The man doing the persecuting becomes the man who writes much of the New Testament. It is the hinge of the whole book — and Luke thinks it important enough to tell three separate times.

The road

Saul is on his way to Damascus, about a week’s journey north, carrying letters authorizing him to arrest believers there and bring them back. He is not a thug; he is a Pharisee doing what he sincerely believes God requires. That is worth holding on to, because it is the thing he never quite gets over.

A light, and a voice: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” He asks who is speaking. The answer undoes him — the one he is persecuting is Jesus. Not the followers of Jesus. Jesus.

He is led into the city blind, and for three days he neither eats nor drinks.

Acts 9:1–9 · retold by Paul himself at Acts 22:1–16 and 26:9–18

Ananias

There is a believer in Damascus named Ananias, and he is told to go and lay hands on Saul. His reply is one of the most human lines in the book: Lord, I have heard about this man, and what he has done to your people in Jerusalem — and he is here with authority to arrest us.

He goes anyway, and he calls him brother. Saul’s sight comes back, he is baptized, he eats, and within days he is in the synagogues arguing that Jesus is the Son of God. The people who hear him cannot make sense of it, which is fair.

Before long there is a plot to kill him, and he escapes over the city wall at night, let down in a basket. He never entirely loses that status — the man someone is always trying to kill.

Acts 9:10–25 · 2 Corinthians 11:32–33

Arabia, and the years nobody writes about

Acts moves quickly here, but Paul’s own account in Galatians fills in a gap. He did not go straight to the apostles for instruction. He went into Arabia, then back to Damascus, and it was three years before he went up to Jerusalem — and then only for a fortnight, seeing Peter and James and nobody else.

In Jerusalem the believers are afraid of him and do not believe he is genuine. It is Barnabas — whose name means son of encouragement, and who earns it repeatedly in this book — who takes him and vouches for him. Even so, he argues with the Greek-speaking Jews there until they too try to kill him, and the church quietly sends him home to Tarsus.

And there he stays. Somewhere between five and eight years pass with almost nothing recorded. Whatever Paul became, he became it largely in those unrecorded years. If you are in a season where nothing seems to be happening, that is worth knowing.

Acts 9:26–31 · Galatians 1:15–24

The next move is not his. It is God’s move on a Roman soldier, and it changes who the church understands itself to be for.