The Damascus of Bible times still stands, with a population of 135,000 people. It was a gay city of white and glistering architecture, its minarets and crescents and domes playing with the light of the morning sun; embowered in groves of olive, citron, orange and pomegranate; a famous river plunging its brightness into the scene--a city by the ancients styled “a pearl surrounded by emeralds.”
A group of horsemen are advancing upon that city. Let the Christians of the place hide, for that cavalcade coming over the hills is made up of persecutors.
Their leader is small of stature and unattractive in some respects, as leaders sometimes are insignificant in person--witness the Duke of Wellington and Dr. Archibald Alexander. But there is something very intent in the eye of the man at the head of this troop, and the horse he rides is lathered with the foam of a long and a quick travel of 135 miles. He cries “Go ’long” to his steed, for those Christians must be captured and must be silenced, and that religion of the cross must be annihilated.
Suddenly the horses shy off, and plunge until their riders are precipitated. Freed from their riders, the horses bound snorting away.
You know that dumb animals, at the sight of an eclipse or an earthquake, or any thing like a supernatural appearance, sometimes become very uncontrollable.
A new sun had been kindled in the heavens, putting out the glare of the ordinary sun. Christ, with the glories of Heaven wrapped about Him, looked out from a cloud and the splendor was insufferable, and no wonder the horses sprang and the equestrians dropped.
Dust-covered and bruised, Saul attempts to get up, shading his eyes with his hand from the severe luster of the heavens, but unsuccessfully, for he is struck stone blind as he cries out: “Who art Thou, Lord?”
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.
Men who have been always prosperous may be efficient servants of the world, but will be of no advantage to Christ. You may ride majestically seated on your charger, rein in hand, foot in stirrup, but you will never be worth any thing spiritually until you fall off. They who graduate from the School of Christ with the highest honors have on their diploma the seal of a lion’s muddy paw, or the plash of an angry wave, or the drop of a stray tear, or the brown scorch of a persecuting fire.
In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of the thousand there is no moral or spiritual elevation until there has been a thorough worldly upsetting.