It is Tuesday in our reading thru
the New Testament in a Year and today we read from Acts 7:1 - 60. It is a long
reading of a lengthy sermon preached by the early church’s first Martyr. After
you have read the entire passage, come back and we’ll walk thru it together.
As Stephen stands in front of the
Sandhedrin, with the High Priest Caiaphas residing, he faces the same body of
religious rulers Jesus had faced before his death. These officials had heard
trumped-up charges that Stephen had been blasphemous. Caiaphas looks at him and
asks the question - “are these charges true?” - but he has no idea of what is
about to unfold. Stephen calmly, but concisely - I believe is being led by the
Holy Spirit - gives a historical account of God’s work in Israel’s history. If
you have ever wondered what the Old Testament is all about, Stephen will give
you the main points in his message to the Sandhedrin.
The Message consists of four main
sections, all of which are God created and God directed. He begins with Abraham
whom God (of Glory he calls him) calls Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeans (think
modern-day Kuwait) to direct him to the land of Israel. “Leave your country,
your people, your land, and go to the land I will show you.” Israel’s
beginnings are God-derived. They who were not a people of God became a people
of God through the obedience of this one man - Abraham. To him, God gave a covenant
- the sign of which was circumcision (vs8) and the promise that from him would
come a nation - but only after 400 years of slavery (vs 6, in Egypt). This is
the first half of the book of Genesis. Stephen is beginning to paint a picture
of the nation’s identity through its Roots. Israel, the nation the Sanhedrin
were to represent, came from God’s initiative, through God’s sovereignty, to
fulfill God’s purposes, through God’s promises: They will be a people, who have
a land, and who are to be God’s blessing to the nations.
The second part is the shift to
Egypt and the Exodus. The nation of Israel was small, just Jacob (Abraham’s
grandson) and his 12 boys when one of his sons, Joseph is sold into slavery (vs
9) - an evil thing brought on by his brother’s jealousy of him. Yet, it is
through their evil that God produces good. Joseph rises to become Pharaoh’s
ruler over all of Egypt, and through a famine, Jacob’s entire family comes to
Egypt where they will settle for 400 years. Jacob dies in Egypt but his children’s
children to several generations await the fulfillment of God’s promise. God
raises up Moses, who like Joseph is first rejected, but then revered for being
a deliverer. As Joseph had done 400 years previously, now Moses becomes God’s
redeemer leader. Stephen recounts Moses’ life in a series of three forty-year
periods. Vss 20-22, he reminds us that Moses lived his first 40 years as part
of Pharaoh’s household - trained in the very best of Egypt’s educational
wisdom. Vss 23 - 29, Moses failed - first by killing an Egyptian, and then in
fleeing for 40 years to live in the desert land of Midian, hundreds of miles
removed from Egypt’s life of royalty. Vss 30 - 36, God calls Moses in the
wilderness to go back to Egypt and lead his people out that they might become
the nation God had promised Abraham - a people, a land, a blessing. At the end
of the Egypt section concerning Joseph and Moses, Stephen reminds them that
Moses had prophesied - near his death - that “God will raise up a Prophet like
me”, a word Peter had referred to in 3:22 in reference to Jesus’ incarnation.
And here, he makes a decisive shift.
As Stephen covers God’s history
with his people he inserts the commentary in vs 39, “our ancestors refused to
obey...”. I did not add the word “him”, because it is not just one rejection
Stephen has in mind, but a series of rejections the nation was guilty of. It
began immediately after the Exodus while the nation was in the wilderness. They
tried to substitute for God with a statute of a calf made out of gold. This was
the beginning of a long history of rebellions that marked Israel’s history in
Idolatry. Stephen reminds them that the Prophets kept being sent (vss 42-43)
until they ended up in exile in Babylon. Stephen reminds them that God had come
to live among them - first in the Tabernacle in the wilderness (a tent) that
remained in the nation until King David, organized and left for his son,
Solomon to build, a Temple. Stephen does not say it here, but that original
Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians as a direct result of the nation of
Israel’s rebellious idolatry that serves as the theme of the historical books,
as well as the Prophets. The Temple now stood as the most recent idolatrous
rebellion - something of which Jesus had reminded his disciples would soon lead
to its destruction again.
Now, Stephen cuts to the point -
the Tabernacle and Temple were never meant to “hold God”. It was this very
issue that brings to a head the reason for Stephen’s sermon. In spite of God’s
direct leading throughout their history, Israel kept on rebelling. God had
called them to be a people in a land in order to be a blessing to the nations.
Instead, they had continued to be what their ancestors were: “stiff-necked”,
“hard-hearted”, unwilling to listen to the Holy Spirit, and thus, had killed
Jesus, “the coming righteous one”. You notice the shift in language as he says
“You are just like your ancestors (fathers)”. They were the ruling leaders of
Israel and they had cut themselves off from God’s blessings. When all a person
has is a religion without a personal relationship to God, they have nothing but
the empty shell of their own self-made piety. Stephen’s indictment is clear. It
is a call to repent of their rebellion, to see that Jesus is the fulfillment of
all of Old Testament history - something Jesus said to the two on the road to
Emmaus (Luke 24) when he opened their hearts and minds by going back to the Law
and the Prophets to show them that Christ had to suffer and die. Stephen is
offering the rulers of Israel a chance to see that they have to turn around and
see Jesus as God.
Instead, (vs 57), they cover their
ears, yelling at the top of their voices, ushering Stephen out of the city as a
mob in order to stone him to death. Stephen sees Jesus standing! It is an
amazing word since Jesus ascended to “sit” at the Father’s right hand. When a
person of greatness enters a room we stand in honor of who they are. Now Jesus
is standing as he sees what Stephen has said and done. We might ask WHY Lord?
Why have this martyrdom? This young man who is so brave, so wise, so compelling
is short-lived...killed by a mob. Luke, the writer, leaves us with two images.
First, he tells us that a young man named Saul is present, witnessing it all,
and even agreeing with this stoning. Saul is going to become Paul and soon will
be leading the Gospel’s proclamation throughout the whole world. Seeing Saul is
crucial as Luke reminds us that Stephen sees God at work in all of this, not
evil: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” It is similar to Jesus’ words
as he hung on the cross. It is a prayer that understands that evil is never the
victor, no matter what the circumstances might seem to be.
Stephen is the first of 10’s of
thousands of martyrs in the early church, and down thru the history of the
church. What is it that moves a person to stand for the truth of God’s word in
the public square, no matter the sometimes hatred of those who despise what
that truth is? What makes us think that our belief in Jesus and our values based
on his Word will be applauded, regarded well, and even agreed with by a culture
that does not believe in God? We must not be naive. Jesus said to his
disciples, “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it
hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because
you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the
world hates you” (John 15:18-19). I don’t think this is a mandate to go out and
be rude, or argumentative. That is a hatred that is self-imposed. Yet, stand
for Christ in the public arena and you’ll find plenty of opposition.
Three quick endings here: First,
be accountable in your sharing Christ. Make sure you’re conversations have both
the right theology as well as the right motives. Second, be willing to be
disagreed with - even angrily disagreed with - without responding in an
unChristlike way. Lastly, realize what happened to Stephen is not a tragedy,
but a victory. “When he had said this, he fell asleep”... one “absent from the
body is present with the Lord”. Our goal in life is to live for Christ. “He is
no fool who gives up that which they cannot keep, to gain that which they
cannot lose” - Jim Eliot
Peace
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