After the announcement made by the Archangel Gabriel to a young girl named Mary that she would conceive from the Holy Spirit, the Gospel of Saint Luke in its 39th verse of the first chapter tells us that She "got ready and hurried of to a town in the hill country of Judea” (The Good News Bible With Deuterocanonical Books)" where her cousin lived because the Annunciation, that is to say, the announcement of the birth by the omnipotence of the Holy Spirit of the saviour of humanity was accompanied by the revelation of the conception of Elisabeth or Saint Elizabeth commonly known as barren, who was at that time in her sixth month of pregnancy.
Mary perhaps did not understand how she was going to conceive, but she simply believed the words of the Archangel because she has a personal relationship with a God who is truth and who constantly reveals Himself in the intimacy of all those who choose to trust Him despite everything or to build a personal relationship with Him which He will strengthen over time through a succession of marvellous works in the lives of all those who choose to believe and contribute to His project of salvation of the human race through His son Jesus Christ.
Whether a believer or not, human beings always need tangible proof. As long as Men does not see the wonders of God in his life for example, or does not have a divine revelation, whether he is a believer or not, he will always or almost be in an obscurantism which does not always allow him to act as He should or take the necessary step back to understand certain things. Finding oneself in this type of situation can lead the person for example to harm others, perhaps without knowing it and in the name of a law or a truth that he knows is of divine origin but that he cannot really understand without a spirit of openness allowing him to also see the good that is in others and not just condemn what he do not know or limit himself to a set of knowledge which do not promote the acceptance of others despite their differences.
Son of a Pharisee and Pharisee himself (Acts 23, 6), Paul and earlier Saul the persecutor of Christians had the fear of God but he did not know who Jesus is and even less that Jesus is Lord. How would we react if we had grown up in a doctrine that resulted from the personal relationship that God had with the Jewish people and then one day, other trends or a particular trend arrives, seeking to impose another way of living a relationship with God?
As long as God does not say who He is, as long as He does not reveal Himself, as long as He does not describe His identity, as long as we do not ask Him who He is, He will always be a person we don't know, or the disciple of a doctrine which must disappear.
Also read: Fear and the gift of the fear of God: He who loves is peaceful and kind
Some people think that in order to force Saul to accept Jesus as Lord and work in His name, God made him blind when that is not the case. For all those who know that God exists and who believe in Him, God Himself gives them the means to know Him better which have nothing to do with any punishment in the sense of forcing a person to follow God or to give his life to Jesus but grant him the grace of knowing better the one he has chosen to serve freely and who will reveal Himself more to him. If indeed we serve God, we must also take the necessary step back or give ourselves the time to better discern so that our service is not a means for us to destroy those who do not think like us. God does not force anyone to follow Him. He intervenes in favour of those who work in His name by using all the means He deems necessary to achieve His objectives. The fact that He is Almighty does not mean that we are puppets or individuals who borrow the expression borrowed from Psalm 139 and Romans 11 from verses 16 for the first and 33 to 34 for the second, namely the ways of the lord are inscrutable to say that there is nothing more to do because everything is fixed in advance. Even if we consider the fact that Jesus predestined Saul to be one of His greatest servants, this did not give Saul the right to persecute Christians. And this is why Jesus asks Him why is he persecuting Him? He asks this question because He knows that Saul is persecuting a person he does not know for reasons that may be valid for the Jews of that time but not for God. Paul was not blinded by God but by his own ignorance which led him to harm someone he did not know personally.
And in another context, if we consider once again the fact that everything is fixed in advance by God in the sense (it is necessary to clarify) of an intangible future or an existence without hope of a better tomorrow after humiliations or distressing situations, it is sure that sterile women and men who after a very long time like Saint Elizabeth had children would never have had children. If this were the case (speaking of a future without hope), the Blessed Virgin Mary would simply have said that she is the servant of the Lord and that it be done to her according to His word because what happens to her is an inevitability and one must simply submit to it under penalty of sanction.
But since that is not what it is about, The Most Holy Virgin Mary believed because she believes that God can do everything. And the fact of believing does not mean that we know everything. God alone can do everything and knows everything. I therefore adhere to God's daily plan in my life because I know that He is God and that He has already demonstrated it to me in the past through what He had done in the lives of those who preceded me and even in mine. If He wants the marvel that I am according to Him to have the grace to carry in her the salvation of the world, may His will be done because I believe in Him. It is in this sense and in the image of The Most Holy Virgin Mary, Saint Elizabeth and Saint Paul that we must understand the intervention of God in the daily life of Men.
The God of miracles
Let us not forget that it is a God who wants to make Himself better known who, through the conversion of Saint Paul, which is also ours in one way or another, destroyed the fear that the persecution of Saul aroused in the hearts of the first Christians through the gift of the fear of God which He gave to Saint Paul after helping him recover his sight. Saul believed he was serving God by persecuting Christians when that was not the case. Jesus performed miracles, He suffered, He died and He rose again. He manifested Himself to His disciples after His resurrection and to several other people. But He had not yet revealed Himself to Saul, A fervent servant of God.
On the path to his (Saul) conversion which is also ours, He said to him: “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting (Acts 26, 15 - New American Standard Bible)”. The one who has the power to enable the blind to regain their sight. To the sick to be healed, to the barren to give birth and to those who have lost courage to rise again.
We do not follow Jesus out of constraint but out of love. Like the apostle Saint Paul and all the others, we follow Him out of love and according to the circumstances of life which are not always similar but which have the same goal, namely to extend the reign of God's love in the world over the basis of the wonders that He works in the life of a minority who will also contribute in her own way to bringing the reign of God closer to a majority acquired or not, but aware all the same that there are some who through their actions demonstrate that they believe in a God without whom they are nothing and who invite all those who want to become Christian to follow Him because salvation or total well-being is assured to all those who make the free choice to choose Jesus as their Lord and saviour obviously without denying the existence of other saving means but by prioritizing the one that we know best and through which we ourselves have established a personal relationship with God.
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