Acts 9:19-31

Saul spent several days with the disciples in Damascus. 20 At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. 21 All those who heard him were astonished and asked, “Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name? And hasn’t he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?” 22 Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.
23 After many days had gone by, there was a conspiracy among the Jews to kill him, 24 but Saul learned of their plan. Day and night they kept close watch on the city gates in order to kill him. 25 But his followers took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall.
26 When he came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he really was a disciple. 27 But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles. He told them how Saul on his journey had seen the Lord and that the Lord had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had preached fearlessly in the name of Jesus. 28 So Saul stayed with them and moved about freely in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord. 29 He talked and debated with the Hellenistic Jews,[a] but they tried to kill him. 30 When the believers learned of this, they took him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.
31 Then the church throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria enjoyed a time of peace and was strengthened. Living in the fear of the Lord and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it increased in numbers.



Dig Deeper
There are still Christians in the world today that live in constant fear of real, physical persecution and even death for their faith. But most Christians, especially those in the United States, know virtually nothing about that life and we rarely, if ever, encounter true persecution. The early church, however, faced it all the time and they had to be on their toes and constantly aware of those who sought to destroy them. Saul was the chief among those persecutors in the early days of the church but then rumors began to spread around that not only had this chief thorn in the side of the church ceased his damaging activities but he had actually become one of them. Obvious questions had to be raised among them concerning whether or not he could be trusted. Would it be out of the realm of possibility to believe that Saul might fake a conversion and even follow through on this charade for months and even years in order to work his way into the presence and trust of the leaders of the movement, the apostles? Once he had gained their confidence the whole movement could be brought to its knees in one fell swoop.

It’s easy to see why the church might feel this way and react with such hesitancy but there is even more to their response than that. Yes, there was an initial distrust of Saul but enter into this story for a moment and imagine yourself in a similar position. Imagine that someone came out publicly as an opponent of your current church family and began to gain the power and support needed to destroy your church. Imagine that they began to speak publicly of wiping out your church and hunting down every single member and making an example of them so that other Christians in other cities would think twice about remaining loyal to this movement of Messiah people. Now imagine how you would feel as this persecutor of your church led an effort to have a beloved and important leader in your church dragged out into the street and killed with everyone there to watch. Can you even begin to fathom how difficult that would be. What would you be feeling? How difficult would Jesus’ words to love your enemies seem under those circumstances? How hard would that be for your church to deal with? What would you tell your dear brother’s widow and children? How challenging would it be to continue to preach about hope in the resurrection and an unfailing commitment to love those who persecute you? That would take real conviction wouldn’t it?

Can you truly imagine all of that and enter into this story? Now really challenge yourself. How would you feel about that man that had persecuted your church, killed your friend, and promised to finish the job with the rest of the believers soon? How would you feel if he suddenly popped up and said that he had come to believe in your Messiah and that he not only wanted forgiveness but wanted to become one of you. Certainly you would be filled with mistrust and caution but overcoming that would be the easy part. Can you imagine loving this man as a brother and allowing him to move among you as one of you? Can you imagine the other friends and family and even the wife of your slain brother in Christ doing the same? That kind of Christianity is not for the weak of stomach. That is big-boy Christianity. Yet, it is exactly what we see in the early church. What Luke is describing is something more than your run-of-the-mill religion. This was what happened when a community of people took seriously Jesus’ call to live by love (cf. Jn. 13:34-35).

After his incredible conversion and baptism into Christ, Saul spent several days with the disciples but he wasn’t just enjoying the fellowship with those that were his enemies just a few days previous. He began to immediately preach that Jesus was the Son of God after all. This teaching was not unique to Saul but he certainly seemed to have stressed it more than anyone else. The term “the Son of God” held deep significance for someone like Saul because it was a term that had come to be connected specifically with God’s promised Messiah based on such Old Testament passages as Psalm 2. The term also became an important concept for the early Christians because they saw it as important to establish Jesus’ status as God’s true son. This identity, they believed, was established by God (Matt 3:17; 17:5) and showed that Jesus was the true inheritor of God’s family rather than Israel who had first been called God’s son (Ex. 4:22). Eventually the term came to be used almost as a shorthand way of describing the strange truth that Jesus was somehow an extension of God himself and was a marker of his identity. In those early days of Saul’s preaching, however, it is most certain that Saul’s primary contention was the Jesus really was the Messiah. His death on the cross was not a mark of his shame but a necessary step as God’s faithful and suffering servant who was resurrected by God, thus declaring his sonship (see Romans 1:1-4 as Paul would develop that thought years later).

Saul’s sudden and dramatic switch was confusing to those in Damascus, to say the least. It would be even more shocking than if Osama Bin Laden suddenly appeared on the Fox Television Network to espouse the great qualities of the United States and to identify himself as an American Patriot who was now seeking citizenship in the land of the free and the home of the brave. People simply did not know what to do with all of this or what to make of it.

It appears that during the “many days” that Luke quickly refers to includes a time period of nearly three years that he spent in Arabia (Gal. 1:17). During that time in Arabia he continued to preach the gospel and apparently made an enemy of the Arabian King Aretas who, on Saul’s return to Damascus, worked with the governor in Damascus to try to get rid of Saul (2 Cor. 11:32-33). Saul’s friends helped him escape Damascus by lowering him over the wall, an act that Saul would use to demonstrate his weakness and humility by human standards in 2 Corinthians 11:32-33. But these friends were even more than just that as Luke already calls them his followers. In just a few short years, Saul went from going to Damascus to kill Christians to having them see him as something of a leader and worth following. The transformation of the gospel in Saul’s life was incredible.

By the time Saul arrived in Jerusalem we might think that he was greeted with open arms but that was not the case. These were people that were committed to living as Jesus’ family but they were still human beings with human fears and hurts. Saul had caused them great damage and had killed their dear brother Stephen. Now here he was just a few years later wanting to be accepted by the believers as one of them. Surely Saul had to understand the situation and his writings never display anything other than great humility and and an overwhelming feeling of grace that he had been accepted into God’s family, but that had to be in doubt, at least for a moment as he arrived in Jerusalem.

Saul needed someone to believe in him and in the powerful work of the Holy Spirit in his life. He found just such a man in Barnabas, a man who had already demonstrated his unyielding commitment to God’s family (Acts 4:36). Saul, verified Barnabas, really had become one of them. This was no mere ploy. He had boldly preached the word of God in Damascus and had come into contention with the Hellenistic Jews, the very group of which Saul had likely been a part and had worked with to kill Stephen.

In the context of all of that, then, verse 28 is rather remarkable. Saul was accepted into the Christian community and he moved freely among them. It is difficult to overstate the amount of love, forgiveness, and belief that this new way of living and viewing the world was really God’s will that this would have taken to bring Saul into the family as one of their own. From a worldly point of view this was crazy. But they were becoming the community of love that Jesus said they would (Jn. 13:34-35) and were truly loving their enemies (Matt. 5:44). Although Saul was only in Jerusalem for about two weeks and met only Peter and James among the apostles (Gal. 1:18-20), his welcome into the community in Jerusalem is still remarkable.

As Saul continued his preaching activities in Jerusalem, mostly with those that he was apparently the most intimately familiar, the Hellenistic Jews, they became contentious to the point that they wanted to kill Saul. He truly was beginning to find out how much he would suffer for this life of Christ, but this was only the beginning. The other believers, however, realized that Saul needed to go elsewhere so they sent him to Caesarea and eventually home to Tarsus. It is likely that this decision was a combination of the realization that Saul’s presence was bringing unnecessary pressure down on the Christian community and that he could be of more use fulfilling his God-given role as apostle to the Gentiles by leaving Jerusalem.

We will not see Saul again until several years later, still in Tarsus (Acts 11:25), but the stage has been set for the next important step in the spreading of the gospel. God’s promise was always that his family would consist of all nations and that had to include the mission to the Gentiles. God had laid the framework and called the people that he wanted to carry that message forward. In the meantime, the existing bands of Jewish and Samaritan believers received a bit of a respite from persecution and these traditional rivals could already think of themselves as “the” church. They were one already and soon, as a result of the work of Saul and others, the Gentiles would join them in the family of the Messiah.


Devotional Thought
Saul’s conversion from persecutor of the church to proponent of Jesus as the Christ is nothing short of amazing. Surely it would have seemed to the early Christians that Saul was beyond conversion. It would have seemed impossible. But what is impossible with man is quite possible with God. But take a moment to think of this. Who is the Saul in your life? Who seems beyond conversion in your mind? Make a commitment to spend time everyday praying for them. If God can turn Saul around, why not the person you’re thinking of?