Psychodynamics refers to the aggregate of motivational forces, conscious and unconscious, working together to contribute to a person’s decisions, attitudes, and actions. The Bible is a record of real people who have real-life experiences that are processed within real hearts and minds and, thus, serve as examples to us of how God works through events and circumstances to present opportunities for people to experience His healing (1 Corinthians 10:6, 10). But it also reveals how our internal fears, insecurities, biases, assumptions, and preferences can resist the Spirit of God and cause us to seek to avoid God’s healing truth to our own detriment. The experiences of Saul of Tarsus, up through the events at Damascus Road, are quite instructive to us when considering this process and how God works to win us to salvation.

We are told that Saul was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless” (Philippians 3:5, 6 NIV84).

Saul was raised in a legalistic religion, a system that had corrupted saving truths given by God with imposed law and rules—the lie that God’s law functions like human law, that righteousness is found in law-keeping, and that justice is found in law enforcement through inflictions of punishments. It was a religion that was harsh, punitive, and unjust, as evidenced by the many examples recorded in Scripture of discrimination, exploitation, cruelty, and greed, all under the guise of religious law-keeping.

Then Jesus came and exposed the falsity of that legal system. He set the various teaching tools, symbols, ceremonies, and rituals into their proper perspective—back under the truth of design law, love, and trust. Every one of Jesus’ parables teaches reality, God’s design laws built into the fabric of the cosmos!

Indeed, Jesus’ life demonstrated in action that God is the source of life, healing, forgiveness, and grace and that God is not the source of inflicted pain, suffering, and death. At His crucifixion, Jesus revealed, in the most unjust and abusive of circumstances, that God will not use power to inflict external punishment upon evildoers, but that He leaves all beings free to choose their own course and to reap what they have chosen in their own lives.

When we are won to trust and choose to surrender to Him, we reap eternal life. But when we reject Him, we cut ourselves off from life and reap destruction—the punishment for sin (Galatians 6:8).

Saul had heard the reports of Christ’s life—and it didn’t fit with his understanding of law and religion. Then Stephen gave his sermon to the Jewish leaders (Acts 7), and the Bible says,

When they heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he fell on his knees and cried out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he fell asleep. And Saul was there, giving approval to his death (Acts 7:54–8:1 NIV84, emphasis mine).

Those who do not have hearts that love truth become furious, agitated, hostile, and abusive when truth is presented. They cover their ears and make noise to drown out the truth, and they seek to destroy all those who are truth-bearers.

Saul heard Stephen’s testimony; he knew his Bible, and he saw the evidence, the evidence of the character and methods of imposed law, legalism, rules, and rule-enforcement, and the opposing evidence of truth, love, and freedom. Just like Jesus, Stephen presented the truth in love and left his persecutors free. He prayed for their salvation, heaven opened, and his face radiated light like an angel—he saw Jesus!

And Saul was standing right there.

He could not ignore these real events. They caused him, what we call in psychiatry, cognitive dissonance—the events, the facts, the evidence, the outcome, what he witnessed, did not fit with his biases, assumptions, beliefs, expectations, and worldview. The Spirit of truth was working to bring the truth to Saul, and he came under conviction. His spirit was not at peace. He was struggling with guilt. He knew something was wrong—but he could not explain why he was not at peace. Why? Because he was following the law, obeying rules, doing what he understood to be righteous.

Yet, because it was not right, he experienced the conviction that something was wrong. And what did he do? He tried to remedy his feeling of guilt of being wrong with God by doing what his legal theology told him—he sought to work harder for the cause. Rather than seeking truth, rather than wrestling out his guilt and anxiety with God, Saul invested himself even more in legalistic religious activity. He sought more external power to employ imposed law and external enforcement to hunt down and punish “heretics.” In other words, Saul was under conviction because of the truth he had heard and seen, but rather than repenting, he sought to resolve his own guilt by denying the truth and embracing the “law,” using “legal” actions of “law enforcement” to destroy the other sources of the same truth that was causing him to be distraught.

We see this same dynamic throughout all human history. Jesus said,

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God (John 3:16–21 NIV84, emphasis mine).

God sent Jesus as the light, the truth, not to condemn but to save, to be the remedy to sin. We are all born in sin, conceived in iniquity (Psalm 51:50), dying of the terminal sin condition that none of us chose to have (Colossians 2:13). God does not need to condemn us because our condition is terminal. God needs to heal and save, which is why He sent His Son!

It is the truth that destroys the lies and wins us to trust, empowering us to open our hearts to receive from Jesus His victory, a new spirit of love and trust (Galatians 2:20; Hebrews 8:10). But if people refuse the light, refuse the truth, refuse the healing presence of God and prefer the darkness, prefer the sickness to the cure, they stand condemned already because their natural state is “dead in trespass and sin” (Ephesians 2:1), terminal, and they are refusing the only cure.

When the light of truth shines in, it brings conviction; it inflames our inadequacies, guilt, and shame until we surrender to Jesus and are reborn. Then all our guilt and shame are taken away, and we have peace with God because we are now, through Christ, partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

But as the light of truth is brought to other hearts and minds, some run from the truth, deny the truth, and seek to make the natural state of fear, insecurity, guilt, and shame go away through their own actions in some way—denial that anything is wrong; mind-altering substances to numb their guilt and shame; by associating with others who also refuse the truth and who will tell them that they are actually righteous; or, like Saul, through various religious activities performed with zeal and hard work to make oneself feel better and give self a “proof” that they are doing right and therefore are right.

So Saul was struggling with his conscience. Rather than repenting and being reborn, he sought the solution that his false theology of legalism and rule enforcement had taught him; he sought to do good works and inflict punishment on those he believed were heretics in order to stamp out evil and make himself feel better. And it was in this state of internal turmoil, while on a mission against God, that Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, with an intervention perfectly suited to break through denial, clarify what confused him, and bring the evidence and truth Saul needed to have his mind freed from the lies of his upbringing. He was hit with a display of might and power and blinded. Saul was confronted with the truth that he had been warring against Jesus, and Jesus is the Messiah. Saul’s previous view that anyone crucified is under God’s curse was refuted by this evidence. Saul’s previous view that Jesus was weak and powerless was refuted by this evidence. The truth revealed by Jesus confronted his biases and false assumptions that the Messiah would rule with power to punish His enemies—and since Jesus didn’t use such power, Paul falsely thought that Jesus must be weak and, therefore, a false Messiah.

Saul now realized that Jesus has power, which triggered many more questions—why didn’t Jesus use power to stop the abuse? Why didn’t Jesus use power to put down rebellion? Why didn’t Jesus use power to punish evil? But Jesus, rather than telling Saul the answers, left Saul blind for a few days to diminish the distractions and give Saul time to really think (cut him off from social media), and He sent him to another human to discuss what happened.

Why didn’t Jesus, after the mighty display of power, after Saul fell down in acknowledgment that Jesus is Lord, say something like, “Obey me! Worship me! Do what I command”? Because what Jesus wants is our love, trust, loyalty, devotion, and friendship. And none of that can be achieved by the use of might, power, intimidation, force, and command. The only way to achieve love, trust, and friendship is by winning people with truth, love, and freedom!

So Jesus gave Saul evidence that He is really God and the Messiah, something Saul did not believe. The display of power broke through Saul’s false assumptions that Jesus was a false Messiah who couldn’t stop the abuse that happened to Him, and it required him to rethink why Jesus would allow it. What was Jesus accomplishing? And in order to be fully persuaded, Saul needed time, quiet time, time to reflect, time to ask questions, time to check the evidence, and an atmosphere free of intimidation to come to his own conclusion—so Jesus sent him to Ananias.

And Saul of Tarsus becomes Paul the Apostle, a transformed man who no longer practiced the methods of imposed law and law enforcement but wrote that “every person must be fully persuaded in their own mind” (Romans 14:5).

Our God is too amazing to describe—the infinite Creator who is supreme in power yet equally gracious, a being of absolute love, and love only exists and operates in an atmosphere of freedom. This means God’s laws are design laws—the protocols of life and it is only by being in harmony with them that we experience health and wellbeing.

Sin breaks God’s design laws and directly causes harm to the sinner. Through Jesus, God took upon Himself the burden of eradicating the sin, the defect, the infection of fear and selfishness from humanity and restoring us back to love and trust. I invite you to do like Paul—take the time to reflect, consider, examine the evidence, and be fully persuaded in your own mind that our God is worthy of our trust and to reject forever the lie that God’s law functions like human law, reject forever the penal/legal lie that has infected so many minds and, instead, to live your life in harmony with God’s design law of love, truth, and freedom—loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and your neighbor as yourself.