(9) He was three days without sight.--It is natural to think of this period of seclusion from the visible world as one of spiritual communion with the invisible, and we can hardly be wrong in referring the visions and revelations of the Lord, the soaring as to the third heaven, and the Paradise of God, of which he speaks fourteen or fifteen years later, to this period. (See Notes on 2Corinthians 12:1-4.) The conditions of outward life were suspended, and he lived as one fallen into a trance--in the ecstacy of an apocalyptic rapture. (Comp. the analogous phenomena in Ezekiel 8:1-4.)

Verse 9. - Did neither for neither did, A.V. The same reason, we may venture to think, which caused the interposition of three days' blindness between Saul's conversion and his baptism, led Saul himself to pass those days in a voluntary self-abasement. His sin in persecuting the Church of God and its Divine Head, his guilt in assisting at the death of God's saints, and in rejecting the testimony to Christ's resurrection, had been very great. These three days of blindness and of fasting were therefore a fitting preparation for the grace of forgiveness about to be so freely and fully given to him (1 Timothy 1:12-16). What thoughts must have passed through Saul's mind during those three days! Before passing on, it may be well to observe that it is to this appearance to him of Jesus Christ that St. Paul undoubtedly refers when he says (1 Corinthians 9:1), "Have not I seen Jesus Christ?" and again (1 Corinthians 15:8), "Last of all, he was seen of me also," where he puts this appearance of Jesus to himself on a par with those to Peter and James and the other apostles, which made them competent witnesses of the resurrection of Christ. And so in ver. 17 of this chapter Ananias says, "The Lord Jesus which was seen by thee" (ὁ ὀφθείς σοι); and Barnabas (ver. 27), when he brought Saul to the apostles, related "how he had seen the Lord in the way." And in Acts 22:14 Ananias says, "God hath appointed thee to see the Righteous One." Moreover the description in ver. 7 of Saul's fellow-travelers, that they "saw no man," implies, by contrast, that Saul did. The reticence of both St. Paul and St. Luke as to what he saw, and what was the appearance of the Lord Jesus, seems to arise from profound reverence and awe, such as St. Paul speaks of in 2 Corinthians 12:4. It may be also worth remarking how this appearance of Christ was deferred till he was quite close to Damascus, according to one tradition only a quarter of a mile from the gates, but according to Porter, whom Farrar and Lewin follow, at a distance of about ten miles, at a village called Caueab. So the intervention of the angel by which Isaac's life was spared was not till Abraham had the knife in his hand to slay his son; and Peter's prison doors were opened not till the very night before he was to have been brought forth to death. Faith and patience are thus strengthened, and God's intervention is more marked. There is not the slightest trace in the narrative of what the fancy of many has suggested, that Saul's uneasy conscience was wrought up into a paroxysm as he approached Damascus, and so prepared the way for the vision of Christ. Even Canon Farrar's eloquent description of what he supposes to have been the thoughts which agitated Saul's mind on his eventful journey seems hardly to rest on any solid base (see 'Life of St. Paul,'vol. 1. Acts 10.).

9:1-9 So ill informed was Saul, that he thought he ought to do all he could against the name of Christ, and that he did God service thereby; he seemed to breathe in this as in his element. Let us not despair of renewing grace for the conversion of the greatest sinners, nor let such despair of the pardoning mercy of God for the greatest sin. It is a signal token of Divine favour, if God, by the inward working of his grace, or the outward events of his providence, stops us from prosecuting or executing sinful purposes. Saul saw that Just One, ch. 22:14; 26:13. How near to us is the unseen world! It is but for God to draw aside the veil, and objects are presented to the view, compared with which, whatever is most admired on earth is mean and contemptible. Saul submitted without reserve, desirous to know what the Lord Jesus would have him to do. Christ's discoveries of himself to poor souls are humbling; they lay them very low, in mean thoughts of themselves. For three days Saul took no food, and it pleased God to leave him for that time without relief. His sins were now set in order before him; he was in the dark concerning his own spiritual state, and wounded in spirit for sin. When a sinner is brought to a proper sense of his own state and conduct, he will cast himself wholly on the mercy of the Saviour, asking what he would have him to do. God will direct the humbled sinner, and though he does not often bring transgressors to joy and peace in believing, without sorrows and distress of conscience, under which the soul is deeply engaged as to eternal things, yet happy are those who sow in tears, for they shall reap in joy.And he was three days without sight,.... Without bodily sight; for otherwise all this while his spiritual sight was increasing, and Christ was giving him by his Spirit a full view of himself, his state and case, and where his salvation was; and a clear insight into the doctrines of the Gospel, which he is said to have by the revelation of Christ, whereby he was fitted for the immediate preaching of it:

and neither did eat nor drink; having no regard unto, or time for either; being filled with grief and sorrow, and true repentance for sin, and taken up in prayer to God, and employed in attending to, and receiving the doctrines of grace, he was afterwards to publish.