Acts 26:14

THE VOICE FROM HEAVEN

‘I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying … It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.’

Acts 26:14

So far as we know, those words were the first with which the silence of the Unseen was broken on earth since the Lord, rising from amidst the Eleven, on the hill-top above Bethany, had given them His blessing as He went. He had been seen once in His exaltation by Stephen, and Stephen had appealed to Him to receive his spirit. But there appears no record of an audible reply. Now, revealed again, Jesus is pleased to speak. He is there, objectively there, there in bodily reality (such, we know, was St. Paul’s absolute and lifelong conviction); and the air vibrated there with the spoken words, ‘It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.’

Is there not a wonder in that sentence, so spoken, and is there not a message in the wonder? We listen; it is a voice from the excellent glory. It is the speech of the Son of God, incarnate, glorified, supreme. What will be the style of His eloquence? What words almost unspeakable will sound from that height, conveying, surely, rather a sublime bewilderment to mortal ears than anything level to their receiving? Well, this was the sentence as it came: ‘It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.’

Here is, indeed, a paradox, when we come to look at it; a discord, almost grotesque at the first thought, if the words may be tolerated by reverence—but unspeakably thrilling as we think again. The King of Glory, from this place of light, putting out His autocratic power to change the course of history through that sovereign revolution in a human will of the first order, has occasion to speak; and speaking, He uses just a proverb, a homely proverb of the farm. Present to His mind is the ox that drags along the Galilæan peasant’s plough; the beast is sullen in his ponderous strength; he lashes back against the steel-shod goad; and he suffers for it, and he gives in at last. No throne of grace, or of glory, can modify His accustomed and most majestic simplicity. From the midst of the things unseen and eternal He stoops down to talk about the ox, and the goad, and the useless rebellion of the poor beast—all in the act of new-creating a Saul into a Paul.

And what are the messages to us of this divinely rustic voice from heaven?

I. Has it not something all of its own to tell us about that upper life, and its inhabitants, and above all about its ascended Prince? To me it seems that ‘heart and mind’ may feel a strong uplifting power, as they seek there to ascend and there to dwell, in this proverb out of the glory above. It says to us that the Unseen, ‘where Christ sitteth,’ the Paradise, the Third Heaven, may be indeed the place on due occasion for words unspeakable, which it is not lawful for mere man to utter—but not for them only. It is hospitable also to speak about the humblest works and most laborious days of our mortality. It is no mere sphere of transcendental abstractions, nor even only the palace of Powers and Virtues aloof from time. Heaven keeps a warm and genial continuity of thought with earth, and we need not wonder that its messengers, when their ministry gives occasion, know how to talk familiarly to man about manger and swaddling-clothes, about streaming tears and gazing eyes, about Judæa and Galilee, about girdle and sandals, about Paul and Cæsar, and shipwreck and escape.

II. But above all, this voice from the glory above, as it comes from the lips of our Redeemer, takes us straight back again to His own human heart and faithful sympathy.—He is indeed, in the words of the man whom He converted in that great hour, words written (surprising thought) while scores, while hundreds of people yet lived who could remember His face and His bearing at Nazareth or in Jerusalem—He is exalted far above all heavens, to fill all things. Through Him, and also for Him, as their sublime goal and Head, ‘all things were made,’ and among them ‘the mighty kingdoms angelical’ in all the continents of heaven. But none the less, now as truly as ever, He is the Mother’s Son of a human home, the loving Neighbour of a terrestrial countryside. He is Redeemer, Mediator, King of Glory, God the Son of God. But oh! He is also the Friend, the Companion, the Brother, of our simplest, saddest, happiest, tenderest hour below. No fancied gulf of space isolates Him from us as we are; no limits of our body of humiliation confine us below His vivid sympathies. He Who does not forget the Galilæan farm takes to His heart the least romantic joys and sorrows of an English life.

Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustrations

(1) ‘ “Lord Jesus,” writes Joseph Hall, in the last of his quaintly noble Contemplations, “it is not heaven that can keep Thee from me; it is not earth that can keep me from Thee.” ’

(2) ‘One hundred and sixty years ago, when a narrow but penetrating scepticism had widely and deeply affected educated English circles, an honest and anxious sceptic, George Lyttleton, afterwards first Baron of the name, discovered in the great Conversion, studied afresh with patient and open thought, good reason for intellectual reassurance and a return to reverent faith. “He found,” says Samuel Johnson, in the last of his Lives of the Poets, “that religion was true; and what he had learned he endeavoured to teach by Observations on the Conversion of St. Paul, a treatise to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious answer.” Those last words may or may not be true to fact. Few arguments are so massive or so subtle as to preclude the production of a specious answer. But it is surely true that Lyttleton’s book (enriched not many years ago with a prefatory essay by that suggestive thinker, Henry Rogers) is still extremely well worth reading; it can still remind us, in a way of its own, of the vastness and depth of the historical as well as spiritual significance of the Conversion.