December 3, 2025 –  What Saul Does Next— Acts #26
Acts 9:1–30 

Saul had his experience with Jesus on the road to Damascus.  He continued into Damascus, where, after 3 days, God sent Ananias so that Saul could regain his vision and be filled with the Holy Spirit.  So what does Saul do next?

Acts 9:19-22   For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus. And immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.” And all who heard him were amazed and said, “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem of those who called upon this name? And has he not come here for this purpose, to bring them bound before the chief priests?” But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.

Saul wasted no time in spreading the message of Jesus.  He “immediately” talked about Jesus in the Jewish synagogues, making it clear that He was not just some great teacher, but he was the Messiah that they had prayed for, the Son of God.  And how did the synagogue’s congregation respond? 

“All who heard him were amazed.”  Remember, as you read your Bible, to slow down.  If you really want to understand what is going on, you have to look at the story from the point of view of all the characters.  Saul comes walking into this synagogue.  Some of the Jews there (likely a minority) believe that Jesus is the Messiah.  Some do not.  Yet they have been meeting together without problems.  They all continued to see themselves as Jews and did not see this difference of opinion as incompatible with worshipping the same God. 

In Jesus’ day, different Jewish sects worshipped together and had been doing so for years.  For example, the Pharisees and Sadducees had very different theological ideas.  The Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife, but the Pharisees did.  The Sadducees believed only the first 5 books of the Bible, while the Pharisees included the rest of what we call the Old Testament as their authoritative scripture. 

They had what we would call significant differences, but they worshipped the same God, and they worshipped together.   Can you imagine that?   Now, we feel like we can’t worship with someone who immerses if we sprinkle or vice versa.  “Oh, they believe in eternal security; we can’t worship there.”  Or “They sing with guitars” or “they sing with those ancient hymn books”.  Or they get out too late, or you name it.  We tend to find numerous reasons why we can’t worship with other Jesus followers.  

It wasn’t such a big deal in Jesus and Saul’s day, and even into the early centuries of Christianity.  But now we have several hundred main denominations, and some say there are 45,000 total denominations.  I think that number is a bit high, but there are indeed too many.   This number multiplied greatly after the Protestant Reformation due to differing interpretations of Scripture. 

There is an old story of a man stranded alone on a deserted island. After many years, a ship sails close by the island, and the man is rescued. The ship’s captain comes ashore, notices the three huts that the man built, and asks, “Tell me about these huts.” The man replies, “The first hut is my home, and the second hut is my church.” The captain asks, “What is the third hut?” The man replies, “Oh, that is where I used to go to church before I got mad.”

Timothy Tennent, who served for 15 years as president of Asbury Theological Seminary and is now on the faculty of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, says we should see God’s church not as a business but as a family, with Jesus as its head.  As with any family, it can be a group that exhibits both diversity and unity.  We all have differences, but we are united because we are family. And we should come together to focus on Jesus, what we have in common.  Tennent says, “We must learn to think of ourselves as members of a massive global Christian movement that is looking more and more like John’s vision in Revelation 7:9, which encompasses people from every nation, tribe, people, and language.” ¹

Despite their differences, the Jews in the first century were united in their belief in the one true God and in worship at the one temple. There was only one place in the world where sacrifices could be made on an altar.  There was one place that they were commanded to travel to for the festivals. That single location helped to unite them, for there was nowhere else in the world to worship as they were commanded.  Now we have churches on every corner.  We no longer have unity in a location, and it seems as if we have forgotten our unity in the one true God.  We sacrifice our unity in Jesus for petty beliefs or, sometimes even worse, for traditions.  We forget that there is still only one temple.

Only one temple?   Let’s take a deeper look at that.  One problem with our English translations is that the word ‘you’ can be used either singularly or in plural.  For example, you are sitting in a room with fellow workers when your boss comes in and says, “I need you to finish this report by 5 PM.”  He walks out, and your co-worker across the table gets up to leave and says to you, “Well, David, you better get on it then.”  But  you say, “Hey, he meant for all of us to work on the report.”  Did he mean you singular or you plural?  There is a difference.  Take the following verse:

1 Corinthians 6:19   Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?”

Is Saul talking to one person or to a group of people?  Now, if these are singular ‘you’s’ then Saul is saying that each individual is God’s Temple and God’s Spirit dwells in each one of us individually.  Fortunately, unlike English, in both Greek and Hebrew, there are different words for the singular and plural forms of ‘you’, so we know they are all plural here.  So it should read this way:

1 Corinthians 3:16   Do you all not know that all of you together are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you all?

We all together are God’s temple.  God dwells in us collectively as a community of believers and as the universal church. (I need to add that there is a verse where Saul talks about God’s spirit dwelling on individual believers, but his main emphasis is about the spirit dwelling on us as a community.) God dwells with us as a church just as he chose to dwell among the children of Israel on their journey to the promised land.  Remember, he told Moses:

Exodus 25:8   And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst.”

This has been God’s goal since Adam and Eve sinned and put a wall of separation between them and God, and were put out of the Garden.  God desires to live with us, to tabernacle with us.  John tells us that:

John 1:14   And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…

Jesus came to dwell among us for a time.  And since Jesus removed the wall of sin that separated us from God, we can now, together, be the temple where God dwells.  He dwells with us now through His Holy Spirit and will one day make that complete when there is no more separation, no more sin, no more death.  Or as Saul writes:

1 Thessalonians 4:17   Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

Saul again, in his letter to the Ephesians, talks even more clearly about how we, together, are God’s temple:

Ephesians 2:19-22   So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

All of us are joined together on the cornerstone of Jesus to be the one holy temple, the one dwelling place for God by the Spirit.   We, together as the followers of Jesus, are God’s dwelling place.   We need to be united in this one temple just as the Jews in Saul’s day were united in one temple.  For the world we live in is changing, and you can probably see that it will become increasingly challenging to be a Jesus follower. 

The percentage of believers is dropping rapidly in the US, even in the Bible Belt.  In many areas of the country, it is already unpopular to be a follower of Jesus.  We need to band together as a family with Jesus as our head.  There is one God, and there is one Church.  We have to learn to work together in partnership with other churches in our community, because we are all on the same team.

And in this synagogue in Damascus, Jews who follow Jesus and those who do not continue to meet together.  Then Saul walks in.  And everyone there knew why he was there.  He is there bringing letters from the council in Jerusalem to have these Jesus followers arrested.  He has come to arrest and carry back to Jerusalem some of the members of their congregation.  But he doesn’t arrest anyone.  In fact, he starts talking about how this Jesus is the “Son of God.”

It is just the opposite of the message they expected to hear.  So they were ‘amazed.’  Other translations say ‘astonished’ or ‘astounded.’ They are shocked and confused.  You could have knocked them over with a feather.  This expert in their religion comes with the authority of the religious leaders, but he starts speaking the message that they said was blasphemy.   Saul is speaking the exact words for which they thought he came to arrest people for saying.  What happened?

Saul’s entire way of understanding scripture has flipped upside down in the past week.  He had studied the Scriptures his whole life and memorized them.  He was sure of what they meant.  He would have bet his life on it.  Remember that Saul was there when Stephen was stoned.  Remember that Stephen gave a long review of the scriptures before he was killed.  Saul had heard Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7 explaining how the scriptures show the rejection of God’s prophets leads to the rejection of Jesus.  

Saul was there and heard it all. But it did not affect him, for he had already decided Stephen was a blasphemer.  He shuts his ears to the story of God dealing with Abraham and all of their forefathers that Stephen had used to explain God’s purpose and their rejection of God’s plan.  Don’t you know that the words of Stephen rang in Saul’s ears after he encountered Jesus, for Saul had rejected Stephen just as his peers had denied Jesus, and his forefathers had rejected the prophets before them.

Stephen and Saul studied the same scripture, the same history, but came to different conclusions.  Saul did not lack education; he lacked perspective.  And what made the difference in Saul’s upside-down interpretation of the Scriptures?  He met Jesus.  And then he considered the scriptures with the knowledge of Jesus.  And he saw the truth of the scriptures he had missed all his life.  He had the best education, he trained under the best, but he had misunderstood.  If you ignore the idea of a Messiah when you read the Scriptures, you can not possibly understand.

And now here is that same Saul who had voted to have Stephen stoned for blasphemy, using that same scripture and the same explanation Stephen used.  Can you imagine their confusion?  Luke tells us they were “confounded.”   Let’s do a word study.  For those of you who like word studies, this will be great. If you don’t, then just bear with me for a few minutes.

Acts 9:22   But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.

The Greek word translated as “confounded”  is ‘syncheō’, derived from two Greek words: “syn”, which means ‘together’, and ‘cheō’, which means ‘to pour.’  Literally, it means “to pour together.”  This is the Greek word that the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was around in Jesus and Saul’s day, uses for the Hebrew ‘balal’, which means ‘to mix’, as in grain sacrifices, where flour is mixed with oil.  

Exodus 29:40   And with the first lamb a tenth measure of fine flour mingled with a fourth of a hin of beaten oil, and a fourth of a hin of wine for a drink offering.

It is the idea of taking something simple and pure, and pouring or mixing something into it, and it is now different.  We have a very similar word in English.  Confusion, which comes from the Latin confundere, which also means “to pour together, mix, mingle, disorder.”  And now you can see how we moved from there in English to our phrase “mixed up” for confusion, and then even further to “agitated” or “stirred up.”

The first time we see the word ‘balal’ (‘syncheō’ in Greek) in the Bible is in Genesis 11.

Genesis 11:7   Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.

‘Confuse’ is our Greek word ‘syncheo’.  What God did at Babel was to take their single, simple language and mix it with other languages, as one would add oil to flour when making a cake.  And by making this mixture, the people are confused.  That is the idea behind the word.

We also see the Greek syncheō in the mirror of this Babel story that we have covered in Acts 2.  There, at Pentecost, God reversed the act at Babel.  There, he removed the language differences so that everyone could understand.

Acts 2:6  And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language.

But this sudden ability to understand all these foreign languages leaves the people syncheo (bewildered), literally mixed up, for the world as they knew it suddenly changed.   What they thought was impossible just happened to them.  And this is the same word translated as ‘confounded’ in our passage today:

Acts 9:22   But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.

So when Saul comes in, they are expecting him to carry off these Jesus followers in chains, but he comes in and says he is a Jesus follower and tries to convince them they should be also.  It is no wonder they are “mixed up.”  Well, people don’t like to be ‘confused,’ so if it is unresolved, they move from mixed up to a more intense state, stirred up or agitated. And this crowd in Damascus will get so agitated that it reaches the point of violence, but we will talk about that later.

And the verse says, “Saul increased all the more in strength.”  What does that mean?  Saul is not going to the gym or working out with weights.  I think the NET Bible translates this well as it says, “But Saul became more and more capable…”.

Over time, Saul grew better at presenting the scriptures as they pointed to Jesus.  But he quickly discovered that it wasn’t going to be as easy as he thought.  The people are just mixed up and becoming stirred up.  This was not what he wanted.  So Saul is about to change strategies.  

He can’t stay in Damascus, as things aren’t going well for him there. He is not leading people to understand how the scriptures point to Jesus, but he is leading them into confusion.   He sure can’t return to Jerusalem, where they are punishing the followers of Jesus.  So he goes where every prophet goes to get instruction from God. He goes to the wilderness, to Arabia.  Next week, we will talk about Saul spending the next three years in Arabia.

But let me review the two points I want you to take home from today’s passage.

1.   The community of Jesus followers joins together to be the place where God dwells.  We are where the Spirit dwells in our community and are responsible for being that light where we live.  And the universal church is God’s Temple in our world, the city on the hill where the light of Jesus will spread to the world.  We worship one God, and we are one Temple.  We should act that way.  We have to learn to get along and work together.
2. (And this is the big one.)  To understand the Bible, you must grasp its big picture and see how it all leads to Jesus.   Saul and Stephen read the same scriptures but came to different conclusions until Saul had a dramatic event that changed his perspective and enabled him to interpret the Scriptures correctly.  That event was coming face-to-face with Jesus.  Without Jesus, we can not correctly understand God’s Word.

This is why it is so essential to understand the big picture of what God is doing in the story of the Bible.  Can you imagine taking one piece of a 1000-piece puzzle, studying it, and trying to understand which piece it represents if you aren’t able to see the big picture the puzzle forms?  But that is precisely what we are doing when we study a small piece of the Bible without knowing the big picture.

You should be able to tell someone the story of the Bible in less than two minutes. The Bible is a big book, and many people find it hard to understand.  But the basic story is not complicated.   God created the universe we live in. And he made people. He made this world a place where we can live with him.  But Adam and Eve decided they didn’t want to live by God’s rules for the world he built.  So they rebelled, we call that sin. 

And since they didn’t want to live by God’s rules, they had to leave.  That is the first three chapters of Genesis.  The rest of the Bible is the story of God designing a way to reunite Himself with His people, because He wanted to dwell with them.  So he tried to give them instructions for how to live, but they continued to rebel.  The only way we could learn to be obedient was for God to place his own Spirit upon us.  But our guilt and sin were in the way.  Someone had to pay the price of the penalty for this sinful rebellion.

And only a man who had never rebelled could pay the price.  But none could be found.  All people sinned and fell short.  So God sent His son to be the one human who would not rebel or sin.  And He would pay the price for all of our rebellion.  And so Jesus came and demonstrated a life of following God, and then he died on a cross as payment for our sins.  And as proof of God’s acceptance of this sacrifice, God raised him from the dead. 

And if we accept that payment, and agree to follow Jesus’ instructions and His way of living, then our debt is paid, and the wall that separated us from God is removed, and now God’s spirit can dwell with us, and He will empower us to live that life we couldn’t before.  And the final part of God’s plan is to one day remove all sin, and all of the consequences of sin, all the pain and death.  And then we will dwell with God forever, just as He designed it in the beginning.

That is the story of the Bible in less than 2 minutes.  That is the story of this entire universe.  That is what the rabbi Saul didn’t understand.  Though he had studied the scriptures all his life, he missed the main point…. he missed Jesus because he didn’t see the big picture of the Bible.  But then one day, he met Jesus, and the light bulb came on for him.  Suddenly, he began to understand the story of the Bible. 

So many people say they don’t understand the Bible.  And I agree, sometimes it is hard.  We are reading a book that is thousands of years old, speaking of vastly different cultures and times.  It takes a little work to read ancient literature and understand what they were thinking and doing.  But I am a firm believer that God rewards people who take the time to read His book.

I believe that God gives insight to those who earnestly seek and ask.  But it is meant to be read in community.  That is why we gather together to study.  That is why many of us are reading 3-4 chapters daily and discussing them.  We are all pilgrims on a path to God.  Let us all walk together.

1. Tennent, Timothy. Theology in the Context of World Christianity. 2007.