Jesus answered him:
“I am the One you have been chasing. He that whips and scourges those Damascine Christians whips and scourges Me. It is not their back that is bleeding; it is Mine. It is not their heart that is breaking; it is Mine. I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest.”
From that wild, exciting and overwhelming scene there rises up the greatest preacher of all ages—Paul; in whose behalf prisons were rocked down, before whom soldiers turned pale, into whose hand Mediterranean sea captains put control of their shipwrecking craft, and whose epistles are the advance courier of the Resurrection Day.
I learn, first, from this scene that a worldly fall may precede a spiritual uplifting. A man does not get much sympathy by falling off a horse. People say he ought not to have got into the saddle if he could not ride. Those of us who were brought up in the country remember well how the workmen laughed when, on our way back from the brook, we suddenly lost our ride. At the close of the great Civil War, when the army passed in review at Washington, if a general had toppled from the stirrups it would have been a national merriment.
Here is Paul on horseback—a proud man, riding on with government documents in his pocket, a graduate of a most famous school in which the celebrated Dr. Gamaliel had been a professor, perhaps having already attained two of the three titles of the school: Rab, the first; Rabbi, the second; and was on his way to Rabbak, the third and highest title.
I know from Paul’s temperament that his horse was ahead of the other horses. But without time to think of what posture he should take, or without any consideration for his dignity, he is tumbled into the dust. And yet that was the best ride Paul ever took. Out of that violent fall he arose into the apostleship. So it has been in all the ages, and so it is now.
You will never be worth any thing for God and the Church until you lose fifty thousand dollars, or have your reputation upset, or in some way, somehow, are thrown and humiliated. You must go down before you go up.
Joseph finds his path to the Egyptian court through the pit into which his brothers threw him.
Daniel would never have walked amid the bronze lions that adorned the Babylonish throne if he had not first walked amid the real lions of the cave.
Paul marshals all the generations of Christendom by falling flat on his face on the road to Damascus.