Dennis Tuuri

# SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Notice for the last three Sundays, including today, the third Sunday of Advent, we’ve chosen responsive readings from prophecies in the Old Testament regarding the coming of our savior. Today, our sermon text is found in Acts chapter 9, verses 1-9. And there is an advent of the Lord Jesus Christ here to the person of Saul, who was a persecutor of the early church.

Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Acts 9, beginning at verse one: “And Saul yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord went unto the high priest 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. And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven.

And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. And he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.

And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. And so rose 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. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink.”

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you.

—

Well, we’ve reached quite a critical turning point in the book of Acts. Chapter 9 begins the account, of course, of the conversion of Saul. But more importantly, in earnest, the message of the evangel being proclaimed to the Gentiles will now begin with the selection by God and his own election of the apostle to the Gentiles, as Paul would later refer to himself as.

Relating to these two names, by the way, Saul and Paul. Saul is the Hebrew name and Paul is the Roman or Greek name. For Saul, there is a difference in meaning, however. Saul means “desired.” Paul means “small”—actually, some people think he was as small as maybe 4 1/2 feet tall. So that is the only difference in those names. And here we see Jesus speaking to Saul in Hebrew. So we see “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou?” But in any event, we find then the conversion of the one whom we’ve had a little bit of information about so far in the first eight chapters of the book of Acts.

We know that this is the man who helped persecute to the death Stephen. And so this is of course the story that most of you are familiar with of his conversion. And while some speak of that conversion on the road to Damascus, I think it probably is a little more complicated than that, which we’ll get to later in the context of this message. In any event, I did want us to remind ourselves though of how we got here in the last couple of sermons, the last couple of weeks prior to this story.

And that’s the way Luke has constructed his narrative. This is a series of stories with some interpretive verses interspersed to them, and we’ll come to one of those in a couple of weeks. But in this particular story, it’s been preceded by the story of the salvation of the Ethiopian eunuch. And there is—you could probably spend profitably some time comparing the two accounts of the conversion of the eunuch and the conversion of Saul.

The eunuch is a picture—almost, you can look at it almost as a short and mini snapshot of what will be then told in larger letters, so to speak, in the account of Saul and the preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles. We talked about that before—about the eunuch being emblematic again of the salvation of the world coming from a far nation further away than Egypt. In any event, before that we read the account of Simon Magus.

Now, Simon Magus is a term I’ve used. I’m not sure if I’ve explained this or not, but it is—Jesus Christ is a term that is first of all a name describing him as Savior. Christ is not his last name. It is who he is. The Messiah, the anointed one, the anointed prophet, priest and king. And Simon Magus—that name is referred to, is given to Simon not because his last name was Magus but because he was a magician, and Magus means magician.

And so Simon the magician was the story just before the Ethiopian eunuch. Now there is a correlation here. One correlation is that Simon and all men who deny the providence of God and his overarching sovereignty over all things attempt to manipulate things and become sovereign in themselves. You remember Simon sought to purchase for himself the gift of the Holy Spirit—that men might receive the Spirit and show these prophetic utterances that were visible to people upon the laying on of hands.

And he sought to purchase that with his own money so that he could control the Spirit in that way. And what we then have after that is two rapid-fire accounts of the Spirit moving in his own sovereign ways. First in moving Philip down to the desert to preach to the Ethiopian eunuch and now Jesus himself coming to Saul in a completely unpredictable way. And so in contrast to the affairs of man and men’s desires to control all things, we have God’s superintending providence that acts very supernaturally at times as an indicator that all things are under his authority.

This is very important for us because we live in the context of a world and nation that believes that man is sovereign. We live in a context of magic here and magic there, in different forms. People attempt to manipulate and control things. The denial of God’s providence by the church with the rise of Arminianism that denies sovereignty of God gave way to and prepared the ground for providence or sovereignty being shifted away from God to man.

You know, we never live in a context without people somebody asserting sovereignty to somebody. Man always asserts sovereignty to someone, and when it’s not God, then it is himself or himself collectivized in the civil state. But these stories give us the account of God as totally sovereign. And very importantly for our day and age, we must remember that in our own lives, particularly as we get to the application for this message—I’ll get to in the second half of the talk—being the need for resolve, determination, steadfastness.

So what we’re going to do is first of all look at the account, and we’ll see here that we have Saul the persecutor going to Damascus to persecute the church, and then in the first couple of verses the story unfolds and we see Jesus, who is the persecuted one. He designates himself that way. He then converts Saul and so he takes captive the one who would take captive others. There’s a great reversal that’s pictured for us here.

And as a result of that then the church in Damascus is eased. Now that’s by way of implication but I think it is there in the text. So it’s the third point—general point we’ll be referring to in the context of this sermon. And then finally the point is that this is for a purpose—not simply of relieving the persecution of the church but God has a tremendous purpose in mind, of course, for Saul, and that purpose is now being fulfilled through the revelation of Jesus Christ to Saul.

That’s how God makes his purposes known in our lives. He reveals himself to us, and in so doing he reveals who we are to ourselves as well. This is what happens to Saul on the road to Damascus. So we’ll consider that, and then after that hopefully we’ll have time to talk a little bit about an ethical standard that is required for all of God’s people. That standard being resolved, determination or steadfastness.

—

Okay. First of all, I should point out that there are parallel accounts to this account in Acts 22, verses 4-16 and Acts chapter 26, verses 12-18. This story of Saul’s being met with the person of Christ on the road to Damascus is repeated three times in the book of Acts. Very important to understand what’s going on here and very important in terms of the propagation of the gospel. Here we have the historical account essentially by Luke.

In Acts 22, we have Paul’s own account of this, and then in Acts 26, we have a separate account by Paul of this. And in Acts 26, that is in the context of him preaching the gospel to Agrippa. And so we have several different accounts of this, and it is important to see them kind of as a unit. We won’t take the time to read the various accounts, but they do support one another in this and I’ll be referring to these parallel accounts somewhat in our explanation of what happens just based on this text.

—

Okay, keep all my papers straight up here. First of all, we have here of course pictured Saul. In the first couple of verses we read about Saul that he was breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord. So he goes to the high priest and he—this is not in his own initiative really. There’s a concerted persecution going on. He’s certainly part of that. But he goes simply to get the license, so to speak, to go Christian hunting in Damascus.

A license they were certainly willing and had prepared him to receive. And so this is not a personal vendetta really. He’s swept up in the persecution of the true church by the false church. And he is a member of that false church, a very devoted member of it, indeed. We read later in Paul’s own words that he was the chief of sinners. He was a man nonetheless—again according to his own testimony later after his conversion—he was, according to the righteousness that comes by the law, blameless. And so he had—he knew the scriptures very well. And now he will meet the person that the scriptures reveal.

It’s interesting that our Lord in rebuking the Pharisees tells them to search the scriptures, thinking that in them you find life, but they testify of me. Again, this reminds us—is what we talked about in terms of the Ethiopian eunuch—that Philip preaches Jesus to the eunuch. And here Jesus identifies himself as Jesus to Saul. The scriptures are a revelation of the person of Jesus Christ. And apart from that person, the scriptures can no more produce right standing in a man than can anything else.

And in fact, in Saul’s case, we see those very scriptures: you take Christ out of the scriptures and make a set of moral precepts or principles out of them and you end up with people who actually hate and persecute the Lord Jesus Christ because that’s who we are in our fallen state. And that’s who Saul was, and this text makes that quite clear. He is breathing out threats.

Later in Acts 22, in that particular version of this account, Paul says that he persecuted the way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women. And then in the account from Acts 26, Paul says that when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them. And so this was more than just Stephen. He actively participated in the death of a number of Christians. And text tells us that he was breathing out threatenings and slaughter—another way to translate that is murder—against the disciples of the Lord. This is a murderer of disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The word is very important. He has greatly persecuted the people of God. But he has done it in ignorance, so to speak, in terms of being motivated by a zeal for the scriptures without the knowledge of the person of Jesus Christ. Our savior had predicted this in John 16:2. He said that they shall put you out of the synagogue. Yea, the time comes when whosoever kills you will think that he does God a service or a good deed. And here we have Saul is the one who does that.

And why is this true? Our savior goes on in verse three of John 16 to say that these things will they do unto you because they have not known the Father nor me. Very important again to see that the scriptures without a knowledge of the person of Jesus Christ produce nothing but amplified hate in the heart of those men who by their very fallen nature hate God and hate his church. And that is who Saul is. He is a persecutor of the church of Jesus Christ. He is a man—as Matthew Henry said—of no ill morals but a blasphemer of Jesus Christ and a murderer of his disciples.

So that is pointed out for us. It’s interesting that the same conspiracy that was in evidence as men gathered together and conspired to kill the Lord Jesus Christ. That same conspiracy is apparently at work here. There are men who are conspiring together—the leaders of the nation of Israel conspiring together against the Lord and against his anointed. And in a very real sense, the church is now the person of Christ, the anointed messenger of Jesus Christ into the world. And so Saul now is himself one of those men that we read of in Psalm 2 about the heathen raging and the people imagining a vain thing.

The Romans and the Jews conspiring together against the Lord Jesus Christ and now against his church. The kings of the earth set themselves. The rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, “Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us.” This is Saul’s motivation, and he is fully culpable for his actions as the scriptures clearly point out. It is important again here in acknowledging the grace of God to acknowledge the depravity of Saul.

He was persecuting those specifically—the text tells us—who are of the way. There’s a reference here to the way, and different commentators differ about what this means, but it certainly seems that there are two ways, the correct way, the false way. Psalm 1 tells us that all the Psalter, by way of introduction, is comprised of instruction in the two ways. And here are people of the right way. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

And the who walk in the way of Christ walk in Christ with his personal knowledge and relationship to him. Very importantly, that the person of Christ be at the center of our understanding of our faith. Systematic theology and doctrine are important, but behind them all is the person of Christ. And without a knowledge of him, all the rest of it does you no good and in fact leads to increased sin on your part.

You must know the way that you might walk in the way. The way is a way of conduct. It’s a way of living your life. It’s a way of community and communion in the context of the Christian church. And those people who knew both knew the way and who were in the way in the proper way, walking in that way and the ruts of righteousness, is the way—the Old Testament places it in its very pictorial language—those are the people that Saul himself was persecuting even unto the death.

He was going there to bind. And again, the text is done various times here in these first chapters of the book of Acts, points out that both men and women are being persecuted by Saul. And so it wants us to really get an understanding of the depravity of the person of Saul. We might not. And then when we see then the work that God does through Saul or Paul as he writes most of the New Testament, it is a triumph of God’s grace and love and of his election and teaches us all those things.

—

Well, so this Saul is on his way to Damascus to persecute the church, and you know a funny thing happens on the way to Damascus to Saul. A miraculous thing we read in the text: that as he came near there, suddenly there shone round about him a light from heaven. That saying a light from heaven is amplified in the two parallel texts.

Later in Acts 22, we read that a great light—Paul says—shone round about him. And in Acts 26, he said that it was a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun. This was not a lightning bolt or some naturalistic explanation. This was a supernatural, intensely bright light that comes and stays upon Saul and those who are with him. There is this visible manifestation. In addition, there is an oral manifestation. And Matthew Henry says the two senses that are learning senses to us are our sight and our hearing.

And Jesus, as he reveals himself to Saul, uses both sight and hearing to manifest himself to Saul. Now, it’s interesting that—I won’t bother to read the accounts, but if you put the accounts together, we know that those that were with Saul, the messengers who were with him, who were probably Levitical police, come to haul off the Christians back to Jerusalem and do who knows what to them—these men also saw and heard.

They saw a bright light, but they didn’t see Jesus as the source of that light. Saul did. They heard noise, but they didn’t understand or did not hear the words of Jesus. And so we have here in a picture the election of God in grace of one man, and he leaves all the rest behind, so to speak, ignorant in their knowledge. They see the same thing essentially. They see the bright light. They hear sounds, but they’re not given the grace of God to illumine both the sight and the sound of their understanding.

And as a result, doesn’t help them a bit. They walk away completely unknowledgeable, apart from Saul’s own testimony, of what really has gone on. Well, the same thing is true of us, and that’s why we pray for illumination from God’s word. You know, the scriptures talk about Babel—sounds of men. We sing the Christmas song about referring back to the tower of Babel, the confusion of tongue. But the point is that the word of God is just Babel to men without the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

You know, I think of that Far Side cartoon where he’s got a man who’s talking to his dog, and I don’t remember the name of the dog, but you can see in the dog’s head, you know, a balloon shows what he’s thinking. And the man’s saying things, and occasionally saying the dog’s name, and the dog is hearing, “Blah blah blah Rex, blah Rex, blah blah Rex.” The only thing he understands is his name. Well, in a way, that’s what’s going on here.

Men are being spoken to really, but they can’t understand. They can’t understand it apart from the election of God and his saving grace. And so God works through those mechanisms to Saul. He brings sight and he brings sound as a manifestation of who he is to Saul. And in this sound that the other men hear as Babel, Jesus addresses Saul very personally, doesn’t he? He says, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” He addresses him by name. He calls him by name.

There is a personal knowledge of who Saul is, of course, and that is driven home to Saul. Matthew Henry in commenting on this fact that God speaks personally to Saul says of course that God is speaking personally to us in the scriptures. That’s again what we pray to hear—is a word for us—to reform our lives whereby Matthew Henry says that when God speaks in general, what he speaks in general is more likely to do us good when we apply it to ourselves and insert our own names into the precepts and promises which are expressed generally as if God spoke them using our name.

And so here he says, “Saul, Solomon”—when we do things that hurt the church of Jesus Christ. We can read these same verses and read our own names in there, you know, our own names: Why do we persecute Jesus Christ himself? And it is frequently a very useful way, in terms of the secondary means of God’s providence, to insert our own names into the commands or the blessings, the comforts of scripture as we read them because they’re meant for us as we are in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Not only does he use Saul’s name, he uses it twice. He repeats it over and over. And again, here we could spend quite a bit of time looking at the occurrences in the scriptures where names are repeated twice. We won’t spend the time, but I will read a short quote from Lenski in his commentary on this fact. He says that the scriptures do occasionally use these duplications: Saul, Martha, Jerusalem, David’s cries over Absalom, and others.

Lenski went on to say that in varying ways they expressed the emotion of deepest concern, yet never anger. And so he—Why, yes, why was Paul or Saul persecuting Jesus? The question called upon Saul to probe his soul about the terrible work in which he was engaged. To persecute the disciples is to persecute the master. That was a saying that Augustine coined. To persecute the disciples is to persecute the master.

And so the use of the double name here, among other things, calls Saul to think upon what he has done in persecuting the master and the disciples of the master. Jesus goes on to say that he is—that he is Jesus Christ, in answer to Saul’s question, “Who art thou Lord?” “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”

And here the word that is being spoken of in terms of pricks are goads. It can refer—this word can—to the stings of bees or it can refer to pointed stains which were used for hurting flocks, etc. And so for a cow or a sheep, whatever it is, to kick against that, to bang against the prod instead of to be moved on the way by the prod is harmful not to the one who has the stick. And it isn’t a difficult thing for the cow to do really. He can do it if he sets his mind to do it, but it’s harmful to the cow.

And so it is hard—that is hard to Saul. It is damaging to Saul’s soul to kick against the prods, to kick against the disciples of Jesus Christ who were using the testimony of the scriptures to bring conviction of Saul’s sin to his heart and a belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so Saul is resistant to that. When men resist that, it is damaging to their own souls. Matthew Henry said it as if he said, “Ease thy vain resistance to my will and power, which can only render thee worse and thy condition more deplorable.”

Saul’s condition certainly was deplorable.

—

And so the Lord Jesus comes to Saul and he brings illumination of who he is to Saul—this conviction of sin. The very first thing that God tells Saul through Jesus tells Saul through these words is that he persecutes the Lord Jesus. He convinces him of his sin. He speaks to Saul’s sin. He doesn’t offer him a better way of life. He doesn’t give him some kind of positive attribute that he can get if he comes to salvation.

No, he convicts him of his sin, of persecuting the church, and of persecuting Jesus Christ. Again, to quote Matthew Henry, he says that a humbly convict—a humbling conviction of sin is the first step towards a saving conversion from sin. He is convinced of one particular sin which he was most notably guilty of and he had justified himself in, and thereby way is made for his conviction of all the rest.

When we talk about the conviction of sin with the preaching of the gospel and the application of the law, it should be specifically—in terms of this model anyway—to men’s specific sins. And Jesus brings conviction for the specific sin of persecuting the righteous, a sin which was seen repeatedly in the Old Testament both from those in the covenant community and from those outside the covenant community. This specific sin in which Saul was particularly guilty of—this is the sin that Jesus drives home to him that he might see himself then convicted of all sins that he is in the context of doing.

And so it is with us. When God comes to us and brings us to conversion, he convicts us of specific sins. And very important for evangelism to see the importance of this. Lenski speaks of how Jesus comes then and preaches essentially the law to Saul. Jesus slays Saul, in a sense, and we’ll see Saul falling down of course and then remaining without food or drink for three days. It’s a picture of the death of Saul. Jesus does this—the preaching of the conviction of sin to him.

And Lenski says this. He says that Jesus preaches the law to Saul. He confronts him with his sin and crime. He smites and crushes Saul’s heart with its awful guilt. But Jesus does not preach the gospel to Saul. He orders him to go to a place where the appointed minister of the gospel will proclaim it. Jesus therefore honors his ministry. Paul is sent to the eunuch by an angel, but it is not the angel who is sent to teach the eunuch. Indeed, he says Jesus indeed converted Saul and he did it through his regular means, the law and the gospel. And no conversion was ever wrought without these means.

In this instance, Jesus applied the law immediately, as he had done when on earth he preached to sinners. He applied the gospel—immediately, rather not immediately—but immediately through his servant in Damascus. The law was not stronger because it was applied immediately, nor the gospel weaker because it was applied immediately. And what he’s saying is that while Jesus certainly comes and manifests himself in a special way to Saul, yet he still—when Paul says, “What should I do?” Jesus tells him, “Arise and go to Damascus and wait there for a man to tell you what to do.” That man will be Ananias.

And we’ll speak about him, Lord willing, next week. And Ananias tells Saul to be baptized for the remission of sins and to wash away his sins and to preach the gospel of Christ. And so the gospel in its fullest sense is not given to Saul by Jesus Christ, but through his ministers. What a tremendous exaltation of the work of men that God has called people to in terms of preaching of the gospel!

Just as we said with the eunuch—remember we said the eunuch rejoiced in the manifestation of God and his word and the supernatural events and God’s providence and all that, but he rejoices too in the agency of men. And so here we also see—while again remember I said that the Ethiopian eunuch is a snapshot, Paul’s picture or Saul’s picture is drawn out more. We have a fuller account of what happens. It’s drawn out more for us and so things don’t happen as fast. But Saul is certainly converted.

But there’s a process at work here, in which again—as he did with the Ethiopian eunuch—he uses the agency of men. Very important for us to see both the impact to our evangelism of preaching—men’s conviction of bringing men to conviction of specific sins and then of the whole law of God, their violation of the whole law of God, and also preaching the gospel and seeing that the normative means God uses to accomplish that in men’s lives is through the agency of men.

In fact, I don’t know of any occurrence where God does not use the agency of men to bring salvation in the scriptures. And so here it is the same. Even though the Lord Jesus Christ makes one of very few of his glorified appearances to men, still he points Saul to a man—an actual man now in Damascus, another believer who would bring him to fullness of salvation. What a great responsibility we have then both to hear the counsel of men!

To recognize that men—and I’d speak here in the general sense, not excluding women—men and women, saints of God, are called by God as agents of his to bring his word in a corrective way into our lives. And so, what a great responsibility we have to open ourselves up to counsel from other men! But secondly, what a great responsibility we have to preach both the gospel and those counseling, exhorting, encouraging, comforting words to men. If we don’t do it, nobody else will. That’s one way to think about it.

Now, of course, we don’t thwart the purposes of God, but God wants us to have driven home in our hearts our responsibility to open our mouths to speak forth the word that brings men to conviction of sin and then ministers the gospel—the evangel of the good news of the ascension of the Savior King to the throne—to those who are called and elect in Jesus Christ and then to open our mouths to encourage, comfort, and exhort each other to faithfulness.

Now, I do that every Sunday, but this is a model for what we all should do. The New Testament doesn’t teach a particular priesthood. It teaches the general priesthood of all believers. And we’re all priests and prophets in the sense of ministering to men the word of God, calling them to consecrate all that we have they have to the purposes of Jesus Christ. And so Jesus—the persecuted one—comes and reveals himself to Saul and the context of this we have light, we have sound, we have the specific words of Christ, and we have a revelation of who he is.

Obviously Jesus appears to Saul, but there is with this revelation of who he is a revelation of who Saul is to himself. We do not know who we are. The heart is desperately wicked, deceitful. Who can know it? And I’m teaching some of my children now: You may not think you’ve sinned, but remember—remember, child—the scriptures tell you that your heart’s deceitful. You’re going to hide your sin from yourself.

And Saul had hidden his sin under a cloak of external righteousness and zeal. And this is a model for us, reminding us that in our lives we do the same thing. We lie to ourselves, and we don’t even know we’ve lied to ourselves. And we need the word of God to come on a regular basis into our lives and strip off the veneer. And frequently God uses other men to do that. But the scriptures and the Holy Spirit alone to understanding.

We have in salvation a revelation both of Jesus, but also a revelation of the sinner to himself. It is an I-thou revelation: I am Jesus. You are Saul. I am the exalted one whom you persecute. You are Saul, the murderer of my people. And that’s the way God brings men and brings Saul to conviction and salvation. And that’s the way he works in our hearts as well.

—

Well, Saul is made a saint, but he is made a saint first by being made to see how he is a sinner and a very great sinner at that. God brings—as he brings all men—Christ brings souls, and Saul here specifically, into fellowship with himself by manifesting himself to them and by manifesting themselves to themselves, and helping them to see their sin.

Saul’s reaction to this is deathlike. Of course, he falls to the ground, but he comes back, arises. But then Saul goes as Jesus tells him to do. And the text ends by telling us that Saul then arises from the earth and he sees no man when his eyes are opened, physically open, but he can’t see. He’s in blindness. They led him away by the hand and bring him to Damascus. He was there three days without sight, and neither did he eat nor drink.

He was crucified at the Lord Jesus Christ. He is in the tomb, so to speak, dead in the tomb for three days, neither eating nor drinking. How do we explain this? We have a contrast here, don’t we? We have the Ethiopian eunuch who comes to salvation and immediately is baptized, goes on his way rejoicing. And here we have Saul coming to salvation—supposedly, as most of us have been taught, converted on the road to Damascus. And yet there’s not much joy. He goes away for three days and doesn’t eat or drink and he’s blind, led away.

Well, I think that—as I said—the answer here is this: this is an extended description of what all of us come to in the Lord Jesus Christ when we come to salvation. The conviction of sin precedes the enlivening to righteousness. The law precedes the gospel in our hearts. And so Saul here is in a period of great depression. I think we could call it depression here. And we see men depressed in our day and age today who won’t eat, won’t drink, are so depressed that they can’t do anything. And Saul’s depression is a godly depression. There is such a thing apparently according to the scriptures.

Jesus—Saul is in this state because God has intervened in his life. He’s brought Saul to an awareness of his sin. And I’m sure that what he thinks on for three days is the fact that he has murdered ambassadors and emissaries from the Lord Jesus Christ. He has a full knowledge of his sin and his culpability in that sin. But remember folks, we’re no different. Oh, we’re, you know, all sins are violations against the Lord Jesus Christ.

When we sin, we sin against God. David made that clear. And so we’re in the same state as we come to conversion. When we come to a revelation of our sin and our Christian growth, it should bring a godly depression into our hearts as well. Maybe not for long, maybe not three days of fasting, but maybe sometimes three days of fasting as we contemplate the sin and the effects of our sin on this world—that we make it a wicked world. God doesn’t. Our sins do.

And so Saul here, rather, is slain by Jesus and he resides in the tomb, so to speak, for three days. In Job 4, verses 25 and 6, read that: “I have heard of thee by hearing of the ear, but now mine eyes see thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Well, that’s exactly what we’re talking about here with Saul. He’d heard of Messiah. He read it in the word. God now reveals himself to Saul through the work of the Holy Spirit and the Lord Jesus Christ’s appearance. And as a result of that revelation, he, like Job, now abhors himself in his own self-righteousness and he repents in dust and ashes, and he goes three days without food or drink. This is the model.

We practice this every Lord’s day. Boy, it’s just terrible, you know. But I’m sure that so often proper liturgy is turned into a problem for us as we just go through the motions and don’t think about it. If we do think about it, we don’t think about it the other six days of the week. But we do this every Lord’s day, don’t we?

I think I list the verses there in your outline. Isaiah 6—Isaiah comes and sees God and he falls down. He says, “I’m undone. I am a dead man. I’m a man of unclean lips, living in the nation of unclean lips.” Isaiah dies and is slain by God as he comes into his presence, so to speak. Daniel 10—he has no strength left then until God raises him up. On and on we go.

We talk about this every Lord’s day. We don’t talk about it, but we practice this. We remind ourselves, and hopefully, it’s not just practice, and we come into the presence of God, we do have a greater awareness of our sin and repent of that sin. And we poor ourselves hopefully for that sin and then we’re raised up to righteousness. It is a process though, is what I’m saying, and the process is pointed out for us here in the case of Saul.

This is the other side, so to speak, of the eunuch story. Yes, there’s joy in the morning but there’s the long night of repentance and sadness and depression over our sin in the evening as well. And that is proper to do that.

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Saul says, “What should I do?” And Jesus says, “I’m not going to tell you what to do yet.” He—that, He sort of does. He says, “Get up and go to Damascus.” But there you’ll find somebody who will tell you what to do. He’s going to use men again to bring him—as the agency, the agent of his work—to tell Saul what to do. But the first thing we should recognize is he doesn’t tell Saul what to do. Think about it. He says, “Think about what you found out this day.” And that’s what Saul does for three days. He thinks about it. He meditates on it.

“It shall be told him shortly what he must do.” Matthew Henry writes, “But for present he must—he must pause upon what has been said to him and improve that—let it let him consider a while what he has done in persecuting Christ and be deeply humbled for that and then he shall be told what he is further to do.” I used this illustration before, but it is an important one in the context of our church. Early on in this church, before Judge Beer’s died, there was a man in our church who asked us, “What should I do? What should I do?” Really come to reformed faith, and Judge Beer says, “Nothing. Don’t do anything. Read. Read wide. Read deep. Think about what who you are. What this country is in the context of what our sin has done to us. And then if you get your mind straight, then think about doing something.”

Action isn’t always the first thing we should do. Meditation is. And meditation specifically upon our own sinfulness and asking the Spirit of God to work with us and to work through us and work all the kinks out of ourselves—at least the ones that are impeding the immediate application of the faith in the world around us.

Again, Matthew Henry—or I guess this is Lenski—who said, “We have reason to think that Saul was all this time rather in the belly of hell, suffering God’s terrors for his sins which were now set in order before him. He was in the dark concerning his own spiritual state, and was so wounded in spirit for sin that he could relish neither meat nor drink.” Clinically depressed, but a godly depression, depression for and an acknowledgement of his sins.

“We read that he fasted and began to read”—this is from Lenski, I believe. “He is in a depressed and wretched condition. Luke stating only the outward facts. His fearful sin lay heavily upon him and the Lord permitted it to crush him for three days. A good deal was required to grind fine this mighty Pharisee and implacable foe of the gospel. Shut off from the world, blind, abstaining from food. With no one to help his soul’s distress, his proud self-righteousness was conquered, and there remained only a sinner in the dust, who ever after felt himself chief of all sinners.”

That’s part of the gospel. That’s part of the good news and the rejoicing is first of all an awareness of our sin and then a being brought to a full knowledge and joy of our salvation.

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Well, one of the effects—and I don’t want to spend much time on it—but do think about the fact that this brings relief to the church in Damascus. For all we know, they may have well been praying in terms of Psalm 76, the reference I give you, verse 10, praying that the wrath of man would indeed praise the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what happens. And we can, I think, not by two large stretching imagination, imagine the church in Damascus.

We know from Ananias, they knew about Saul, knew he was coming, knew he was coming to persecute them. I’m sure that they were praying for deliverance. And God grants them deliverance here.

It’s important for us to see that Jesus Christ does these things specifically to help us—that indeed he does this to manifest grace to the church in Damascus. And so we certainly see rest to the church being given. And we also see here very importantly Christ’s identification with his church. As he said in Matthew 25:45, “I say unto you, as much as you did it unto the least of these, you did it unto me.” That is, in terms of helping them or ministering to them.

And the reverse is true. You persecute the church, you persecute Jesus Christ. They are covenantally identified. It’s who we are as a church—covenant in covenant with the Lord Jesus Christ. And Jesus has a total identification with his church. And that has tremendous implications as well. Those who persecute the saints persecute Christ himself. And he takes what is done against them as done against himself and accordingly will be the judgment in the great day.

To quote Matthew Henry on this point: “He thus identifies himself with his people not as an aggregate body merely but as individuals according to the principle which he had formerly laid out—laid down when teaching his disciples how they might indulge their feelings of attachment to him even in his absence. ‘In as much as you have done it under the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me.’ He identifies with the church not just corporately but also individually. Very important.”

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And then finally, this all occurs that God’s purpose in Saul might be fulfilled. And we have here again—and not to dwell upon this, but this is a great time of year when most elements of the church and many non-people outside of the church all sing praises to God about the birth of Jesus Christ. They do so in words that are almost invariably postmillennial optimistic in terms of the future—knowing of the—really almost God causing their lips to sing forth the truth of what the scriptures plainly teach from beginning to end—that the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ brings blessing to the earth as far as the curse is found, to quote the words from Isaac Watts.

Well, here we have another picture of that as we did at the Ethiopian eunuch. Remember the Ethiopian eunuch story begins and closes with a reference to two of the primary of the five cities of the Philistines. Remember that? And so we have the totality, so to speak, of the Philistine cities conquered by the gospel from Gaza to Azotus. And here we have a city mentioned as well, Damascus. Damascus was perhaps the oldest city—and I list a bunch of scripture references. You can look them up later if you’d like—but it’s one of the apparently oldest cities mentioned early on in the account of Abraham. And remember, Abraham’s servant Eliezer was of Damascus.

And Damascus not only was an old city, but it also became a very wicked area as well. Is a quotation from Amos tells us that indeed Damascus was known for its persecutions of the saints. Let me just read that text. Amos 1, verses 3-5: “Thus sayeth the Lord, for three transgressions of Damascus, and for four I will not turn away the punishment thereof because they have threshed Gilead with threshing instruments of iron. But I also will send a fire to the house of Hazael, which shall devour the places of Benhadad. I will break also the bar of Damascus, and cut off the inhabitant from the plain of Aven, and him that holdeth the scepter from the house of Eden, and the people of Syria shall go into captivity unto curse, sayeth the Lord.”

That was an Old Testament prophecy of God’s actions to judge Damascus. But the point is that Damascus had a long history of persecuting the people of God. But now Jesus turns that persecution away. And indeed, we’ll see that Saul goes to Damascus. Now, there’s this great reversal. Instead of binding people, he is now bound by the Lord Jesus Christ. Instead of leading away trophies of his faith, instead he is a trophy of the Lord Jesus Christ, the true faith in the scriptures.

And so, there’s a reversal pictured out for us here. The Christmas message at the coming of Jesus, the advent of Jesus brings victory to God and to his people is pictured for us here in the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ to the person of Saul and to the city of Damascus. The great opponent of the church Saul and the great city of opposition to the church throughout the centuries and throughout the millennia—Damascus—now being converted by the chief persecutor who would be in it now being converted to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We have a tremendous message here that God’s purpose for Saul is much wider than simply the individual Saul. So we have a picture of that. It is also another account that could be compared to this is the account of Balaam. Remember Balaam as he goes to curse God’s people. An angel of the Lord appears to him and says, “I have come out to withstand thee because thy way is perverse before me.” And Balaam who was called upon to curse God’s people can utter nothing but blessings to God’s people.

Now and so we have Saul on the way—a perverse way—to persecute God’s people being confronted by the angel, the Lord—the Lord Jesus Christ—and him being changed now from a curse into a blessing for the church. And God’s purpose for Saul, of course, is that he might carry that message that will convert the whole known world. And the message that is even now being used by God to convert men and nations and shall until time ends and shall be effectual in that the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters covers the sea, as we read about in the prophecy from Isaiah.

And so that is the purpose for which God calls Saul. But notice that behind this purpose—tied to this purpose of victory in the preaching of the gospel, the great reversal from those who don’t rule for Christ to those who will—Tied to this is an acknowledgment of the grace and election of God, the saving grace of God, against the most miserable of sinners, the one who would kill and murder various manifestations and ambassadors of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so God’s grace, the demonstration of God’s grace, great grace, great love, mercy, and tenderness is demonstrated, and that is one of the purposes for Saul’s conversion, and that is tied then to the message of the gospel. It’s also true that election is pictured for us here—that one of the purposes in this account is to teach us that God calls to himself who he will. Many men see the light, hear the noise, but they do not see in the midst of the light the person of Jesus Christ and they do not hear in the noise the wondrous words of our Savior that bring life and salvation.

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So we have the message from Acts 9, verses 1-9, of Saul. And I want to just spend a couple of minutes here at the end of this sermon talking about an implication of this message for us.

So we’ll move now to the second point of the outline. I’m going to talk about resolve or steadfastness. Now, if you have a Bible that has a footnote in verse 6, where we read that Paul, trembling and astonished, said, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” And the Lord said to him, “Arise”—there are some manuscripts that don’t like that there. They think that verse doesn’t really belong to that first half of the verse. But we do know from the other accounts in Acts 22 and Acts 26 that this did happen. And this is probably a correct part of the text for us.

And I want—I say that because I want to focus upon this. I want to focus on Saul’s response to the advent of Jesus Christ. And the first thing he does when Jesus identifies who he is and he says, “Lord, what will you have me to do?”—not what will you have me know, not how do you correct my knowledge, not what changes do I have to make to my systematic theology—but Saul’s response is “What do I do? What shall I do?” And we live in the context of a world in which that theme is sounded forth on all quarters in the Christian church increasingly.

I heard—and I’m going to be speaking about this for the next four weeks—George Grant. I’ve mentioned this before. Back in Chicago in July when Doug H. and myself were back there, George Grant spoke really on this theme: “What shall we do?” He began his talk with a quote. He said that as he began his talk, he said that George Whitfield said that all men when they preach should start with a healthy dose of Calvinism. And so Grant said that he was going to begin with a quote from Calvin, but it was Calvin Coolidge, not John Calvin.

And this is a quote from Calvin Coolidge, president of the United States, of course, roughly seventy years ago. But listen to what Coolidge said, and this was after the First World War.