Sermon from November 23, 2003

Last week, we saw that Stephen's accusers produced false witnesses, who testified, "This fellow never stops speaking against this holy place (meaning the temple) and against the law (the Torah, the religious foundation of Judaism)." Verse 14 offers evidence for these charges. "For we have heard him saw that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs Moses handed down to us."

Do you remember the charge thatpeople brought against Jesus at His trial? Mark 14:58 records the testimony of witnesses against Jesus. "We heard him say, 'I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days I will build another, not made by man.'" I accept Luke's statement that the people who accused Stephen were false witnesses, but obviously, Stephen had something about the temple that was open to serious misinterpretation.

The second accusation, also false, was that Jesus will "change the customs Moses handed down to us." That seemed closer to the mark, because we know that Jesus set on edge the teeth of a lot of people by his Sabbath behavior, non-kosher meals, and method of forgiving sins. Again, it would seem that Stephen was saying something about the customs of Moses that left him open to serious misinterpretation.

Was Stephen making inflammatory and blasphemous statements about the temple and the customs of Moses, or had he seen something in the teaching and practices of Jesus that others had missed and which had far-reaching implications for the Church and the human race?

Stephen's Inflammatory Speech
Acts 7:1 opens with the right question. Then the high priest asked him, "Are these charges true?" Stephen replies by giving a long answer - 52 verses long. We need to be disciplined here, or we'll miss its impact. Maybe the place to start is after the speech ended. How did his first audience respond?

They certainly didn't miss its impact. Look at verse 54. When they heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. Would you do a brief experiment? Would you gnash your teeth? Put your molars together and bare your front teeth and make the rest of your face show anger. When dogs look that way, we worry. When people look that way, we should worry. Those were men under enormous strain, and something Stephen said pushed them over the edge. What did he say?

Stephen told part of a familiar story. He told the biblical story of Israel from Abraham to Solomon. Even though it was a long speech, it was a very short version of that story. In fact Stephen left out most of the story. What he left in carried his answer to the high priest's question about the charges leveled against him.

The first part of his story in verses 2-8 focus on Abraham. He depicts Abraham as a man of obedient faith. Look at these examples. In verse three God said to Abraham, "'Leave your country and your people, and go to the land I will show you.'" Verse four gives Abraham's obedient response. "So he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran."

Later, he made it to Canaan, and verse five says that "He (God) gave him (Abraham) no inheritance here, not even a foot of ground. But God promised him that he and his descendants ager him would possess the land, even though at that time Abraham had no child." No land to possess and no children to possess it, but Abraham soldiers on, a man, Stephen implies, of great faith.

Then came the shocker in verse six. "God spoke to him in this way: 'Your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves,' God said, 'and afterward they will come out of that country and worship me in this place.'"

Verse eight reports the outcome of Abraham's faith. He had a song, Isaac, who had a son, Jacob, who had twelve sons, the tribal heads of Israel. The covenant of circumcision bound them all together.

Verses 9-16 tell the story of Joseph, his mistreatment at the hands of his brothers, his reversal of fortune in Egypt, and his indispensable role in saving Abraham's descendants from a dreadful famine.

Why did Stephen tell the story of Joseph and not the story of Jacob? They are both superb stories. Why focus on Joseph? Do you think Stephen might have had Jesus in mind? He, like Joseph, was mistreated by His Jewish brothers, and they did to Him what most of Joseph's brothers wanted to do with him; they killed Him. Do you think the Sanhedrin thought Stephen had Jesus in mind as he was telling this part of the story? They were not fools, and they knew how stories worked. If Stephen had Jesus in mind, he didn't make it obvious, and he moved on to the major part of his story, a story of Moses.

His story about Moses occupies verses 17-43. It tells of Israel's fall from the Egyptian king's favor and the horrible decree for Jews to kill their newborn babies. One of those babies that was spared was Moses, whom the Pharaoh's daughter fancied and brought up as her own son and educated him in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.

Verses 23-29 tell the familiar story. "When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites. He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defese and avenged him by killing the Egyptian. Moses thought that his own people would realized that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. The next day Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saing, 'Men, you are brothers; why do you want to hurt each other?'

"But the man who was mistreating the other pushed Moses aside and said, 'Who made you ruler and judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?' When Moses heard this, he fled to Midian, where he settled as a foreigner and had two sons.

Verses 30-34 tell the famous story of Moses at the burning bush, where God commissions him to go back to Egypt and set his people free from oppression. In verse 35 the subtle undertones of Stephen's story get very interesting.

"This is the same Moses whom they had rejected with the words, 'Who made you ruler and judge?' He was sent to be their ruler and deliver by God himself, through the angel who appeared to him in the bush." Did Stephen have Jesus in mind when he said this? Was it a subtle way of saying to his Jewish brothers and fathers, "You made the same mistake with Jesus they made with Moses, but it's not too late; you can receive Him as God's deliverer just as they later received Moses as God's deliverer." Do you think the Sanhedrin thought Stephen had Jesus in mind as he was telling this part of the story? Again, they were not fools, and they knew how stories worked. Again, if Stephen had Jesus in mind, he didn't make it obvious, and he moved on to the next part of his story about Moses.

In many ways verse 36 is the key to Stephen's motives in this story. "He (Moses) led them out of Egypt and did wonders and miraculous signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea and for forty years in the desert." Stephen had compressed the entire story of Exodus 4-15 into 14 English words, and he never once mentions Pharoaoh. He was telling the well-worn story of Israel, but he was telling it for his own purpose.

Verse 37 makes that clearer than ever. "This is that Moses who told the Israelites, 'God will send you a prophet like me from your own people.'" This is the one part of his story that does not come from Exodus. It comes from Deuteronomy 18:15. Do you think Stephen put it in, because he had Jesus in mind? Jesus was the prophet like Moses that Moses foretold. Do you think the Sanhedrin though Stephen had Jesus in mind as he was telling this part of the story? Again, they were not fools, and they knew where teh quote from Deuteronomy came from. Again, if Stephen had Jesus in mind, he didn't make it obvious, and he moved on to the next part of his story about Moses, and here Stephen's intentions begin to be obvious.

Verses 38-42 describe Moses as the one who received the Ten Commandments from God on Mount Sinai. But verse 39 is Stephen's punch line. "But our fathers refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt." And he illustrates it with the famous story of the golden calf.

It seems to me that two things are going on here. Stephen was saying that Israel rejected Moses a second time. But this time Stephen makes a second, ominous point. He does it twice. First, in verse 42 he said, "But God turned away from them and gave them over to the worship of the heavenly bodies." Second, in verse 43, at the end of the quotation from Amos 5, he had God say to Israel, "'Therefore I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.'"

Do you think the Sanhedrin thought Stephen had Jesus in mind as he was telling this part of the story? Do you think they thought Stephen had them in mind as he told of God's turning away from Israel and sending them into exile? Do you think they thought he was saying that God was going to do it again, if they refused Jesus? If they thought that, we can understand why their blood was beginning to boil.

Stephen abruptly changes the story in verses 44-50. False witnesses had accused him of saying that Jesus intended to destroy the Jewish temple. So, Stephen sets forth a thoroughly biblical but most unwelcome doctrine about temple.

The end of verse 46 is important, where David enjoyed God's favor and asked that he might provide a dwelling place for the God of Jacob. Stephen makes his point plain in verse 48: "However, the Most High does not live in houses made by men," and he quotes Isaiah for good measure.

"'Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me? says the Lord.'"

I wonder if Stephen's idea about the temple ran something like this. Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple. That would be a terrible loss, but He doesn't live there, and it wouldn't remove God from our life. He will take care of us just as surely as He took care of Abraham, Joseph, Moses and the children of Israel when there was no temple. There is something worse than losing the temple and that is offending God.

The Point Stephen Was Making
Stephen finishes his speech by making it clear that he really did have Jesus in mind all through his retelling of Israel's story. "You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! you are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him - you who have received the law that was put into effect through angels but have not obeyed it." That will make you gnash your teeth.

As will Stephen's statement in verse 56. "Look," he said, "I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." If we don't hear this with Jewish ears, we will miss its power. The Son of Man obviously means Jesus. The four Gospels call Him that all the time. To have him standing at the right hand of God in heaven was to use language from the book of Daniel 7:13-14.

At His own trial before this very Sanhedrin Jesus had used the same words, when the high priest asked him, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?" Jesus answered, "I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One."

Educated Jews of Jesus' day knew that was the language of vindication. On Stephen's lips it meant something like this. "You betrayed and murdered Jesus, but God vindicated Him, when He raised Him from among the dead." That vindication was causing Stephen and others to reinterpret what it meant to be a Jew. They were rereading and retelling the story of Israel in the light of Jesus' resurrection.

The Sanhedrin was not willing. There may have been dissenting voices, but they were drowned out in the mayhem that verses 57-58 describe. At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul, whom we know better as Paul.

The Pastor Center of Gravity
If anyone ever reinterpreted what it meant to be a Jew, if anyone ever reread and retold the story of Israel in the light of Jesus' resurrection, it was Saul. And who do you think most influenced him to do that? I would have to say it was Stephen. It cost him his life to be Saul's teacher, but as the book of Acts unfolds, we will see the far-reaching effects of Stephen's doctrine on the history of the Church.

Do you ever have a hard time seeing how the worse moments of your life might be used for the glory of God? Stephen had a hard time seeing that. He wasn't even around to see it. Who knows? Maybe Paul learned from this experience that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Maybe Paul learned to die from the man he killed.

There is something else we can all learn from Stephen's last breath. Verses 59-60: While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," an echo of Jesus' last words from the cross. Then he fell on his knees and cried out, "Lord, do not hold this in against them." He had learned the lessons of the cross well.

Jesus asked the Father's forgiveness for those who brought about His crucifixion. Stephen asked the Father's forgiveness for those who brought about his stoning. So, whom do you need to forgive? How serious are we about following Jesus, our Sovereign?