“And there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias …”
If we ask who this Ananias was, then we can only say that he was “a certain disciple at Damascus;” for apart from the incident recorded in Acts chapter 9, and repeated in Acts chapter 22, we know nothing whatsoever about that old saint. What we do know, however – although not telling us much about Ananias himself – tells us, yet again, something more of that precious truth of how God is so often pleased to use the ordinary to perform the extra-ordinary.
Ananias of Damascus, then, was the human instrument that God took up to use in the pointing of Saul of Tarsus to salvation in Christ. You remember the scenes? Saul on the way to Damascus, breathing out threats etc., against the church there. The Lord stops him in his path, directs him into Damascus, and eventually sends one to lay his hands-on Saul and to pronounce, in God’s name “Brother Saul, receive thy sight.” That one was Ananias; that one was the instrument that God used for the directing to Christ of the greatest apostle that the Church was ever to see. And when God used such a one as that, then it again highlights the lesson of how God so often takes up the apparently foolish, or despised, or insignificant to perform some of His greatest works.
Very often we say that God can use the little things to confound the mighty; and that is, of course, true; but it is not all the truth. And the truth is not simply that God can, but that God so often does just that. We would never have chosen Ananias of Damascus for such a task as leading Saul of Tarsus into the Church of Christ. What a catch! Don’t let that fish get away! And so, we would have gone right to the top: Philip the evangelist, fresh from preaching that revival in chapter 8, or having carried out that tremendous piece of “personal work” with the Ethiopian Eunuch. But no. Not that either of those things are to be despised in the least degree; but it is this way in which God so often turns our thinking upside-down. What about Peter, or John, or Matthew – a professional man? But no; it is “A certain disciple named Ananias.”
Isn’t it like Jericho? Or Gideon’s army? Or David slaying Goliath with a sling and stone? Ah, pre-eminently; isn’t it like the Cross! And this is “the offence of the cross”: - to bow to God’s ways, and to be prepared for God’s ways that are far above our ways in all.