Acts 26:12-18 ¹²In these things, as I journeyed to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, ¹³at the middle of the day, on the road, I saw, O king, a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and those who journeyed with me. ¹⁴And after we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew dialect, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ ¹⁵And I said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And the Lord said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.

The next part of Paul’s speech focuses on his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. He began his journey as a zealous Pharisee but ended as a zealous witness to the resurrected Jesus. By this point, the reader of Acts should be familiar with this story since it is the third time it is told (9:1–30; 22:5–21). Each retelling has a slightly different emphasis, primarily because of the setting in which it is told. In this case, Paul was defending himself in such a way that he needed to explain to Romans, Gentiles, and the Jewish king about his faith in the resurrected Jesus. Missing in this recounting is how Paul was blinded and how his sight was restored through Ananias. The focus is more on Paul’s mission and why he traveled around preaching about Jesus. In this account, Paul’s commission to go to the Gentiles came from Jesus directly rather than through Ananias. Paul may have compressed the events in order to show a predominantly Gentile audience that they were part of God’s plan.

On the road to Damascus, Paul saw a light brighter than the noon-day sun. The light was also seen by all of Paul’s companions, but they did not hear the voice, which was meant specifically for Paul. Light may have more symbolism in his account than the physical light that blinded Paul. He did not mention his blindness from the light because it was secondary to his purpose, which was to reflect the light of Jesus to others. The contents of the voice are more significant than what Paul or his companions experienced. Only in this account did Paul note that the voice spoke in Aramaic, a dialect of the Hebrew language. This small reference not only added a vivid detail but made the vision more believable since Jesus spoke Aramaic. This was not subjective, within Paul’s Greek-speaking mind, but external in another language, which he knew but was likely not his mother tongue.

Verses 14-15 give an important idea that guided Paul’s ministry over the years. The voice connected Paul’s persecuting of Jesus’ followers with persecuting Jesus himself. In many places in his letters, Paul connected believers to Jesus. One significant metaphor was the church as the body of Christ. A key phrase repeated over 160 times was that believers are “in Christ.” Paul then told of a proverb Jesus spoke: It is hard for you to kick against the goads. This proverb is confusing to modern readers who interpret it to mean that Paul was fighting his conscience and that God was speaking to him before Damascus. This interpretation has some possibility to it since Paul heard Stephen’s testimony and possibly many other Christians. God’s prevenient grace was drawing Paul, but he was resisting because of his hardened heart. To Paul’s Gentile audience, the proverb would have a slightly different meaning. In other Greek literature (Euripides, Bacchae 794–95; Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1624; Terence, Phormio 1.2.27), the proverb means to fight against the will of the gods. Paul was fighting against God’s will for him, which was to be a preacher of the gospel, not a persecutor of God’s people.

Paul recognized something divine about the voice but could not fathom who it could be because he was persecuting heretics, not God. At the moment of the vision, he was confused. Something did not make sense in his thinking. The clincher of his encounter was to hear that the voice was the very person he hated: Jesus. Everything changed in Paul’s thinking and life at the mention of this name. This name became precious to him from that moment on. He was willing to die for that name.