The Expositor's Bible: The Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 2 — John Shaqi
The Expositor's Bible: The Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 2Stokes, George Thomas
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 2
Stokes, George Thomas
Bible. Acts -- Commentaries; Bible. Acts -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Then, again, we have the voice that was heard. Difficulties have been
also raised in this direction. In the ninth chapter St. Luke states
that the attendant escort "heard a voice"; in the twenty-second
chapter St. Paul states "they that were with me beheld indeed the
light, but they heard not the voice of Him that spake to me." This
inconsistency is, however, a mere surface one. Just as it was in the
case of our Lord Himself reported in John xii. 28, 29, where the
multitude heard a voice but understood not its meaning, some saying
that it thundered, others that an angel had spoken, while Christ alone
understood and interpreted it; so it was in St. Paul's case; the
escort heard a noise, but the Apostle alone understood the sounds, and
for him alone they formed articulate words, by him alone was heard
the voice of Him that spake. And the cause of this is explained by St.
Paul himself in chapter xxvi., verse 14, where he tells King Agrippa
that the voice spake to him in the Hebrew tongue, the ancient Hebrew
that is, which St. Paul as a learned rabbinical scholar could
understand, but which conveyed no meaning to the members of the
temple-police, the servants, and constables of the Sanhedrin who
accompanied him.[35] Many other questions have here been raised and
difficulties without end propounded, because we are dealing with a
region of man's nature and of God's domain, wherewith we have but
little acquaintance and to which the laws of ordinary philosophy do
not apply. Was the voice which Paul heard, was the vision of Christ
granted to him, subjective or objective? is, for instance, one of such
idle queries. We know, indeed, that these terms subjective and
objective have a meaning for ordinary life. Subjective in such a
connexion means that which has its origin, its rise, its existence
wholly within man's soul; objective that which comes from without and
has its origin outside man's nature. Objective, doubtless, St. Paul's
revelation was in this sense. His revelation must have come from
outside, or else how do we account for the conversion of the
persecuting Sanhedrist, and that in a moment? He had withstood every
other influence, and now he yields himself in a moment the lifelong
willing captive of Christ when no human voice or argument or presence
is near. But then, if asked how did he see Christ when he was blinded
with the heavenly glory? how did he speak to Christ when even the
escort stood speechless? we confess then that we are landed in a
region of which we are totally ignorant and are merely striving to
intrude into the things unseen. But who is there that will now assert
that the human eye is the only organ by which man can see? that the
human tongue is the only organ by which the spirit can converse? The
investigations of modern psychology have taught men to be somewhat
more modest than they were a generation or two ago, when man in his
conceit thought that he had gained the very utmost limits of science
and of knowledge.
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