Alright, I got a weird deep probing question for you right off the bat today. And this is actually, it's gonna be hard. This is gonna push you. This is gonna require focus. You with me? All right, here we go. What singular incident could occur in your life that could cause you to flip in an instant from all of the convictions you currently most deeply hold to the opposite set of convictions? I'm just gonna make sounds so you know I'm still here and the podcast thing didn't break and just not buying you some time here to think about it. Did you come up with anything? Because I'm not sure I can come up with anything. Convictions are what convictions are. It's I'm maybe there's something, but I can't even write a story off the top of my head that would get that done. If in the mid-1990s, at the height of the rivalry between my beloved Colorado Avalanche, it's a hockey team, and my reviled arch nemesis, the Detroit Red Wings, if at the height of their rivalry, I drove a car that started to fall off a cliff and I leapt out and I was hanging on for dear life to the cliff. And somebody in a Chris Osgood Red Wings jersey came up and reached over the cliff and took me by the hand just as my grip started to fail and pulled me to safety. And I'm alive and I'm catching my breath. And yeah, I noticed the Red Wings jersey, but I'm so happy to be alive. You know, it's cool. And panting, I say to this person, thank you so much. You saved my life. I owe you. What can I give you? What can I do for you? And they're like, There's only one thing I ask of you, and it is for you to become a Detroit Red Wings fan like me. I don't know what I would do. And he's like, the reason I saved you is because of the values of the 1990s Detroit Red Wings. All I want from you is to change your values and your loyalties to be a part of that. That is how you could repay me. I don't think I could do it because the heart wants what the heart wants. And even though I'd be really grateful and I would try to fake liking the Detroit Red Wings, you can't like what you don't like. And if you don't like the Detroit Red Wings, you just don't like the Detroit Red Wings. It is what it is. The point is, it's very hard to conceive of something that could happen, an incident, an event that could just flip the deepest stuff about us. Those things are pretty much woven into the fabric of who we are and what our identity is and the story that makes our life make sense and be cohesive. Well, I'll tell you this much. There's not a lot of things on my list of stuff I deeply care about and believe in that I would be willing to kill people over, especially innocent people who just believed the wrong ideas or ideas that I reject. But Saul, early on in the book of Acts, he has that level of conviction and passion for his team. He does believe in something so passionately that he would do violence, shed blood, kill even, or at least approve of those who did over his loyalties and his convictions. And yet, in Acts chapter 9, we see a guy whose convictions run that deep, flip in just a few sentences in completely the opposite direction. And not surprisingly, this story that we're gonna look at real quick here in today's conversation is a story that gets told maybe more than any other story in the Bible. I'm not sure anything gets repeated more than this. Man, I've never really thought about that until just right now. It's way up there. Over in the discussion that we do on Patreon, correct me if you can think of one that gets repeated in the Bible more than this story gets repeated in the Bible. But here is the first time this story of shocking transformation is recorded in the Bible. It's 19 verses. Get ready, here we go. Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus that if he found any there who belonged to the way, that is, people who follow Jesus, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. But as he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Who are you, Lord? Saul asked. I'm Jesus, who you're persecuting, he replied. Now get up and go into the city, and you'll be told what you must do. Now the men travelling with Saul stood there speechless. They heard the sound, but they didn't see anyone. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind and he didn't eat or drink anything. In Damascus there was a disciple named Ananias. The Lord called to him in a vision. Ananias. Yes, Lord, he answered. The Lord told him, Go to the house of Judas on Strait Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he's praying. In a vision he's seen a man named Ananias come and place his hands on him to restore his sight. Lord Ananias answered, I've heard many reports about this man and all the harm he's done to your saints in Jerusalem, and he's come here with authority from the chief priest to arrest all who call on your name. It's funny, Ananias here reminds me of Peter a little bit, because Peter's the one guy in the Gospels who constantly seems to think Jesus maybe just doesn't always know what's going on. And he's always kind of pointing things out to him, like, hey, Jesus, like we've been fishing all day. I don't think there's going to be any more fish in the water if we were to throw the thing in right now. I just think it's super cute that Peter and Ananias tell Jesus about how things are. I mean it's cautious at least with Ananias. Like, you know, have you heard about the thing? But the Lord said to Ananias, Go, this man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer from my name. Then Ananias went to the house and entered it, placing his hands on Saul. He said, Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit. And immediately something like scales fell from Saul's eyes and he could see again. He got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength. Now there's so much here, but we're not doing a deep dive on Acts. We're doing a deep dive on Galatians, and just got to take a little time here to set up Galatians. So here's a couple things I want to highlight real quick. One, for those of you who were here for the Old Testament seasons that we just got done doing, did you catch it? Are you feeling the connection between these two things? Remember, Zechariah and Isaiah and other prophets as well made it really clear that through the Jews, all the other nations were going to be shown the one true God. And there's even a vision of the future that's articulated in the Old Testament. That one day the kings of the world are coming up to the hill in Zion and Jerusalem, and they are recognizing the one true God and acknowledging him as the true forever king. And it's God's chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, who play this role of pointing people toward the one true God. Now, a lot of the Jewish people, since those Old Testament prophets said that stuff, have forgotten all about that. And they are really leaning into the isolationist stuff, the ethnic exclusivity stuff. But God hasn't forgotten about it. It was always the plan, going all the way back to day one of Judaism, if we can call it that, the day God picked the first guy who was the natural father of all of this entire race of God's chosen people, that being Abram, right there, God said, I'm going to make you a great nation, you're going to have a ton of descendants, you're going to have a promised land, you're going to be blessed, and all the nations are going to be blessed through you. This is absolutely a payoff on the whole Old Testament. The Old Testament leaves you kind of wondering, okay, it's in there. Like the prophets are saying this is going to be for everybody. And somehow all of the nations are going to come and recognize the true king of kings, but we don't really see a political pathway. We don't even really see a clear spiritual pathway unless we look very, very closely at the prophecies about the Messiah. But when we leave off of the Old Testament, a gigantic Persian Empire is in power. There's a little baby temple that's been rebuilt in Jerusalem, but it's nothing like the old temple. It just doesn't look at all like the Jews are going to be in a place to exert their will politically, militarily, or even culturally in such a way that the vision of the prophets throughout the Old Testament could ever possibly be fulfilled. But all throughout the gospels, that is the four accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, all throughout those, we saw more and more hints that this was going to be for everybody. And now it's becoming downright overt here in Acts chapter 9. So there are two giant things happening here. One, as we were talking about at the beginning, when I asked you to brainstorm what would cause you to just flip 180 on your beliefs, we're seeing a guy, like the chief enemy of the way, the Jesus thing, flip 180 in 19 verses. So that's pretty big news. But now, even further, we find out that this guy is going to be the one to take it out beyond the boundaries of ethnic Judaism. He is going to be the guy who Jesus himself is raising up to do the last part of the commissioning and hang on and turn it pages. I'm going to get it of the commissioning in Acts 1.8. Remember, this is the key verse for the whole plot summary of the book of Acts. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. This is Jesus talking, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. We did the Jerusalem thing, you'll recall over the course of the first eight or so chapters, seven or so chapters, until Saul came along and picked a fight with all the Christians, and they kind of scattered. Now it seems like we're sort of done with the Jerusalem phase or it's on hold. Now we're in the Judea and Samaria phase of Jesus' instructions to take the message out. But Judea and Samaria, that's still Jewish people or like half Jewish people. The ends of the earth. By the time you get to Acts chapter 9 and the story we're looking at, or as you're coming into it, you don't see a clear pathway for how that is going to happen, how God is going to achieve the message going out to the Greeks or the Romans or the barbarians or maybe even the Spaniards or the Gauls or the North Africans or back east toward Persia. How the heck are we going to pull that off? There's no mechanism in place. Well, now there is, and his name is Saul. Why is he the mechanism? Well, this is, I guess, maybe kind of a third observation that I want to make about this passage. Because God picked him. That's it. You don't read this and get the impression that Saul could have been like, no, I don't think I'm going to do that. Uh, I know. I like what I'm doing. I'm actually gonna go round up more Christians. Thank you though. This was really cool. I've never had a miracle like this before, and that was really, really wild. But I'm pretty in on the thing I'm doing. So could you make my vision come back so I could do that? Uh-uh. You come away from the story with a strong impression that he doesn't totally have a choice. God, who is the sovereign God of everything and can operate outside of time if he wants to, just sort of seems to stomp all over Saul's free will here. It sure seems like it anyway, from a linear human timeline perspective. It seems like Saul had to do this, but he doesn't seem to regret it at any point. I mean, it's a true 180. It's not like me pretending to like the Detroit Red Wings to make that hypothetical rescuer happy. I could only fake that. My heart would know it's a lie, but for Saul, who pretty quick here is going to start to be known as Paul, he's not faking it. Everything we see from him from here on out, all the way to the bitter end, when a sword separates his head from his body, he is all in on the way, he's all in on the gospel, he's all in on Jesus from here on out. But why him? Because God picked him. Remember a minute ago we were talking about Abraham, the first guy in this whole lineage, twenty, probably two hundred, twenty, three hundred years before the stuff we're looking at in Acts 9. Well, why did God pick Abraham either? I don't know. He's just some guy living in modern day Iraq or modern day Kuwait, something like that. God was like, I just I'm gonna go with you. Okay. God says something really cool about him. He's like, Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. That's Abraham's biggest redeeming quality. Saul was a little slower coming around, but it turns out as soon as he heard from God, he believed God as well and immediately repented, 180, about faced, flipped entirely from his old set of convictions to a new set of convictions and never looked back. There's so many echoes in this passage, in this story of the Old Testament, so many loose ends of the Old Testament that are getting tied up and pulled back together here, but there's also so much about this story that looks forward to the rest of the Bible. And if you don't know this story, the rest of the Bible really doesn't make a ton of sense. This is a vital hinge point in the whole unfolding of God's whole redemptive plan, and we'll carry it forward into the next little bit, manna. All right, that's plenty for the time being. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.