The wonderful sovereignty of God

Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is well known. Here was a man intent on persecuting Christians. Sometimes people wax lyrical about Stephen’s death having made an impression on Saul/Paul and this playing a part in his eventual conversion. Well maybe, but the Biblical evidence for this is precisely zero. At the beginning of chapter 8 we read that Saul approved of Stephen’s execution (8:1) and then was ravaging the church (8:3). Here we read that Saul was still breathing threats and murder and was on his way to Damascus to round up a few more Christians. Nor was Paul discriminating between men and women, if they followed Christ then he wanted to imprison them. The persecution was especially severe. So Paul was going to Damascus with a very clear purpose in mind. God, however, had a very different purpose. The Lord encountered Saul on the road to Damascus and changed the whole direction of his life. In Acts 9:20 we read that Saul “immediately proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues saying ‘He is the Son of God’”. And then in 9:22 “But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ”. What a transformation!

But there is another amazing thing to consider. Why was Saul so intent on going to Damascus to continue his persecutions? Why was it so important a place to him? The reason is that it was a major commercial hub, with connections into north Syria, Mesopotamia, Anatolie, Persia and Arabia (Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, Zondervan) If the gospel took hold here, then it would start to spread to these regions and beyond. It had to be stopped! But the wonderful irony is that Saul who was going there to stop the spread of the gospel was God’s chosen instrument in taking the gospel to the Greek and Roman world.

So we see in this an illustration of the beauty of God’s sovereignty. In our day when we see the world making plans and carrying out actions to damage the gospel we should not despair. Christ is Lord, and it is His plans the prevail, and His plans are sometimes wonderfully unexpected.

Finally, a few words on Saul’s “name change”. We all know that while in Damscus, and prior to this, he was known as Saul, later he is known as Paul. When and why did his name change? There is a very good article on this here. His name was not changed. As was quite common in those days, he had two names. Saul was his Jewish name, and Paul his Greek name. In his persecuting the church days using his Jewish name made sense. Later when he was the apostle to the Gentiles, becoming all things to all men, using his Greek name was the obvious thing to do. This was not a name change given to him by Jesus, unlike with Simon becoming Peter.