Paul and his company went on, leaving the gleaming waters of the Lake of Galilee behind, up into the Syrian mountains. At last, one day at noon they topped the final peak and saw, spread before them in the plain below, the beautiful city whose loveliness was renowned throughout the East. There, he may have thought, as the little convoy stopped to rest and he looked down upon the view, were the Christians he had come to hunt out and take back with him bound to Jerusalem. In the excitement and fervour of his work he would forget the questions and thoughts which had tantalised his mind. He would stop trying to reconcile those contradictory scriptures that had burned themselves into his brain by day and flickered across the screen of his consciousness at night. He would …

A flash of light, vivid, searing light which rose up and outshone the hard, brassy glare of the Syrian noonday sun; a white hot, gleaming screen which blotted out earth and sky and burned itself into the eyes of Saul even to the extent of causing physical pain. He was dimly conscious of the asses and mules standing stock still, of his companions prostrating themselves on the ground in terror: then, his gaze drawn irresistibly upwards to the almost unendurable glare above him, he beheld, with a shock that pierced through his very being, a form whose own glory exceeded by far that of the shimmering light around him — and at that Saul himself veiled his eyes and fell to the ground and there lay, fearing to look again upon that Majestic Presence, still, silent, his mind racing, waiting.

A sound, as of a distant wind, coming nearer; the rush of many waters, a swelling crescendo of rolling thunder, taking the form of a voice, a heavenly voice, shaping itself into words, awe-inspiring words that yet seemed to have in them a tinge of gentleness, almost as if they breathed assurance with their enquiry.

"Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?"

Persecuting God? He, Saul. the zealous upholder of the Law and of the true faith? Persecuting the One to whom he had devoted his whole life and all his energies, for whom he was willing to do all and dare all and lay down life itself if need be? Persecuting the Rock of Israel whose enemies he was even now engaged in hunting down and punishing? How could such things be? It was unthinkable. Then who was this One whose solemn voice had reached his stricken mind, whose awful Presence had appeared before his amazed sight? Had he indeed beheld God, and lived? Had the Most High verily appeared to mortal man?

"Who art thou, Lord?"

"I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting."

The shock with which Saul of Tarsus must have heard those words might well have unhinged the mind of a lesser man. Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified felon, the imposter who had claimed to be the Son of God and the Messiah that should come, and who had been executed for His blasphemy? Taken down from the cross, His dead body certified by the authorities, and interred in a tomb, his delusions and claims silenced for ever — there, in that glory, at the right hand of God? Only a little while ago he had watched Stephen lift his face to heaven and declare that he saw heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God and he had judged him guilty of blasphemy and condemned him to death; now he himself had undergone the same experience and he himself had with his own eyes seen heaven opened and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. "Jesus of Nazareth". Had the answer been "The Word of God" he could have understood it. Had it been "Your Messiah, the Coming One" he would have rejoiced and looked for His speedy descent to take the glory of His Kingdom. Had it been "the Arm of the Lord" "the Hope of Israel" "the Son of God" he would have understood those terms and bowed himself in submission. Had the Presence even announced Himself as Michael the Archangel, the Captain of the Lord's Host, he would have rendered humble adoration and awaited the heavenly message. But no; "I am Jesus of Nazareth" .

When they picked him up from the ground he was blind. The intensity of that scorching glare had destroyed his sight. The men with him had dropped to the ground when first the light flashed, they saw the radiance but they did not see what Saul saw. As they lay they heard a noise but they distinguished no words. Now the light was gone and the solemn rumblings died away. The sun shone brilliantly down upon the familiar landscape and everything was as it had been before — except that little group of wondering Levites leading in their midst a broken and sightless man.

So Saul entered Damascus, walking on foot, holding the guiding hands of his erstwhile despised subordinates. One might ask how it was they did not set the blind man upon his mule for the remainder of the journey — surely that would have been the most convenient way to get him to a place where he could be cared for. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Saul himself, under the effect of his experience, insisted on completing the journey on foot, in token of his humiliation and submission. He left Jerusalem an arrogant, self-assured Pharisee. He entered Damascus a bond-slave of the Lord Jesus Christ.

There are three accounts of this incident in the Book of Acts — one, the narrative of the happening in chapter 9, another, as recounted by Paul in his defence before the Jerusalem Sanhedrin years later, (chapter 23) and a third, in his speech before King Agrippa just prior to his voyage to Rome (chapter 26). In none of these does Paul say that he actually saw the Lord, only that an overpowering light shone around him and his companions. The evidence that he did in fact behold a form enshrined in that supernatural radiance lies in his statements elsewhere in the New Testament that he had actually seen the person of Christ and that he saw Him "as one born out of due time", as though his eyes had been enabled to witness an appearance which in the ordinary manner no man would expect to do until in his own time he was born into the heavenly world 'beyond the Veil'. The Apostle John tells us (1 John 3. 1-3) that "it doth not yet appear what we shall be but . . . we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is'. This celestial glory of our Lord Jesus Christ is of necessity something no human mind can visualize for we have no basis of comparison. The medieval idea that Jesus preserves the fleshly body of His humanity to eternity, even though in a "glorified" condition, may be dismissed, for the conditions of life in the celestial world and in the Divine Presence are such that, as Paul himself told the Corinthians, "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God". (1 Cor.15.50). Our Lord's celestial glory at the right hand of God the Father is one that cannot be discerned by the human faculty of sight. It remains then either that the risen Lord manifested Himself in some such fashion as God revealed Himself to Moses on Sinai or the angel Gabriel to Daniel, in which some kind of physical manifestation perceptible to the human optic nerves represented the reality of the Being behind it, or in some wonderful fashion Paul was literally translated for the moment into the world of the spirit and received a sense impression that normally he would have been quite incapable of accepting. His reference in 2 Cor.12 to his having been translated into the 'third heaven' and hearing "unutterable things which it was not possible for a man to relate" goes to show that such an experience did befall the great Apostle on at least one other occasion. If this is so, and if of all men Saul of Tarsus is the one who alone has seen into the mysteries that lie beyond the barrier of human sense and retained a recollection of what he saw, then how apt his expression, referring to this event in his life "last of all, he was seen of me also, as one born out of due time" (i.e. prematurely 1 Cor. 15. 8).

One thing is certain. The sight which Saul witnessed on the Damascus road was one which convinced him utterly and irrevocably that the man Jesus of Nazareth who had been put to death in Jerusalem was indeed the Christ, the Son of God. For the rest of his life he never wavered in that belief. Nothing of the evidence against the claims of Jesus, satisfactory as it had been to him previously, now weighed in the slightest against that fixed conviction. He had all to lose and nothing to gain by accepting Christ. The whole of his career prospects, his power and honour, were thrown away in this whole-hearted acceptance of the crucified one. He lived with the events; he had access to all the evidence for both sides of the matter. He could question and obtain information from living men who had been the principal actors in the drama. His own personal zeal for the principles of the Pharisees and the Law of Moses and the traditions of Judaism strongly predisposed him against the claims of Christianity. In spite all this, that which happened to him on the road outside Damascus convinced him so completely that his whole future life and work was devoted to the preaching of that Gospel which previously he had condemned. One of the strongest evidences for the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead lies in the conversion and conviction of Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of the Church.
AOH