of here, is that he knew just what he was doing.
Conversion for Saul didn’t mean he had to change certain aspects of his behaviour - he was already a devout Jew obeying the Law very closely. Conversion for Saul meant acknowledging Jesus Christ as Lord. That would result in a lot of things, but one very real consequence for Saul would be the fact that his old colleagues with whom he had imprisoned and even condoned the killing of Christians, would now be after him ( Acts 8:2-3 ) It would take a lot of faith to persuade Saul that he should worship Jesus as God.
Saul’s conversion happens just before an other dramatic conversion - dramatic for different reasons - that of the Roman Centurion, and just after the dramatic conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch. Perhaps Luke is trying to tell us something.
Not everyone who was with Saul experienced what he experienced. They heard something, but didn’t see anything. And although Saul’s life will never be the same, those around him apparently remain relatively unaffected. And that causes me to ask the most difficult of questions, why Saul and why not the others? Did Saul deserve this singling out by Jesus, or had his companions done something particularly wrong which meant that they weren’t allowed to hear from Jesus? If grace and mercy break in so dramatically into someone’s life, why not in someone else’s life?
Perhaps part of the answer to that is the fact that Saul had witnessed the stoning of Stephen and heard his final words. Maybe Saul, who was so earnest in his pursuit of God that he tried to destroy these things which he perceived had set themselves up against God, began to wonder at the words of Stephen, perhaps open his heart to the possibility that Jesus really was God’s Son. If I can’t be sure of that, I am sure that God had good intentions for Saul and his companions on that road to Damascus that day, God loves the whole world.
