Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, in the region that is now Syria. It already existed in the days of Abraham, nearly two thousand years before Christ, and ran through the whole of biblical history into the New Testament.
In the Old Testament it was the capital of the Aramean kingdom, a constant rival of Israel and Judah. Kings such as Ben-Hadad and Hazael ruled wars from there that marked entire generations.
The prophet Elisha was in Damascus and there revealed to Hazael that he would become king, fulfilling a judgment God had already announced against the house of Ahab.
But it is in the book of Acts that Damascus gains its best known place in the Christian faith. It was there, on the road and then inside the city, that Saul of Tarsus met the risen Jesus and became the apostle Paul.
Blind, dependent, and broken, Paul passed through Damascus from persecutor to preacher. The same city that nearly killed him was where he received his sight back and the call to proclaim Christ among the Gentiles.
Damascus reminds us that God can transform even the most resistant heart, and that his plans stand firm even as kingdoms and empires rise and fall around them.
