Ep 405 – Acts 9:26-31

Luke appears to be a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase kind of a guy. In chronicling the history of the early church, he provides us with a tremendous amount of details, from its rather bizarre beginnings in that upper room in Jerusalem to its eventual spread to the ends of the earth. But Luke doesn’t include everything. At times, he seems to purposefully leave out some details that he deems unnecessary or superfluous. And today, we’re going to look at one such case. In Acts 9:26-31, Luke appears to have Saul going straight from Damascus to Jerusalem, where he would interface with the apostles. But we know from Saul’s own accounts of that period of his life, there was a significant time gap between his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and his eventual visit to Jerusalem. By pieicing together the timeline of events, we get a better understanding of what God was doing to prepare Saul for the task assigned to him by Jesus. There was a period of preparation necessary. While Saul was a zealous individual with a superb education and unprecedented knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, he was not yet ready to act as God’s hand-picked ambassador of the good news to the Gentiles. There were lessons to be learned. There was spiritual formation required. And there was the need for time, so that the church could adjust to the idea of their former persecutor becoming one of the greatest proponents of the gospel the world has ever known.