Resistance is Futile
“I am standing trial for the hope of the promise made by God to our fathers; the promise to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly serve God night and day. And for this hope, O King, I am being accused by Jews. Why is it considered incredible among you people if God does raise the dead?
“So then, I thought to myself that I had to do many things hostile to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And this is just what I did in Jerusalem; not only did I lock up many of the saints in prisons, having received authority from the chief priests, but also when they were being put to death I cast my vote against them. And as I punished them often in all the synagogues, I tried to force them to blaspheme; and being furiously enraged at them, I kept pursuing them even to foreign cities. While so engaged as I was journeying to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, at midday, O King, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining all around me and those who were journeying with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew dialect, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’” (Acts 26:6-14)
Paul never preached to the choir. When King Agrippa and his sister Bernice arrived in Caesarea to pay their respects to the new Roman governor, Porcius Festus, Agrippa asked if he could listen to Paul. So Paul told the king about how he had been a persecutor of Christians until Jesus had appeared to him and changed the whole course of his life.
What did Jesus mean when he told Paul that “it is hard for you to kick against the goads?” In Greek literature, to fight against the goads meant to resist one’s destiny and to do battle against the “will of the gods.” By persecuting Christians, Paul had been fighting God’s will for his life, since, as Paul later told the Galatians, God had set him apart from birth to preach the gospel message (Galatians 1:15). So when Jesus told Paul he was kicking against the goads, he was simply telling Paul that he was fighting God’s will for his life—not an easy thing to do. In fact, resisting God’s will is ultimately futile, because God always gets his way. Since we’re going to do God’s will anyway, it is better for us to give in sooner rather than later. It will hurt less.
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