Stephen takes the big-picture view. As Pastor Bob calls it, the 30,000 ft. view … He reviews the run up …(like the triple jump) to get it right this time. He steps out the entire journey from Abraham onward so we arrive at the present … at exactly the right point to help us understand what God is doing … who Jesus is and what God’s plan was from the beginning of the big picture. At first, much of Stephen’s speech doesn’t seem to be a direct answer at all to the charges laid against him. But he is retelling the story to make certain points about who Jesus is and God’s divine kingdom purposes. He begins with the God of glory … to show that he is not blaspheming God. This expression, the God of glory is only used in one other place … Psalm 29:3 “The God of glory thunders.” The Lord thunders over the mighty waters. He says this to refute the charge that he was blaspheming God ...and their ancestors … so he begins with Abraham Theologian N.T. Wright says … “The significance of Abraham for understanding both second-Temple Judaism and Christianity as its surprising but powerful offshoot can hardly be overestimated. It is with Abraham that the story of the Jewish people begins; and it is with Abraham that Genesis begins the story of how the world is to be set right. The story of the people of Israel, in other words, does not come as a separate free-standing entity, but as a way of saying: this is how the creator God is acting to deal with the problem of human sin, social catastrophe and cosmic disaster as set out in Genesis 3-11. Stephen focuses on Genesis 15 … the covenant God makes with Abraham … but tells him long in advance that his descendants will be slaves to a foreign nation … and they will be brought out and given a land as their inheritance. (The land where he lives as an alien.) Land was important to the Jews … maybe they were starting to comment on the fact that followers of Jesus where selling their ancestral property … (Barnabas, and Ananias & Sapphira) The Story of the Exodus is an essential pillar of Jewish identity. Stephen does a selective retelling of the story … he emphasized that Joseph was rejected by his brothers … but God used him to become ruler of Pharaoh’s household and the whole land of Egypt. The brothers who had rejected Joseph had to come to him for food and Joseph was gracious to them. Maybe some in Stephen’s audience could begin to see where he was heading. Stephen knew how to tell the story … the story of the O.T.; the story of Jesus as both the climax of the Old Testament and the foundation of all that was to come … and the story of the church from the first days until now. These are not just some random events that make good preaching material with salvation tacked on the end. It is good for us as well to take a long walk back, like the person pacing out the triple jump … to make sure we get everything in the right rhythm, in order to properly tell the big-picture story of what God is doing. Acts 7:17-34 People of all nations have a sense of national identity For Canada – 1) The War of 1812 – defending ourselves against the Americans 2) Confederation in 1867 3) The Two World Wars in which Canada earns her place among nations seeking to preserve freedoms. For Israel – they looked back over 1500 years … to when God had given the Law through Moses … this defined Israel. Stephen is accused of going soft on the Law and Moses. So that’s where Stephen takes the story … He says three things about Moses …
1. Moses was raised by God and trained to be the leader God would use. After the contribution of Joseph was forgotten by the Egyptians and the Israelites they became slaves, to keep their numbers in check, Hebrew male children were to be destroyed. Moses was providentially rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter and he was trained in the education and wisdom of Egypt.
2. Moses was a rejected rescuer trying to help his fellow Israelites. His first attempt at rescuing went badly … he steps in and kills an Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Israelites. The next day, seeing a dispute between his fellow countrymen he steps in to break up the fight. The man says “Are you going to kill me like you did the Egyptian?” Moses had to flee, rejected by the very people he was trying to help. “Who made you ruler and judge over us?”
3. Moses was the one through whom the God of glory was making himself known in a new way. The God of Abraham and Moses was not a different God than the God these new Christians had come to know through Jesus … he was always rescuing his people in fulfillment of his ancient promises. God addresses Moses again at the burning bush, calling him to rescue God’s people. Stephen has said nothing against Moses at all. He reiterates that God prepared, equipped and called Moses to rescue his people. Whenever God steps in to rescue His people … that is Holy Ground. Stephen moves on to address the Temple … The holiness of what God is doing is more important than the Temple itself. Stephen is saying that what God is now doing in rescuing his people through Jesus was, in fact, greatly upstaging the holiness of the Temple. Stephen pleads “not guilty” of speaking against Moses. But not so about speaking against the Temple. It’s all in how you tell the story … of Israel, of Jesus, of the early Christians … and our story today. God is constantly doing something new … his kingdom is breaking in … in new ways … What new things is God doing in your life … in our church? What burning bush have you experienced?
Illust: Today, when you say something is “Hand made”- in most cultures that is a good thing …whether it’s Amish furniture or hand-made greeting cards. In Ottawa as Kathy and I visited the War Museum … I was intrigued by a glass case that contained a brown crocheted scarf hand-made by Queen Victoria … she made eight of them in the last year of her long life to be presented to members of her forces fighting in the South African War at the turn of the 20th century. In the ancient world of Israel however, saying something was hand-made was not an endorsement at all. On the contrary, it meant that God had not made it … it was merely a human invention. When the hand-made object was something someone worshipped … that is about as bad as it gets. Idolatry is the worst sin. It is worshipping something as if it was God when it wasn’t. How do you make an idol? You fashion something with human hands. Aaron made one at Mt. Sinai. How ridiculous is that … first you make a god … then you worship it. Seriously? Stephen says, … in the conclusion of his speech … this is what the Israelites had done with their Temple. Stephen, in telling the story …. says they had rejected Moses … and had failed to worship God himself even after he rescued them. Moses was up on the mountain getting instructions from God about how to truly worship Him and they were at the foot of the mountain worshipping a golden “hand made” calf. What about the Temple? It was always ambiguous because God doesn’t live in houses made by men. At worst … it becomes an idol itself when people worship the place of worship rather than the God who deserves all worship. Stephen’s speech becomes an indictment against the Jewish religious leaders. He turns the tables on them. They are the idolaters. It begins in the wilderness. One of the rabbis’ had said, All Israel had drunk in wickedness from two calves, the golden calf that Aaron had made and the calves of Jeroboam … (1 Kings 12:25-33) Aaron had set a pattern … it was repeated. According to the prophet Amos (5:25-27) the honeymoon period between God and Israel was really a time of rank rebellion and idolatry. They were worshipping pagan gods Molech and Rephan and the moon and stars of heaven. Acts 7:42-43. So Stephen is turning the tables. He’s not the heretic, blaspheming God and the Temple. It’s the Jewish rulers following their idolatrous ancestors. David planned the Temple … Solomon built it … but Isaiah had already declared following Solomon’s dedication prayer, that since God made everything, the idea that human beings can produce a hand-made building that can somehow contain God is sheer blasphemy. God doesn’t live in buildings. Heaven is his throne and earth his footstool. The entire universe can’t contain him since He made it all in the first place. God wanted to come Himself and be our rescuer, as a human being, the Righteous One to rescue his people. But just like their ancestors, they refused the deliverer God had appointed and preferred their own homemade, handmade system and building. Moses and all the prophets would unite in condemning them. To quote Dr. Warren Wiersbe, “The nation refused to accept the new truth that God was revealing from age to age. Instead of seeing God’s truth as seed that produces fruit and more seed, the religious leaders embalmed the truth and refused to accept anything new. By the time Jesus came to earth, the truth of God was encrusted with so much tradition that the people could not recognize God’s truth when he did present it. Man’s dead traditions had replaced God’s living truth.” Peter had accused the religious leaders of rejecting Jesus, The Messiah, the Righteous One, and handing him over to the pagans to be killed. Stephen takes it to a whole new level. He says they were simply following the long history of rebellion acted out by their ancestors. Instead of Israel’s history being a story of salvation … it turns out to be a story of rebellion. Stephen puts himself on the side of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon and all the prophets. He puts the Jewish leaders on the side of Joseph’s brothers, the Israelites who rejected Moses, and with those who helped Aaron build and worship the golden calf. N.T. Wright asks a very insightful question? “As we consider our own traditions, and think of them lovingly since they “prove” that we ourselves are in the right place in our worship and witness, perhaps sometimes we need to allow the story to be told differently and to see whether we ourselves might be in the wrong place within it.” So Stephen becomes the first martyr of the Christian Church. A martyr is a witness; someone who gives evidence. Why do we use the term for people who die for their faith? It is a very powerful witness when someone is prepared to die for what they believe. Then we know they really believe it. Stephen’s final statements are a real witness. Stephen has a vision … “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” Stephen is in a courtroom but it is as if he sees a heavenly courtroom superimposed on the earthly one. Rather than the High Priest and his fellow judges standing there, Stephen sees the God of glory, the Ancient of Days seated in judgment, with the Son of Man, Jesus, standing at his right hand acting as an advocate for him. While the human worldly court is condemning him to death, the heavenly court is finding in his favour. There is a difference between martyrs of other faiths and Christian martyrs. There were Jewish martyrs 200 years before Christ when the pagan king Antiochus Epiphanes took control of Jerusalem. He descrated the Temple and forced many Jews to renounce their Law, their ancestral way of life and even to eat pork which, of course, was forbidden in the law. Many were martyred, refusing to submit. A very typical response of Jews being martyred was something like this … “God will give you what you deserve. Do not think that God has forsaken our people. Keep on and see how this mighty power will torture you and your descendants.” Stephen didn’t say anything like that. He had just laid a pretty heavy charge against the Jewish leaders. But when he is about to die (when the rocks flying at him) he says, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” If all we knew about Christian martyrs was that they called down blessings and forgiveness rather than cursing and judgment on their torturers and executioners … that would be very telling. There would only be one obvious conclusion. These people really had been transformed by Jesus and his teaching … a teaching that made loving one’s enemies a central, non-negotiable theme. Jesus, modeled it on the cross when he said, … Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” God takes something that we would see as negative, tragic … a waste of life … and uses it to spread his kingdom. Stephen did this full of the Holy Spirit; his defense before the Jewish leaders was spirit-led. God was using it for his glorious kingdom purposes. Conclusion: For the Jewish leaders, killing Stephen was another condemnation …Dr. Warren Wiersbe makes an interesting observation … They allowed John the Baptist to be killed (and so sinned against the Father who sent him.) They asked for Jesus to be killed. (sinning against God the Son) They killed Stephen themselves. (and sinned against the Holy Spirit whom Jesus had promised to send to his followers.)
The result was persecution. In Acts 8, everyone is scattered except the apostles. For the church in Jerusalem it meant liberation. They were witnessing to the Jew first ever since Pentecost. But now they would take the message to Samaritans, and even to the Gentiles. The persecution that followed the stoning of Stephen prevented the church from becoming a Jewish sect and encouraged the church to fulfill the Great Commission of Acts 1:8 … “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” What about us today? Are you ready to say, God, I’m yours. Use me however you choose! Or am I reluctant to have the Holy Spirit control my life because he might have me do something radical like he did with Stephen. God doesn’t call many of us to be martyrs but he does call all of us to be living sacrifices. Do you remember what the name Stephen means? “Crown.” Rev. 2:10 says … “Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown.” * (borrowed significantly from N.T. Wright’s “Acts for Everyone”)