Thoughts on Acts 9

Today’s reading: Psalms 145-146; Acts 9

Saul (Paul), in Acts 9, is a great example/case study of what we have talked about a few times lately, that for many people, once they have decided that they will not believe in or follow Jesus, no amount of argument or information will change their mind.

I know his name is still Saul in this chapter, but I’m going to refer to him as Paul this morning since that’s the name most people know him by.

Paul starts chapter 9 “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,” and going about actively hunting them down. It honestly seems to me like Paul has a chip on his shoulder from something, like maybe an old friend or now ex-girlfriend became a Jesus follower or something. I also wonder if he was radicalized by his mentor’s passivity regarding the growing Jesus “cult” (in his mind). We have already seen Paul’s teacher, Gamaliel, warn the Jewish leaders not to treat them heavy handed lest they risk standing in the way of God, and I wonder if Paul, rejecting Jesus, but seeing his mentor refuse to push or confront too hard, reacted by taking an increasingly antagonistic stance himself, until he eventually ended up in this state of driving rage, forcing him to action.

However he got to that point though, Acts 9 opens with Paul, so set against Jesus’ followers, that he is seeking out permission to travel to other cities to hunt them down. This attitude makes it quite the contrast then when Jesus appears to Paul on the road, knocks him off his horse, and a few days later Paul is a follower of Jesus himself.

The personal turnaround when confronted by the resurrected Jesus is not why I say Paul is a great example/case study of what we have been talking about lately though. He did get knocked off his horse by the very man he claimed was not actually resurrected, so that turnaround makes sense. Why I say he is a great example is what happened in the days immediately following his conversion. Luke tells us that Paul stayed in Damascus, immediately began preaching Jesus in the synagogues, and, for our purposes this morning, “confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.”

What brand new Christian has the knowledge and understanding to confound other religious leaders, proving that Jesus was the Messiah? Sure, we all have different thresholds of understanding that we need to cross in order to personally place our faith in Jesus, but Paul didn’t spend the three days after Jesus appeared to him studying the Old Testament for new information he didn’t previously know (he couldn’t, he was blind), he spent those three days coming to grips with the information he already knew but had been unwilling to admit until Jesus knocked him off his horse.

The fact that Paul can immediately go out and confound every Jewish argument tells us that he had that same information and could have made those same arguments all along. He could have known that Jesus was the Christ, but he wasn’t willing to allow himself to know it.

Paul had everything he needed to trust in Jesus, and chose to be antagonistic against Him instead. No argument or evidence, short of Jesus Himself confronting him, would have changed Paul’s mind, because the knowledge wasn’t the issue.

This is why I said, the other day, that at a certain point it can be better to let it go and stop trying to change someone’s mind. Paul, in refusing to accept what he evidently knew, had to harden his heart more and more against that knowledge, until he was breathing threats and murder against Jesus’ followers. When the issue isn’t knowledge, but a heart unwillingness, further prodding isn’t going to change the heart, it’s going to force the thickening of calluses to the voice of the Lord. But if instead, we let the topic drop but continue to love them graciously and sacrificially in the name of Jesus, it creates a space for the Holy Spirit to strip away those calluses and gives them a better chance to accept what is otherwise so clear.