Before Damascus, Saul/Paul could not conceivably have imagined a way that God could extend to the undeserving, totally misguided, polytheistic and idol-worshipping Gentiles, of reachable salvation by grace through faith…through lives previously exhibiting the most unmerited works as viewed by a Jewish Pharisee at that time.
But a well-educated young Pharisee erroneously persecuting the early Christians could appreciate the overwhelming grace of God needed to commence the Great Commission, through the loving outreach of forbearance rather than condescending derision.
This brilliant creativity of imaginative insight in crafting this life-script for the apostle Paul to enable him through super-humility to become the missionary evangelist to the larger Greco-Roman world at this time-period of the start of the Great Commission (Mt. 28:19-20), to my thinking is uncannily similar to the brilliance of the Big Bang creation of the universe, the origin of life, the nanotechnology inside living cells, and human conscious thought that we examine through science.
The revelation on the road to Damascus that Jesus was the Christ was a priceless gift to Paul that was beyond the human perception of one of Jerusalem’s young rising stars within its tight rabbinical group.
This need for God’s light in this critical area of discernment was not lost upon Saul/Paul as he took the gospel message out to the Greco-Roman world in the first-century, that Jesus as the truth active in our lives will set us free beyond our wildest imagination.
Paul the apostle is the epitome of the Christian salvation by grace-through-faith message to the world, because he more than anybody recognized that he should have known better, but missed it.
This revelation on the road to Damascus eliminates forever for Paul the program of self-salvation through the misguided effort of performing good-works, because with all of his education and knowledge about the Law of Moses, he lacked the needed, upfront discernment to see that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Christ (Mt. 5:17).
But here Paul is in good company.
The prophet Samuel similarly cannot discern amongst the sons of Jesse a suitable future king for Israel, using outward appearances as the criteria for selection (1 Sam. 16:6-12).
John the Baptist displays discernment that falls short of divine perfection in doubting from prison the messianic identity of Jesus of Nazareth (Mt. 11:1-3).
At the Lord’s Supper, the other eleven apostles had no idea that Judas would be the traitor who betrays Jesus to the authorities (Mt. 26:20-25).
Finally, the fundamental question having eternally cosmic implications is why isn’t reaching the truth much easier than it is?
This is why Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (Jn. 3:3).
This is why modern science is a search for truth regarding phenomena in the natural world.
This is why God-composed, adventure of faith life-scripts displace our ways with God’s higher ways and thoughts (Is. 55:8-9), a concept that is anathema to the philosophical worldview of secular humanism.
This is why, to be able to adjudicate the question of the competence of either Satan or God to be the King and Ruler for an eternity of time to come, God has given to the believer the indwelling of His Spirit as a personally accessible PhD theology and life-coach professor, guiding believers through our research program into the knowledge of good and evil (Jn. 16:13; Rev. 3:20; Heb. 11:6).
This is why there must be a fallen, broken world that contains evil and suffering, that with tragically unavoidable consequences is nonetheless necessary to separate-out the outcomes between self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty, being the fundamental, primary issue within the broad array of moral concepts, first introduced at the temptation in the Garden of Eden.
This is consistent with a vertical continuum-line that contains light and darkness, and good and evil as a real-world reality in a cognitive, sentient, intellectual and moral reasoning heaven and earth.
Redemptive salvation by grace through faith in Christ, provides the impunity of being able to enter into a research program into the knowledge of good and evil, utilizing the lens of an imperfect yet redeemed earthen vessel to comprehend the subtle nuances contained within the broad array of moral concepts.
To my thinking this is the epitome of the concept of being an inference to the best explanation, based upon the evidence currently on the earth today.
The cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ enables believers to surgically investigate the knowledge of good and evil without ruining ourselves or the world.
This is a spiritual engineering feat by God of remarkable insight, precision, and the daring boldness of confident leadership to open-up a way through the inviolability of our free-will, to willingly choose to follow Him into a higher journey in this life.
Jesus Christ with His arms opened wide on the cross and spilling His life’s blood on our behalf, is telling us that He is also willing to do His part in the painful process of researching the knowledge of good and evil in which from time-to-time we are bound to fall and skin our knees.
But this will produce our ability to discern virtue and righteousness through the unavoidable route of first-hand field research.
The bottom-line in the Bible is that we need God to craft life-scripts for us to lead and guide us into all truth (Jn. 16:13), assisted by spiritually born-again, new hearts and minds that have eyes to see and ears to hear (Jn. 3:3; Mt. 11:15).
Satan’s insurrection in heaven and as exhibited by the continuous and repetitive chaos on earth in the affairs of mankind, is by definition the exact opposite of God-sovereignty.
From the Christian viewpoint, this is one of the reasons why God created the universe.
This is one of the seemingly inexplicable mysteries within human intellectual and moral reasoning for why some people succumb to the deceptive appeal of personality cult leaders (2 Sam. 15:6; Rev. 12:9), that must be resolved here and now for the benefit of eternity, time without end.