Evangelizing the Western Mindset - Part 10 — Winkie Pratney

Pragmatic and Experiential Tests of the Christian Worldview

We have been looking at a series of five interlocking circles that Clark Pinnock has laid out as just a good, convenient summary of different types of apologetic. We have looked at pragmatic, which was the first one.

We've looked at a number of different positions within this by taking a look at what the crowd thought of John the Baptist. Jesus summarized all of that statement by saying, you came out to look for a prophet, he's more than a prophet.

And yet, the one who is the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. So, we move from what you could call a pragmatic test. Does the Christian worldview fit with what is real? Does it make sense from where it starts to where it ends?

Does it match reality as we know it? And the tests that we placed on that come up smelling like a rose. In other words, pragmatically this thing fits. Then secondly, we looked at experience, we looked at witness.

Matter of fact, the Quaker church under George Fox, to them that was the major thing. Wesley put it like this way, the spirit answers to the blood and tells me I'm born of God. There is an experiential witness that is not to be despised.

Scripture says we have that assurance. His spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. So, there is a very real sense in which that is a testimony, it is an evidence and our speaking out into the world just as an individual witness is powerful.

Design, Humanity, and Cosmic Evidence

Thirdly, then we had the cosmic evidences and it's under these that the various studies of the world, what's sometimes called the teleological evidences, there's the design of the universe, the uniqueness of man.

We haven't even looked at man, but if we just look at man as an intricate personality, as a work of art or as an engineering marvel, man himself is an incredible mystery. There's just incredible evidence for design.

If you ever consider what the foot is, here it is, it just doesn't complain, it just carries you around all the time. But it's designed like a suspension bridge. It's arched and that flexing takes place all the time.

You'll stick it in jogging shoes and thump it for thousands of miles. You'll jump up and down on it. But just the foot alone, the way it's designed is incredible. The reason why I realized just how sophisticated just the hand and the foot are is because when we try to build robots now, and a great deal of engineering has gone into designing robots that will carry out simple tasks, it becomes an incredibly difficult matter just to make a hand, even if it's not as complex as the human hand, that will pick something up with enough strength to lift it, but not break something that is small.

I mean, the human hand can pick up something tiny like a pin and then can push something like a car. It's got all of this incredible amount of ability. You make a claw that's big enough to pick up a 40-pound weight and it goes to pick up an apple and goes...

And you just begin to realize what an incredible marvel the human body is. The heart, the brain itself. The brain is a nightmare to macroevolutionists. The eyes. How do you get eyes evolving? From light-sensitive patches, you know?

The eye is an incredible thing, the stereo vision. Here we have a set of cameras that work in full color. I've forgotten how many colors they... I think 530 ,000 different shades of color the average eye can see.

It's much, much more sensitive. I'm a photographer and the range of light that a camera has is nothing compared to the human eye. It can observe things from almost near darkness to brilliant, brilliant light.

And you've got automatic irises, automatic focus, you've got stereo vision, you've got all of these things happening all at once. The ears. The design just of man alone is worth an entire apologetic in itself.

And a matter of fact, one man, is it Brand? Philip Brand and Yancey have put together Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. And there's another book, a medical doctor has done two books. I would suggest for a tremendous apologetic just on man that you buy those two books.

I've forgotten what the second one is. One's called Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and it's just a study by a medical doctor on the human body. And there is an account there of what happens when you cut a finger or you get a cut on your hand and the incredible complexity of what happens in your body.

All of these things, there are chemicals that are dumped, there are alarm signals sent, there are a complete mobilization that's so sophisticated that takes place in seconds in your system. The human blood, all of these things.

And the Scripture hints many, many places on the design and complexity that Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, of course, is a quote about our substance, about what we're like. Scripture speaks thousands of years before it's discovered the life of the flesh is in the blood.

There is man himself as an apologetic, not to mention nature. Bill Garth has done three volumes of what he calls character sketches in nature and Scripture and uses the verse, ask now the birds and they will teach thee.

You know, and I really believe this. I believe when God designed the earth, He designed animals and birds and insects as object lessons. I don't think that Jesus came along and said, boy, that's a great idea, maybe I could use that as an object lesson.

I think it was designed like that. I think into the very design of God's universe He built in pointers, testimonies, evidences that would point anybody with a half a brain cell in His direction. And those who don't have half a brain cell, He would be able to give them a brain cell.

There are little books. This one is one that was very popular in New Zealand, The Seal of God in Creation and Word. Not a terrific cover on this one. This is an ancient copy I've had a long time. And this man's design in apologetics basically goes to patterns in the universe and then patterns in Scripture.

And he ties in the design of the universe with the design of the Bible and puts the two together and says, whoever shows by design, which up until a century ago when Darwinian thought began to really grab hold, the design argument, argument by design, was a major teaching.

It was in every university. The wonders of God and His creation pointed to a designer. The idea of design equals designer. And then it was replaced by time plus chance plus matter equals design. And some have pointed out that this plus, that's called fairy story.

So we have a world around us that testifies. Man himself is a testimony. Not even looking at his moral yearnings and desire for love. Where does love come from? Where does truth come from? Beauty, all these pragmatic things we looked at.

But those evidences there are well worth a good solid look at. And I encourage you to study design. A lot of engineers get saved because of that. Not just finding how incredibly complex man is. The reproduction, that's a nightmare for evolution.

How that developed. The birth of a human baby is an incredible miracle. A lot of nurses get saved watching that. And they go, how did that... We want to look now at historical again. We touched on this.

The Harmony of the Four Gospels

We looked at the Scriptures. And a couple of areas that were brought up. One special one, in the book Youth Aflame, I did four ways of studying the Bible. And they're just basic hermeneutics. They're just basic ways you approach Scripture.

One is called the inductive and one is called the topical and called the deep look, the wide look. There is one which I want to bring out today and I mentioned in our last session or after it. And that is the harmony of the Gospels.

Now, this area of the four different accounts of Jesus' life given in the Gospels has been a rock for people in two different ways. Some young people, when they first see these different accounts, as a matter of fact, the guy who started this thing lost his faith in Bible college being taught the harmonies of Scripture.

He was given all of these various accounts and the guy who taught him said, you know, well, we just can't reconcile these. They're just sort of problems. And so he went to with Christianity and later on he came back to God and this thing bothered him.

So one day he thought, well, what I'll do is I'll make a scrapbook. I'll get the New Testament, I'll cut it up in bits. You know, preachers do that all the time. And he thought, he got sick. He had TB and he had a long time of bed rest.

And he thought it would be interesting just to actually chop up the actual accounts of the thing. And he found that just by cutting the pieces out and dropping off the spare bits, he could actually put together an account given in three separate gospels, each one which was unique and distinctive and has its own style and flavor and texture.

That they actually fitted together without any loss of anything at all. He didn't have to throw anything away, he didn't have to add anything and it made perfect sense and it totally harmonized and it blew his mind.

And then he realized that he had really come on something that nobody had done before. And as a consequence, this book was finished about two or three days before his death. It's called The Life of Christ in Stereo, a foreword by Dr. Earl Radmacher.

And this is a far out book. It basically takes the four gospels and simply interweaves them. As a consequence of this, some problems which have been held up before as real difficulties and find this hard to reconcile, have just fallen so neatly into place that instead of it being a problem, it has become a tremendous apologetic.

Because we're actually dealing with four totally different people. Matthew was Jewish, Mark was Roman, Luke was Greek, John was Spacey. You know, we're dealing with something that is so different from everything else.

So what I want to do for you, I can't obviously go through this whole thing, but what he has done, to make it easy, this of course is taken from the Greek text. You can do it in the King James or New American Standard or whatever.

That's fine, but it's the Greek texts that ultimately this harmony is best seen in. And here is the point. You're aware, of course, that there are four gospels. There is Matthew, Mark, Luke and then John.

And the first three, these ones here, we call the synoptic gospels. And most harmonies of the Bible, the Diatestaron and some of these early ones, all they do is they put columns. You might have one in the back of your Bible, I've got one in the back of my Bible.

Sort of the harmony of the gospels. And it puts a list of the scriptures and where there seems to be parallel passage. And very, very often when you compare these things, it's hard to figure out what happened.

But the power of this thing is this, and I mentioned it briefly at the end of our last session. If I came in to, if this was a courtroom, and I did something, I did a series of events, and then I asked everybody to watch very carefully, I did these series of events, and then asked you to write down now what you could remember I did, we would not have everybody in this room write down exactly the same thing.

Some would remember some things, some would remember other things, many of you would have the same things, things that stuck in your mind, things that were particularly important or particularly significant or stuck out, everybody would have.

But if we put all of those accounts together then and carefully compared each one with each one, providing you didn't make mistakes in what you saw, we would be able to assemble, hopefully, the entire thing of what happened.

And it is that which is used in courts of law as a fundamental evidence that what is being said is the truth and not simply a story that has been passed out among the witnesses to share as a lie. And when we come to the scriptures, we find them written like that.

I mean, each one of these guys, even in the languages written, the Greek of Mark and the Greek of Luke and the Greek of John are different. There's different flavors, there's different colors. They're not at all like each other.

In the early days, people used to think that probably Matthew borrowed great chunks from Mark to make his account and that kind of thing. But what the harmony does, what this Gospels and Stereo shows, is that there is no necessity for one borrowing from the other at all.

That what we've got here is actually four different men telling a story. And I know I'm flying in the face of a great deal of law criticism saying this, but the life of Christ in Stereo shows there is no necessity of one borrowing from the other, that we actually have four people telling this story.

And when this, I call it interweave analysis, it's like the threads on the curtain thing I mentioned to you. Three different, we'll say four different colors, all woven together to form one story. Now the simplest way we can do this is, we'll do it just in English, but we'll label these one, two, three, and four.

I'll just ask you if you could look up this passage, and I've got it here in this thing, I'll have to look it up myself. It's in Matthew 22, 34 to 40. I remember reading this when it first came out, when the guy, it wasn't even a finished work yet.

I was still in Bible college and it blew my mind. It excited me so much, I began to use it in my Bible studies for that time on. And I've used it now, I guess, close on 16 years. And it has been a constant source of excitement to me.

It is a neat apologetic. And that was the principle I told you, you can go so far and get skeptical, you can read dumbly and not understand any of the problems, then you can hit problems and get skeptical.

Or you can plow on through those and say, this is God's Word, He's got something to say, I'm going to keep going. And even on a pragmatic basis, I think we talked about this, just on a purely pragmatic basis, if I had a choice between thinking like this, this book is mostly God's Word, it's probably got a lot of errors in it.

Do you see that? Or, this book is God's Word, it is free from error in the original autographs, and if there is a problem or a discrepancy somewhere, I'm going to keep plowing and I'm going to keep asking until I find out what that thing is.

On purely pragmatic grounds, I'd go with the second one. Do you know why? Because that second one is a greater motivator of inquiry than the first one. Now, on the first one, you just go, hey, it's probably one of those mistakes, and you never look at it again, and you can miss such incredible blessings.

In at least four areas that I've even seen quite hot licks Bible answer books. I think their answer is stupid. I don't think it's true at all. They come up with some weird, obscure little, well, it's probably this thing, and a simple principle like this harmonizes this thing on much deeper levels.

I'll give you this first, just in the Gospels, and then we'll go to a major thing that I've seen even Bible translators change words in, which I don't think are necessary at all. Okay? We'll call these then Matthew, Mark, Luke, and here's the Scriptures, Matthew 22, and you'll have to have three fingers at least for this, 34 to 40.

And then Mark 12, we'll only use two in here. I'll just show you the, I was trying to find a passage that had three or four, but then I thought you'd go crazy, 28 to 34. Now, when I say one, read Matthew.

When I say two, read Mark. You know, three is going to be, so just, we'll go for two. This is the first and great commandment. Okay? Start in Matthew. The principle here has been take the major passage, and if I wanted to visually do it like this, so it'd be like this.

Say we have a passage where we'll read this passage first in Matthew, then in Mark. Okay? So we'll see it as two distinct passages written by two different people, and one is Jewish, one is Roman, each have their own styles.

We analyze Mark, for instance. It's a very short gospel. It's very, Mark is a pragmatist. He's a realist. He's very, very full of energy and power. Everything happens straightway in Mark's gospel. Boats arrive at the thing straightway.

He's very impressed with crowds and with numbers. It's huge, multitudes is one of Mark's favorite words. He is a, if you want to give a gospel to somebody who's in a hurry and doesn't want to mess around, give them Mark's gospel.

And it shows Christ as a servant, and it shows Him as a man of great power, which is two things not usually put together in our world. Matthew's gospel, on the other hand, is eminently Jewish. It is a revelatory gospel.

It has many quotes like that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet. It's got a Jewish flavor in it. Luke's gospel, again, is different. Matthew's gospel shows Jesus as the Messiah, the promised King, the One who is the Anointed One, who is going to come to deliver Israel.

Even the genealogies of these two are different. For instance, Matthew's gospel is a forward-looking one. It is a prophetic genealogy. It looks forwards into the future. Mark doesn't even have a genealogy.

A servant is not known by his pedigree, but by his service. Luke's genealogy goes in the exact opposite direction. It shows Christ as a man. It shows Him, so it traces His genealogy in a historical sense instead of a prophetic sense.

And then John's gospel shows His genealogy in the other direction, that He is not only man and the promised, not only related to Adam, but He is also in the promised line of the Messiah, the King, and then He is also God's Son.

And that's neat to look at the genealogies in this, when they harmonize together. Okay, now let's read first Matthew 22. I'll just read it in King Jimmy. It's good enough for the Apostle Paul, it's good enough for me.

I'll just read it in the standard version here. When the Pharisees had heard that He had put the Sadducees to silence, they gathered together. Then one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question and says, tempting him and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

Jesus said to him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Now that's an account. It is coherent, it makes sense, it's not stilted. All the words are there necessary to put that account together. Now we go to Mark, Mark 12, and we come to a parallel account of this.

In verse 28, And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first commandment. And the second, like this, You shall love thy neighbor as thyself.

There is none other commandment greater than these. And then it goes on, Well said, Master, etc. Now watch what happens. Remember we're taking this from Greek, but it's fair enough in your English versions.

All we do here then, in taking these two passages, here's Matthew's account, here's Mark, a little bit shorter, in some places, a little bit longer in other places. What we do is, whenever there is a match of two exact same words, we drop one of them and leave the other one in.

But we leave nothing else out. We put in everything that is, you know, like there's one up here and nothing down here, we put it in. But we keep it in the order in which it arrives. And that's the only, there's no big, heavy, exegetical principle.

Whenever there's a doubling, you drop one of the things. And you leave everything else in, and you don't mess with the order, you don't try and change it. Greek order, of course. You stay in that, and away you go.

Okay? Here's the way it goes. So, I'll read it to you from this, and I want you to flip backwards and forwards. One, we're in Matthew now. But the Pharisees, when they heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together, and one of them, who was a lawyer, two of the scribes, having...

See, this guy's a heavy duty, he's not your ordinary lawyer. He's also a scribe. Which means he wrote out this thing, remember, and memorized it. So this guy really knows the law. He's not just a guy who interprets, he's also one who wrote it.

Having heard these disputations, and perceiving that He had answered them well, came up and, one, asked Him a test question, saying, Teacher, which commandment in the law is the great one? Two, which is the first commandment of all?

And Jesus answered him, the first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one law, and that's a quote, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

One, this is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it. Two, namely this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. One, on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Two, there is no greater commandment than these.

Now isn't that incredible? Now let me just read it to you without the one and the two. Okay, and you tell me what this sounds like. But the Pharisees, when they heard He had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together, and one of them, who was a lawyer of the scribes, having heard these disputations and perceiving that He had answered them well, came up and asked Him a test question, saying, Teacher, which commandment of the law is the great one?

Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, the first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one law, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.

This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it, namely this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. There is no greater commandment than these.

Now that is a gospel in stereo. It is a four-dimensional thing, and some other passages tie all four together like this. Now the thing, this would be fun for you to get into, but I'll leave this here afterwards and you can have a look.

What I did originally, in the original version, I underlined all the sections in different colors. Whenever there was a blue, I put blue for John and red for Matthew, and I went through that thing. And it's wild to read the thing.

But here is the question. If you just pick this up, you would recognize it as the gospel. You would not be quite sure what chapter it came from. We've got a Greek translation here, so there are little shades of difference.

But the original here, not a jot or a tittle has been dropped. Nothing has been dropped out to make something harmonized. It's all been in. Here are some very interesting conclusions from this. First of all, the ministry of Jesus was not simply three years.

It was closer to four. These are the consequences of this discovery. Jesus' ministry actually lasted closer to four years, not three. There are passages near the end of Jesus' life where it seems like He did four million things in three seconds.

And in the ordinary parallel things, people try and jam something He did there into the same place. But they don't belong there. They are properly spaced out. The other thing, and this is a wild one, is that Peter did not just deny Jesus three times, he denied Him six times.

He did two sets of three denials. In one, the cock had not crowed. In the second lot, he denied Him three times after that. And so Peter's denial looks much worse. It is not just a few inadvertent blunders.

It is an entire string of denials. And in each case, the prophecy Jesus gave, He said, before the cock crows, you will deny Me three times. And then He said, when we put the two together, we see Peter denying three times, the cock crows, and then denying Him another three times.

And it must have really smashed Peter to bits when at the end of those string of six, and it is so appropriate that it should be six denials. You know what six as a number represents in the Hebrew mind?

Six, six, six. Right at the end of that string of six denials, six is a man under sin number, it's basically what it means. Jesus walks out, having just been before the judge, He walks out on the balcony, He looks down, Peter's in the middle of his worst swearing match, Jesus looks down, Peter looks up, and broken hearted, it just busts him right up.

Harmonizing the Accounts of Paul's Conversion

Now, I want to give you another one of these, and this one is not in the Gospels, it is in the book of Acts, to show you the same principle operating. And this one has to do with the conversion of the apostle Paul.

Could you find for me, please, because I haven't looked at it, you know, find for me the account, there are three different accounts of the apostle Paul's conversion. We'll write them up on the board, we won't call them one, two, and three or anything, we'll just have a look at it.

I'll take a little time on this because it's a fun thing and we haven't had time to get into deeply any of these others. So, first account, where's the first account? Acts 9, okay, that's the actual record of it, and then later on he gives his testimony, at least twice.

Where are the other two accounts? Acts 22, and one more, and 26. All right, these are the three passages. Let me read it now from the original account, and we'll keep this in mind. See, the power of this apologetic is that that which looks like a difficulty turns out actually to be one of the strongest evidences for a mind supervising this thing.

What I read to you is clear, precise, filled with details, and yet you've got to understand, no one of these guys wrote this. Each one said their own thing in their own color, their own language, their own particular modes and forms.

Each one made sense within what they said, so if you just picked that one gospel, it would be it. It would still tell you the facts. But when you step back out of it, you see sometimes up to four people, and when you get a very key thing happening at the same, you know, a very critical thing, all four chime in on that same thing, and all speak about it at the same time.

But you're seeing a mosaic that couldn't have been put together without an incredible amount of research just on one, and the guy took, I've forgotten, 26 years to do the harmony of this thing. And you can imagine what, how people can write and figure out, you take this bit, I'll take this bit, you talk about Q and Matthew borrowing from Mark, this thing blows that to cheese.

It just says, everybody said what they said, but on a multi-level thing, somebody supervised it. And it's not even a big deal, it's just there. Stop at base one, if you like, and get skeptical, but if you push on, you'll get some real excitement in your life.

Now let's look at Acts 9. I'll read this first in the account of Saul's persecution, of his conversion. Saul, yet breathing threatenings and slaughter out against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, and desired of them letters to Damascus, to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound into Jerusalem.

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus. And I want to write down now some of these facts. Suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven. So he's on his way to Damascus, a light shines from heaven.

And he fell to the earth, and he heard a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, Who are you, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. It is hard for you to kick against the goads.

And he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what do you want me to do? And the Lord said, Go to the city, and it shall be told what you must do. And the man which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.

Saul arose from the earth, but his eyes were open. He saw no man, but they led him by hand, brought him into Damascus. Now we go to Acts 22, and we've got the essential elements of what happened in Paul's life, the record of it.

Go now to Acts 22, and here he's giving his testimony. It came to pass, as I made my journey, I was coming nigh unto Damascus, there's your place identification, about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light.

And I fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And I answered, Who are you, Lord? He said, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting. And here is where the New American Standard, or New International Version, I forget which one, maybe both, makes a change in language.

It was quite permissible. It's not, and it is actually a different word, but I don't think it's necessary. I know the reason why they did it, but it's not necessary. And here's the way it goes. They that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid, but they heard not the voice of him that spoke to me.

Okay? Now look at our board. They saw the light, but they did not hear the voice. Now Paul's thing says, heard a voice, but seeing nobody. So at that point, what is your, read your versions out. Tell me what you got.

Verse 9, who's got a New American Standard? Got it, Don? See the change of the word? See the word? Understand? That is a permissible translation. That same word could be translated understand, but it is not necessary.

The reason why they translated understand is because they thought this was a discrepancy. See? Hear he said, they heard, and up there it said he didn't hear. And that hearing is an understanding hearing.

But you can keep it as they didn't hear, because it doesn't belong there. Let's just follow the order of the thing. Verse 9, they that were with me, here we are, we're up to, who are you Lord? And we're up to, I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you're persecuting, and then at this point, verse 9 comes.

They that were with me, this is where we put it in, not here, this is something else, something different. I'll show you why it's different in a minute. They that were with me saw indeed the light, and they were afraid, but they did not hear.

You can translate it, understand it if you like. They didn't hear the voice of him that spoke. And I said, what shall I do, Lord? See? He said, arise, go to Damascus. And when I could not see for the glory of the light, I came to Damascus, and then so on.

In chapter 26, there's the same kind of thing. The light from heaven, a voice speaking to me, we added a little thing in verse 14 that throws some extra light on this, which gets much more exciting. I heard a voice speaking to me and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why are you picking on me?

Now, if we just simply stick these two together, do a harmony thing, do an interweave thing, and not try and fool around with hearing and understanding, then what we get is a beautiful revelation. It goes like this.

Let's just act it out. I'm Saul riding along in my donkey, light comes out of the... Ah! I fall off my donkey. I hear a voice speaking to me in Hebrew. Why Hebrew? Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

Now, what is going on here? Who are you, Lord? He thinks, uh-oh, this is the boss. But what does he mean persecuting him? I'm zealous for him. I'm killing Christians for Christ. I mean, this, you know?

I'm serving you. What do you mean? Who are you, Lord? Embarrassment, embarrassment. I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting. The knife not only goes in, it turns around a number of times. It is hard for you to kick against the bricks.

Ah! Now, what is going on with these other dudes? I'll tell you what's going on. A light. And all they see is Saul going like this. Who are you, Lord? Why? Because this is Paul's conversion. It is personal.

It is intimate. It is God and Saul. That's it. Nobody else. They don't need to know this. Whether they understand it or not, I don't care. They don't even have to hear it. Who are you, Lord? I am Jesus.

Still. And the men saw the light, but they heard not the voice of him that spoke to me. And then he says, and this is obedient, and the change actually takes place. Lord, what do you want me to do? See?