Biblion Bible Commentary
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Preaching in the synagogues, lowered over a wall
Acts 9:20-25
20 Immediately in the synagogues he proclaimed the Christ, that he is the Son of God. · WEB
He preaches at once in the buildings he carried warrants to, and within a short time is the one being hunted — the pattern of his whole ministry, established immediately.
Immediately in the synagogues he proclaimed the Christ, that he is the Son of God. The adverb is doing a lot of work and the location does more. He had asked for letters to the synagogues of Damascus; he now stands in those same synagogues, holding the argument from the other side. Nothing is said about a period of training. Whatever he needed, he had — a man schooled in the Scriptures who had just discovered what they were about.
The content is compressed into one clause and it is the highest claim available: not merely that Jesus is the Messiah, but that he is the Son of God. This is the only place the book uses that title of Paul's preaching, and it sits at the very beginning of it.
The congregations react with a question that is really an accusation of identity theft. Isn't this he who in Jerusalem made havoc of those who called on this name? They have his reputation exactly right, including his errand — he had come here intending to bring them bound before the chief priests. Amazement, in this book, is rarely the same as faith, and here it is a way of refusing to deal with what he is saying.
His response is to get better at it. He increased more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived at Damascus, proving that this is the Christ. The verb for confounding suggests an argument that cannot be answered on its own terms, and the method is proof from the Scriptures they held in common — the method of every sermon in this book.
The interval is passed over in four words: when many days were fulfilled. Paul, writing about these same months, says he went into Arabia and returned to Damascus, and that three years passed before he went up to Jerusalem Galatians 1:17–18. The narrative here compresses that stretch to a phrase, which is what a summary does; the two accounts are describing the same period at different scales and neither excludes the other.
What ends it is a plot to kill him. The watch is set on the gates day and night, which means the city is closed to him and the danger is organized rather than spontaneous. Within a few years of holding the coats at a stoning, he is the one a synagogue has decided to remove.
The escape is undignified and the text does not dress it up. His disciples took him by night and let him down through the wall, lowering him in a basket. He already has disciples, which says something about those months. And the most formidable preacher of the age leaves his first mission field in a container over a wall, at night, because other people carried him.
He remembered it. Years later, listing what he had endured, he could have begun anywhere and began with this — the governor, the guarded city, the window, the basket 2 Corinthians 11:32–33. Of everything that happened to him, the escape he chose to record as the first item is the one where he was completely helpless.
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