The Confounding Logic of Grace Text: Acts 9:19-22
Introduction: The Un-Domesticated Convert
We live in an age that wants its Christianity to be respectable, polite, and above all, tame. We want conversions that are quiet, introspective, and do not cause any trouble for the neighbors. We want a Jesus who is a helpful life coach, not a conquering King. We want a gospel that soothes, but never startles. We want a faith that fits comfortably in our back pocket, to be pulled out on Sundays, but which makes no demands on our Monday mornings. The modern evangelical impulse is to take the lion of the tribe of Judah, give him a haircut, file down his claws, and teach him to purr.
Into this tranquilized landscape, the conversion of Saul of Tarsus lands like a meteor. There is nothing tame about it. It is violent, disruptive, and utterly transformative. And the immediate aftermath, which we have before us in our text, is just as disruptive. Saul does not go on a quiet retreat to "process" his experience. He does not form a committee to explore the possibility of a new outreach initiative. He does not spend a year finding himself before he can serve the Lord. No, the man who was breathing out slaughter against the church one moment is, in the very next moment it seems, breathing out the gospel of grace in the synagogues of his enemies.
This is the logic of a genuine, Holy Spirit-wrought conversion. It does not just change a man's opinion; it changes his entire trajectory. It flips his world upside down, or rather, right side up. It takes the greatest enemy of the church and, in an instant, turns him into its greatest champion. This is not a rebranding exercise. This is a resurrection. And because it is a resurrection, it is necessarily confounding to the world. The world can understand a man changing his political party. It can understand a man changing his diet. But it cannot understand a man who was dead being made alive. This kind of change does not compute within their closed system of cause and effect. And so, when they see it, they are first astonished, and then, when the logic of it is pressed upon them, they are confounded and enraged.
This passage shows us the immediate fruit of a true conversion: fellowship with the saints, a bold proclamation of the central truth of the gospel, and the inevitable reaction of a world that cannot process the sheer power of God's grace.
The Text
Now for several days he was with the disciples who were at Damascus, and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.” And all those hearing him continued to be astounded, and were saying, “Is this not the one who in Jerusalem destroyed those that called on this name, and who had come here for the purpose of bringing them bound before the chief priests?” But Saul kept increasing in strength and confounding the Jews who lived at Damascus by proving that this One is the Christ.
(Acts 9:19-22 LSB)
From Persecutor to Brother (v. 19)
The first thing to note is the immediate change in Saul's associations.
"Now for several days he was with the disciples who were at Damascus..." (Acts 9:19)
Remember the context. Saul had come to Damascus with letters of authorization to arrest these very people. He came as a wolf to the sheepfold. But after his encounter with the risen Christ, after his baptism by Ananias, he is not found skulking in the shadows, nor is he found back with his old companions from the Sanhedrin. He is found "with the disciples." The hunter has joined the flock. This is the first mark of genuine conversion. It is a transfer of allegiance, and therefore a transfer of fellowship. You cannot be joined to the Head, Jesus Christ, without being joined to His body, the church.
There is a profound lesson here for our individualistic age. Salvation is not a private affair between you and Jesus. It is a public enlistment in His army and a public adoption into His family. Saul, the arch-persecutor, is now breaking bread with the very people he had come to drag away in chains. Imagine those first meals. Imagine the mixture of fear, wonder, and dawning joy on the faces of the Damascus disciples as they listened to this man's testimony. Grace dissolves the old hatreds. The blood of Christ is a solvent powerful enough to wash away the deepest animosities. The man who was their greatest terror is now their brother.
The Non-Negotiable Proclamation (v. 20)
Saul's conversion is not a quiet, internal affair. It immediately, and I mean immediately, bursts forth in public proclamation.
"...and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, 'He is the Son of God.'" (Acts 9:20 LSB)
The word is "immediately." There is no probationary period. There is no three-year seminary course before he is allowed to speak. The truth that has captured him now compels him. When God lights a fire, it burns. And notice where he goes. He goes straight to the synagogues. He does not start a new "seeker-sensitive" gathering on the outskirts of town. He goes right back to the very places where he was authorized to carry out his persecution. He takes the fight directly to the intellectual and spiritual heart of the opposition.
And what is his message? It is not a vague testimony about a spiritual experience he had on the road. It is a direct, dogmatic, theological assertion: "He is the Son of God." This is the central, foundational, non-negotiable claim of Christianity. This is not just saying Jesus is a good teacher, or a prophet, or a moral example. To say He is the "Son of God" in a Jewish synagogue was to declare His deity. It was to say that the man from Nazareth, the one they had crucified as a blasphemer, was in fact Yahweh in the flesh. This was the very charge for which they had killed Jesus, and now their own star pupil, their fiercest champion, is proclaiming it as the central truth of the universe. This is not bridge-building. This is a declaration of war. All true evangelism begins with this glorious offense.
The World's Astonishment (v. 21)
The reaction from the Jews in the synagogue is entirely predictable. It is utter shock.
"And all those hearing him continued to be astounded, and were saying, 'Is this not the one who in Jerusalem destroyed those that called on this name, and who had come here for the purpose of bringing them bound before the chief priests?'" (Acts 9:21 LSB)
They are "astounded." The word implies they were knocked out of their senses. Their categories were scrambled. They knew who Saul was. They knew his reputation. He was their man, their weapon against this new heresy. And now he has completely flipped the script. Their champion is now fighting for the other side. This is the world's reaction to a true work of God. It cannot be explained in their terms. They see the effect, but they do not understand the cause. They can only point to the radical discontinuity: "Is this not the one...?"
Their astonishment is a testimony to the power of God. A man changing his behavior gradually can be explained away as self-improvement. But a man who does a complete one-eighty, who goes from murdering Christians to proclaiming Christ overnight, this defies natural explanation. This is the glory of a Damascus Road conversion. It leaves no room for human credit. No one could say that Saul talked himself into this, or that the disciples persuaded him with clever arguments. God simply reached down from heaven and turned him inside out. This kind of radical, inexplicable change is one of the great apologetics for the truth of the gospel.
The Unanswerable Argument (v. 22)
Astonishment quickly gives way to something else. As Saul continues, the Jews are not just shocked; they are intellectually defeated.
"But Saul kept increasing in strength and confounding the Jews who lived at Damascus by proving that this One is the Christ." (Acts 9:22 LSB)
Saul "kept increasing in strength." This refers not just to physical strength after his fast, but to the power and force of his argumentation. He is growing in his grasp of the gospel and his ability to articulate it. And what is the result? He is "confounding" the Jews. The word means to throw into confusion, to stir up, to bewilder. Their initial astonishment has now curdled into intellectual chaos. They have no answer for him.
And how does he confound them? Not by emotional appeals, but "by proving that this One is the Christ." The word for "proving" is a compound word that means to place together, to compare. Saul, the master of the Old Testament, is now laying the prophecies alongside their fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth. He is taking the very Scriptures they claimed to honor and showing, with inescapable logic, how they all point to Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ. He is not asking them to take his word for it; he is demonstrating it from their own book. He is shutting their mouths with the Word of God.
This is crucial. The Christian faith is not a blind leap. It is a reasoned faith based on the self-attesting Word of God. Saul did not check his brain at the door when he became a Christian; he had it sanctified. His formidable intellect, once a weapon against the church, was now a finely-honed instrument for its defense. He confounded them because the evidence, biblically demonstrated, was unanswerable. They could not refute his exegesis. And when men lose an argument but are unwilling to repent, their only remaining options are slander and violence, which is exactly where the story goes next.
Conclusion: The Unashamed Gospel
So what do we take from this? We see in Saul the pattern of every true conversion. First, there is a radical break with the world and a joyful fellowship with the saints. Second, there is an immediate and bold proclamation of the deity of Jesus Christ. You have not been saved to be silent. You have been drafted into a war, and the primary weapon is the spoken testimony that Jesus is the Son of God.
Third, we should expect the world to be astonished. If your Christianity never surprises or startles anyone, you should ask if it is the real thing. A faith that is perfectly at home in the world is a faith that has made a treasonous peace with the world. The gospel is, and always will be, a profound shock to the unbelieving system.
And last, we are to be ready to argue, to prove, to demonstrate from the Scriptures that Jesus is Lord. We are not to be ashamed of the logic of our faith. Like Saul, we must so master the Word of God that we can confound the opposition, not with clever rhetoric, but with the plain, powerful, and unanswerable truth of the Bible. The goal is not simply to win debates, but to shut the mouths of gainsayers and to show the world that our faith is not a fable, but the very grammar of reality.
Saul's new life began with this confounding proclamation. He began as he meant to go on. He would spend the rest of his life proclaiming this one, central, world-altering truth: that the crucified Jesus is the Son of God, the Christ, the King of all. And our lives, if we have been truly converted by the same grace, must be nothing less than an echo of that same glorious confession.