Clough Acts Lesson 16

Overview of Stephen’s Speech to the Sanhedrin – Acts 6:8; overview of 7

Because we’re involved at this point in the book of Acts in a great matter of transition, actually one of the beginning points in history for the concept of Christian missions, we want to go back and get the large scale overview of this book and understand some of the lessons so we don’t lose the forest for the trees. Acts 2-7 deals with the Jerusalem phase of Christian evangelism. It is only in these chapters that the early church is confined to the city of Jerusalem. During this period the Church was successful, extremely successful in fact, in Acts 6:7 you’ll notice that the priests were becoming obedient to the faith. This looks, at first glance, as a note or observation of success but as we’re going to see, it’s not success as far as the Holy Spirit is concerned. The Holy Spirit has something on His mind and what the Holy Spirit has on His mind is the thought of the great commission, given in Acts 1:8, namely that the Church is not to remain confined, narrow, restricted to Jerusalem but it’s to spill outward, so that even though the Church is not aware of it and even though the Church leaders are not aware of it, the Holy Spirit is and because of Acts 1:8 the Holy Spirit is going to do a work using the most unpromising of things, namely a dispute involving the widows of the Hellenistic Jews.

He is going to use that unpromising church fight to be the means by which the Church is moved along corporately in its sanctification on to its next phase which is to break out and take the gospel outside of the city walls of Jerusalem. There’s a divine guidance principle in all this that we can apply, every one of us who is a Christian, and that is that God the Holy Spirit has a hidden agenda, it shouldn’t be hidden but unfortunately for most of us it is, and the agenda, like it is for the Church, Acts 1:8 was the agenda the Holy Spirit used; for us in Romans 8:29 and other passages is the agenda of the Holy Spirit in your life, namely that He is going to, whether you like it or not, bring you into conformity with Jesus Christ. And we may not be conscious of how He’s going to do it, when He’s going to do it, how He’s going to do it but the Holy Spirit is going to do it. And this explains why there’ll be some catastrophes in your life, why there’ll be some adversities, why there’ll be the most unlikely, unpromising things that appear to happen and you wonder what is going on. What is going on is that the Holy Spirit, in His sovereignty, is moving you in line with that agenda. In other words, He is working behind the scenes, unknown, unrealized, and unfortunately in most cases unappreciated by us, to bring us into conformity with the Word.

In acts 6 and 7 we have this transition for the Church and the transition is to somehow break out of Jerusalem and go into Judea, into Samaria, and into the areas of the world. The question is, how is the Holy Spirit going to do this? Well, He’s going to do it in the same way He operates most of the time in our lives, He’s going to use circumstances. He is going to use His sovereignty as he controls everything in our environment to lead us, and He’s doing this, as we spent a lot of time last week in developing, He is going to do this through the use of the Hellenistic Jews. There are two classes of Jews, the Hellenists which we said would be analogous to immigrants in the land of Israel, and the natives. So far, from the ranks of the natives come the twelve apostles. They are men who spent all their lives on Palestinian soil, they are men who have their outlook limited to just the city of Jerusalem and the local area. Recall the fact that Jewish men would come to Jerusalem to die and their widows would be left in the city of Jerusalem to remain until they died. So Jerusalem was the logical end point for Christian people in those days. And Jesus had done the same thing, so reasoned the apostles, after all, hadn’t Jesus come to Jerusalem to die? Wasn’t it in Jerusalem where we had our tender last moments with Him before He departed this world? Wasn’t it in Jerusalem where He commissioned us finally and so on. So Jerusalem held great memories, fond memories, for the apostles. And because of this we find the Church locking down and freezing in its position.

Now the dilemma of the Holy Spirit, how is He going to break this down. The Hellenists would come from the great metropolitan centers of the ancient world; some would come from Rome, some would come from Alexandria, some from Athens, some from Corinth, some from Crete, some from Cyprus, some from Antioch and so on. In other words, these Hellenists were people who had a cosmopolitan mentality. When they mixed as Christians with their fellow Christians who were natives, they would begin to discuss, obviously, Jesus Christ. And the natives would tell about Christ did this and Christ did that and wasn’t Christ wonderful, He’s the Messiah of Israel and all this. And the Hellenists would say yeah, that’s real fine, it’s real nice to say that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel but our families are over in Rome, our families are off in Antioch, our families are down in Alexandria, what about them. Does Christ have anything to say to Egypt; does Christ have anything to say to Asia Minor, does He have anything to say to say to Cyprus, to Crete, to Greece, to Rome? Does Christ have any pertinence whatsoever to the outside world. And these are the questions that the Hellenists brought into the Church.

Now here’s another principle of application that goes right down to each one of us personally. Again, if you’re a believer you have brought into the body of Christ a certain viewpoint. You have brought into the body of Christ something that you have that no one else has at all, and that is your background. You say well I have a lousy background. Listen, all the people in the Word of God that are mentioned prominently had (quote) “lousy backgrounds,” (end quote). Stephen was one who would be looked down upon by the natives and yet it was Stephen who made the astounding breakthrough of doctrine. It was Stephen who became the first theologian. In fact, after studying this passage quite carefully I’m convinced that if Stephen had not died Stephen would have been the Paul to write the New Testament. Stephen was the man who began a startlingly new application of the Word of God and Stephen was able to see an application of doctrine that no one else saw because of Stephen’s background. Stephen was a Hellenist; Stephen therefore thought in terms not of the soil of Palestine but the soil of Greece, of Rome, of Egypt, of North Africa, of the Mediterranean area, which historians have referred to as the Levant. Stephen had all of this background and it was this background that prompted him to come to the same Word of God that the apostles had and ask different questions and get different applications, new applications, creative applications.

Now take yourself, you have had a certain background, you come out of a certain area so you have certain interests and you are going to bring to the Word of God certain things that I cannot and that your friends cannot. You have an opportunity to make unique applications of the Word of God and this is what we encourage at Lubbock Bible Church. And where the Word of God is taught in other local churches the same thing; we encourage believers to make their creative applications in their own areas of the Word. God the Holy Spirit uses this.

In the bulletin you find a letter received by one of our members from Eldridge Cleaver who in the late 60s was the leader of the Black Panthers, a leader of a radical anarchistic leftist movement. Eldridge Cleaver today is a Christian and because he trusted in Christ he voluntarily surrendered to a jail sentence and is now in Alameda County Jail in California. A while ago his address was given in the bulletin and one or two people from Lubbock Bible Church wrote him and have obtained replies; one of those replies you’ll see in the bulletin. It’s very interesting that a man like Eldridge Cleaver can come to Christ, come out of his radical left-wing background and come with all of that as his background to the Word. And then when he gets in the Word of God later on and gets straightened out in the Word and doctrine, then he can come up with some applications that probably most of us have never seen. Contrary, you can take a man like Charles Colson who would represent politically polls apart from a man like Eldridge Cleaver, a man solidly identified with the establishment, and when Colson gets trained in the Word of God he will see things and applications of the Word that no one else can see.

So this is an exhortation to each one of you as an ambassador for Christ to make your applications in your own area. It may not be anything from your perspective as startlingly revolutionary but it will be at least a unique area where no one else can compete with you because you are just you. Now as the Holy Spirit works He works not only individually but He works corporately. The early church was being led here, of course, by the Holy Spirit in kind of an unconscious way and even in our own local congregation we can see this. From our human point of view we would say what LBC as well as other local churches ought to do is concentrate in the local community. And yet as the Word of God is taught we have a far greater response on the part of people who are outside of the local community. We have people who are trained here who move away geographically and being to share the teaching of the Word and this begins to spread. And so we have apparently the Holy Spirit saying that I want to use this particular ministry, this particular congregation in a certain way and this is the way I want to use it. You may have your own dreams but those own dreams are out of line with how I am using it, so once again we have to be open to this unconscious leading of the Holy Spirit.

In Acts 6:8, where we left off last time we have Stephen beginning his ministry. Keep in mind who Stephen is. Stephen is one of these Hellenists; Stephen is a man who with his Hellenistic background, cosmopolitan type of viewpoint is going to make some exciting discoveries in the Word. It says in verse 8, “Stephen, full of faith and power, was doing,” imperfect tense, “great wonders and miracles among the people.” Now the phrase, “wonders and miracles” should be “wonders and signs,” and a thing that you want to get used to in Bible study, in fact those of you who are new Christians ought to remember right now, don’t waste your money buying a bunch of Christian junk. The best thing for you to do is save your money and invest in one basic tool and that is a concordance, a big thick one; don’t get a small one, it’s useless, get a large one, something like Young’s or Strong’s if you use a King James translation. Use that concordance, a concordance is like a dictionary, it has every word in the Bible and has every verse where that word occurs in the Bible. And that is a basic study tool, and with that one tool plus your Bible, plus a piece of paper and a pencil, you will find you can get tremendous information from the Word of God. And that information will not be found in a lot of so-called Christian devotional literature, which is written by lazy people. Don’t be a lazy Christian. There is a gold mine of doctrine here in truth if you are willing to spend the effort.

Now “wonders and signs” is one of these things that pays off because it is a theme with Luke. Luke wrote Acts and when he uses “wonders and signs” he consciously refers back to a chain of references. Let’s go back to Acts 2:19 for it was here that this phrase first came up, “wonders and signs.” Notice it was in the quotation from the prophet Joel and in this prophecy of Joel the Holy Spirit is said to “show wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath.” That is a signal that God the Holy Spirit is going to do something at the end of history, and since Jesus Christ has come the end of history, phase one, begins. So you have the phrase, “signs and wonders,” or it’s reverse. That is first given in Joel, which means that it forms part of the Old Testament plan of history, and then whenever you see this phrase again in the book of Acts, you are looking at the fulfillment, you are looking at a continuity. This is not a magic story, this is not a series of miracle workers going around doing their little show. It is rather a series of events that are consciously the outplaying of our sovereign God in history.

Now in Acts 2:22 you have another reference: “You men of Israel, hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved by God among you, by miracles and wonders and signs,” so again the phrase “wonders and signs” points back to this same theme that God is giving empirical evidences of His final era through Christ. Acts 2:43, “Fear came upon every soul; many wonders and signs were done by the apostles.” So the second application of Joel’s passage has not to do with Christ but to the apostles extending Christ’s ministry. In Acts 4:30 we have “wonders and signs” again, this time a petition to God the Father because of the decree of the governmental authorities not to teach the Word of God so that places the Church in the status of civil disobedience and they make a prayer in civil disobedience that they may disobey the government by continuing with “signs and wonders,” that is God’s plan. In Acts 5:12 we have the theme occur again, “by the hands of the apostles were being wrought many signs and wonders.” So there’s a constant theme of the thread of God’s plan operating.

Now in Acts 6, when we come to verse 8, Stephen stands in the same line that Jesus stood in, that the apostles stood in, and that the people who made that prayer stood in, namely he continues his ministry, now not as an apostle but as one appointed by the apostles. He did it “among the people,” and the people he did it among are the Hellenistic group. Remember, Stephen was a welfare officer who ministered to the Hellenist widows. Therefore, Stephen’s major ministry is not to all Jews but to the Hellenist Jews. And this controversy that’s going to break wide open now in a few verses begins with a Hellenist. And we have to understand all this little background to appreciate some of the things that the first martyr of the Christian church faced.

You’ll notice in Acts 6:9 that after he did this for some time, apparently as a Christian welfare officer, he ran into a storm of protest. “Then there arose certain of the synagogue, which is called the synagogue of the Libertines, and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and of them of Cilicia and of Asia, disputing with Stephen.” Now the Talmud tells us that at this point in Jewish history there were 480 synagogues in the city of Jerusalem. They were labeled much like we label our local churches, there’s the First Baptist Church, Second Baptist Church, First Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church, Bible Church, they all had their names and the synagogue had their names and in verse 9 one of the names of the synagogue was given, the synagogue (singular) called of the Libertines, Cyrenians and Alexandrians. That’s an odd name for a church but this was the… the Libertines were free Jewish slaves, the Alexandrians and the Cyrenians, so that was the title of that particular local synagogue.

Now because skeptics have always doubted that Luke knew what he was talking about, of course pontificating from the 20^th century these self-appointed historians thought they knew more about it than Luke did, but Luke was only there, and recently in archeology there has been discovered the foundation of that synagogue. And Dr. Avi Yonah in his model in the city of Jerusalem brought that synagogue into his model. Here is a map of the old city of Jerusalem as it exists today; this is the valley of the Kidron, the Kidron Valley, there’s a road that goes down into this valley on the east side, and on the west side there is the remains of what was once the Tyropoeon Valley or the valley of the cheese makers. There’s this peninsula of land that extends south from the temple area and stops here by the pool of Siloam. In Biblical times it was this area that was called the City of David; it was this area on which most of the buildings were built and in Christ’s day that area looks like this. [shows slides] You have a series of buildings on this ridge line; one of those buildings is the synagogue of the Libertines. There’s the synagogue where Acts 6 and 7 occurred. The foundations have been discovered, though a lot of the top part of this building is Avi Yonah’s speculation, the foundation is real; the foundation is based on what has been dug up very recently.

So once again Luke, the historian, is vindicated against his 20^th century self-appointed critics. As he went into this synagogue he encountered those who were actively disputing. This means to stand up and argue with him. So obviously Stephen was saying something that irritated people, and he irritated two groups; he irritated the men of the synagogue but then it also says “of those who came from Cilicia and came from Asia.” So there are actually two groups, not one, that are mentioned in verse 9. Now since Paul is the one who stands over Stephen as he is dying at the end of the incident, and since it’s Paul that now comes into prominence in the book of Acts we cannot help but deduce a very obvious thing. Guess who was sitting in the synagogue, guess who probably attended that synagogue as a young rabbinic student, as a man who was getting his doctorate from Rabbi Gamaliel at the time, and the one who was actively disputing that with Stephen—none other than Saul himself.

And it says that as this disputing went on, verse 10, “they were not able to resist the wisdom” the word “wisdom” means skill, “they were not able to resist the skill and the Spirit by which he was speaking.” Now verse 10 might be just an innocent verse and you read right over it and never get the point. Put two and two together and get four; who was involved in disputing with Stephen at this point? Saul. And who won the argument? Stephen won the argument. Now from what you know of reading the New Testament, from what you now of Paul’s later personality you know what kind of a genius Paul was. Paul was one of the most brilliant members of the human race. Paul was chosen by God to develop Christian doctrine, develop it in such a way that it would be aggressively oriented against Hellenistic thought and so on. Paul was a genius, but verse 10 tells you that Stephen was an even greater genius.

So conclusion: if Stephen had not been stoned to death, Stephen would probably have taken Paul’s position in the early church. Stephen who, we’re going to see, developed the concept that Jesus Christ would reign outside the soil of Palestine, he saw very clearly that Jesus Christ could not just be the Messiah of Israel but had to be connected with the world, the cities, the metropolitan areas where he and his Hellenistic friends had lived all their lives. It was Stephen who developed the topological interpretation of the Old Testament, that later came into prominence with the author, that mysterious man who such a brain, who wrote the epistle to the Hebrews. So Stephen is responsible for a lot of the New Testament indirectly. In fact, critics have stumbled over Acts 7 which is the next chapter because they’ve argued, why is it that Luke has the longest speech in his entire work devoted to Stephen. Why Stephen, why not devote the longest speech to Peter or to Paul or to John, or James, one of the apostles. Why develop the longest speech to an unknown deacon who lasted a couple of years and then was stoned to death? What is so significant about Stephen, his ministry, his message and his death? Because Stephen was the one who made the break.

Now application: very often we run across Christians who feel like they’re 8^th class Christians; well I never went to college, or I didn’t finish high school, or I’m just a janitor and I don’t have a professional job or I don’t do this and I don’t do that, I never had training in Greek or Hebrew or I never had a course in how to speak, I’ve never done this, I’ve never done that. Always some excuse for thinking of yourself as an 8^th class believer. Now listen and learn from Stephen. Stephen was neglected in the sense that he wasn’t chosen as one of the apostles. Stephen was a man who had to begin his ministry solving a bunch of quarreling old women. That’s how he began, real auspicious start for the first great Christian theologian. Stephen began with none of the advantages of the apostles, yet, because God the Holy Spirit is sovereign, providentially, over every area of life, because God the Holy Spirit was sovereign over all of the background of Stephen, when Stephen got through it was Stephen, not even Paul, who made the big theological break. Why an unknown man? God worked in his life.

All right, let’s look at what happened, and as we start to look at the violence and begin to see the tremendous reaction to Stephen’s ministry we’ve got to discipline ourselves to start asking this question: what is it that Stephen did that hacked off these people so much. Now he did something quite serious, obviously; you don’t just go out and stone someone because they called you dirty names. Stephen had to have annoyed these people and annoyed them in a very, very deep level. Now you can annoy someone by chewing them out three inches in front of their face, that’s the kind of thing that could irritate you, it might get you out of fellowship for a while. But that’s not the kind of thing that really irritates people. What really irritates people is when you demolish the foundations of their faith. That’s what irritates people; that’s what Stephen did. Stephen was able to pull off, somehow, in his generation what Christian evangelists have not been able successfully to do in our generation. And this is they made the gospel a threatening message at the deepest level of the souls of the hearers. He pulled the carpet out from under the way people thought.

The nearest thing I can cite as a local experience, something happened in Lubbock that would convey this thing that happened would be to remember Dr. Henry Morris’s discussion at the Municipal Auditorium 2 years ago in the creation/evolution controversy. Dr. Morris, a very soft-spoken individual, hardly raising his voice and yet after he gets through the ceiling falls in. Why? Why do people become furious at Dr. Morris? For the simple reason that if Dr. Morris is right everything they’ve stood for is wrong. That makes people furious, when you undercut their entire evolutionary humanistic worldview and shred it, factually; factually! Not just say you don’t believe it but give evidences why they are totally completely wrong. That is going to get a reaction. And so as Christians we have to learn from Stephen. Stephen didn’t quibble up here; Stephen got down with a bulldozer and started digging out the foundation and the building toppled in. That’s what happened to Stephen. Sometimes you die doing this but that’s all right, you go t be face to face with the Lord, no problem.

So let’s see what the questions were that Stephen was hitting throughout this episode and then we can better understand the reaction. Stephen was asking two questions. He asked these two questions of himself and I might add this is anticipating chapter 7 but I hope by the time I get through chapter 7 you’ll be convinced that in fact these were the two questions that Stephen was asking. The first question Stephen asked was: shall the Word be limited to Israel alone? That was the first question. We live 20 centuries away from this so we’ve lost the impact of the question; I’ll try to give you the impact of the question as we go on but just take it right now that that was one of the questions that Stephen hit. The second question he hit which was even more emotional is: what good is the sacred temple now? That’s the second question, what good is the sacred temple now? And you couldn’t ask for two more touchy items.

Again we have to put something else into the background here and ask ourselves why would these two questions upset Greek Jews. We can understand why they’d upset native Jews, but remember Stephen’s ministry isn’t with the large Jewish native population; his ministry has been with the Hellenistic Jews; why are they infuriated with these two questions. Maybe we can dramatize this a little bit by pretending, taking a little imagination trip here for a few minutes and image we’re in the synagogue that you saw on that slide; the synagogue of the Libertines. And Stephen comes in to give his sermon, whatever it is and he begins to chip away at these two points. And let’s pretend we’re sitting down in the chair next to a young rabbinic student by the name of Saul. And let’s pretend we have the ability to read Saul’s mind; we can sit there with Saul and we can say with Saul, question Stephen. And so this young rabbinic student is sitting there very intently, listening to Stephen and Stephen begins to say the Torah is not for Israel only; the temple is not the only place where men worship. And you can see the blood pressure of Saul rising and thoughts like this would rise through Saul’s mind. I want you to understand that they had legitimate gripes if their interpretation of what Stephen said was right. It was wrong, but if what they thought Stephen was saying was right, they were right in killing him.

All right, Saul would say, now listen, we Jews of the diasporas, we Jews who have lived our lives outside of this land of Israel, we had to live out in the Gentile society, we could never fit with that Gentile society and you remember Mr. Stephen, you remember back two centuries what happened when we Jews tried to amalgamate ourselves with Gentile society. You remember a little man by the name of Antiochus Epiphanies, remember him and what he did to us; when we tried to ingratiate ourselves and we tried to harmonize ourselves with the Gentiles when they told us you Jews, to save society, to bring peace to the community we can’t have this pluralism, we can’t have this religious exclusivism, by the way, just like the public schools are saying to evangelicals today, we can’t have this exclusivism, you have to blend in, blend in with the sociological average, stop this adamant adherence to a Biblical absolute. And so Mr. Stephen, we Jews blended in, didn’t we, and we tried to get along with the Greeks, and we tried to get along with the Persians and what was our reward? Antiochus Epiphanies came in and he made us sacrifice unclean swine, pigs on the altar of Yahweh; he told the Jewish mother, stop circumcising your Jewish baby boys; he told the Jewish men stop reading the scrolls of the Torah in the Jewish home. That’s what we got, Stephen when we Jews tried to accommodate with the Gentile society and this has always been the lot of the Jew down through history. In France when the Jews tried to amalgamate with the culture you had the Dreyfus affair. And there was a young journalist who sat through the trial of Captain Dreyfus and his name was Theodor Herzl, and out of Theodor Herzl came the Zionist movement of today. So always the liberal option of amalgamation had failed for the Jew. He has never been able to do this. In Germany the Jew was becoming amalgamated with German culture, he was intermarrying, he was losing his Jewishness and then through Satan’s work, through Hitler and the Nazis the Germans and the Jews parted. Why is it that down through history the Jew has never been able to accommodate himself? Because of his election, God sovereignly has saved the Jew for a special destiny and He will not permit this amalgamation.

Paul may not have gone into all that with Stephen but certainly he would say Mr. Stephen, we are Hellenists, you are a Hellenist, I am a Hellenist, as Hellenists we daily live in Gentile areas and we know what happens when we amalgamate with that society so Mr. Stephen, you are aware as I am, are you not, that the only other option for us Jews is to form a strict separation policy. And thus as Saul and others did, they became fanatics, Pharisaical fanatics for the purity of the Torah. It was through the purity to the Torah, through loyalty to the temple that I keep my Jewishness, that I keep my safety amalgamation. If we can’t amalgamate with the Gentiles then we will stay strictly a Jew. And now Mr. Stephen are you coming into this Hellenistic synagogue and you dare get up in the pulpit and dare tell us Jews that what we are to do is go out and try that first option again; you dare say to us that the Torah isn’t sacred any more, that it’s not there to maintain our strict separateness, that the temple isn’t the place where men ought to worship and only the place where men ought to worship? Is that, Stephen, what you’re telling us? Then Stephen, you blaspheme, you are really anti-Semitic Stephen.

Well, let’s see what happens. That would have been the thought, let’s look at the reaction and then see what Stephen really says. In Acts 6:11, because they lost the argument in verse 10, because obviously Stephen said all right Mr. Saul, the rabbinic student, you come up here and stand alongside and we’ll have a public dialogue in front of this great congregation and I will show from the Scriptures that my position is correct, I challenge you as the top graduate student under Rabbi Gamaliel to defend your position from Scripture, Saul, not from Jewish tradition, from Scripture. Saul lost the debate, and every young man who got up to debate with Stephen and he’d be toppled by Stephen’s arguments from the Old Testament. And the only conclusion, therefore, in verse 11 that they could come to is that we’re going to get him. And so thus began a smear campaign; politics in action in verse 11.

Acts 6:11, “Then they suborned men, who said, We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God.” It goes back to Stephen’s two arguments, against the Word which would be against the Torah or the Law of Moses; “blasphemous words against Moses,” blasphemous words against God because God would be associated with the place where God was worshiped, the temple. So they hire these men, “suborn” means to hire, to influence, they get these men and they’re going to make charges against Stephen. Notice verse 12, “And they stirred up the people, and the elders, and the scribes, and came upon him, and caught him, and brought him to the council.” The word “council” is the Sanhedrin, same place as before.

But before something was different; remember before when the two persecutions hit, the first persecution the Christians got off with just a warning. The second persecution was more intense; what happened to Christians then? They got off with a beating. Now in both those cases, as the Christians responded to the Sanhedrin, who protected them? What was their protection? What prevented that persecution from exploding into mass murder? There was only factor and lest we’ve forgotten it, turn back to Acts 4:16, under the doctrine of civil disobedience we remember that there was a factor that operated and has always operated historically to protect Christians. What was that factor, 4:16, “What shall we do to these men? For that indeed a notable miracle has been done by them is clear to all them that dwell in Jerusalem,” and then in verse 21, “So when they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding nothing how they might punish them, because of the people, for all men glorified God for what had been done.” Acts 5:24, the second persecution, “Now when the high priest and the captain of the temple and the chief priests heard these things, they doubted of them, whereunto this would grow.” Verse 26, “Then went the captain with the officers, and brought them without violence; for they feared the people….” What, then, was the protection factor for those Christians during those first days of persecutions one and persecution two? The protection factor was their political popularity. It was sheer political popularity that protected Christians.

Now a little application for the modern scene. The reason why your brothers and sisters in the faith are dying behind the curtain, are being swept off to Siberia, why they’re dying in China, why they’re dying in some of the new black republics, the black Christians getting paganism crammed down their throat in Chad and some of the other places, the reason this is all happening is because the Christians do not have anybody to speak for them politically; there’s no angry mobs demonstrating on behalf of the Christian refugees. That’s something the Jewish people have learned; that’s why in the United Nations when you go to Manhattan today and you go down to the east side where the U.N. building is you’ll see signs almost every day reminding what is happening to the Jews behind the iron curtain. And don’t you think that as powerful as they are, the communist delegates to the U.N. don’t, when they come out of that building, have to go by those pickets and don’t think that doesn’t have an affect. But where are the Christians? Where are our pickets? Where are our signs? Where is our political pressure. We have Soviet delegates that come right here to the city of Lubbock and never a protest is made to the authorities for allowing blood thirsty mongers on the soil of this city, men who are identified with an anti-Christian government are permitted in this city; the city of conservative Bible belt Christianity. Why is there not a voice raised? Because we’ve forgotten the principle, the protection of Christians in this situation is only their political power; that’s the way God has history up.

So in Acts 6:12 we have Satan’s very clever move that led to persecution number three, and this persecution would be different than persecution one and persecution two because in persecution three Satan had successfully destroyed Christian political popularity. “And they stirred up the people, and the elders,” see, it’s so easy to misrepresent Stephen’s words, he speaks against the Torah? He does? The Christian, do Christians speak against the Torah? Damn them! And thus ended the popularity and that’s why on the human level Stephen is going to be murdered. Stephen has lost the shield of protection of political popularity and he goes down, this always happens, model of what went on century after century, going on to our day.

Acts 6:13, “And set up false witnesses,” false not in the sense they wholesale created these charges but false in the sense they manipulated the deal. Stephen said that but that’s not what he meant, he wasn’t being anti-patriotic in saying it. He meant something else, but it’s so easy to get the mob interested with just a few little innuendos. The greatest people today that do this, of course, are the TV news commentators, who are able to smear a man’s character, from coast to coast, with a few words on a national network, and never is there justice done to protect the character of the people thus smeared. So they “set up false witnesses, who said, This man doesn’t cease to speak blasphemous words,” and now they’re explicit, here is Stephen’s two points, “against this holy place, and the Torah.”

Acts 6:14, “For we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth is going to destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us.” So we now know what Stephen did.

Verse 15 is a very strange observation, it says, “All that sat in the council looked steadfastly on him,” there was something about Stephen, it caused everyone in the room to stare at him while he was doing this; they interrupted him finally, as I’ll point out in a moment, before he could finish he was interrupted and cut off, but while he was speaking, at least until he bulldozed their framework to the point they really became furious, they didn’t whisper, they didn’t talk with their neighbor, they didn’t look around, they concentrated on one thing, the man’s face. And apparently, since Luke wrote this, Luke must have talked to somebody who was there. I wonder who was there? My guess is it’s Saul, Saul was the one who saw this.

“…looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.” Now that doesn’t mean some little sweet thing; angels in Scripture show up as normal human beings; they do not show up with wings flapping around, they don’t show up as little cherubs floating halfway between the ceiling and the floor. They show up as people dressed in the garb of the day. Angels had robes on in the Old Testament, everybody else had robes on. If an angel were to show up to you today he’d show up wearing clothes like anybody else wears, nothing particular. So angelic beings are not distinguishable from humans in their form. Well, then what do we say when it says it looked, as it says here, “the face of an angel?” The identify of a person is related to their face in Scripture. And the identity of a person in particular is related to the eyes of the face. Your eye is the only place on your body where the nerve endings are exposed. You can look into the eye and what you’re looking at is the optic nerve in the back of the eye. This is rare place, because in all our body the nerves are imbedded in tissue, except that one place, the back of the eye where this optic nerve comes out to get the visual impulse. Now it’s precisely the area of the eye, then, Scripturally speaking, where the human spirit can be most easily observed. I hope you don’t have the experience but if you’re ever around a person in a real case of demonic affliction you don’t have to be a theological student to detect it; all you must do is look into their eyes and you will know. The eyes tell all, and don’t we automatically, almost subconsciously know this, for what bandit is there who has not tried to cover his eyes when he robs someone, when he steals, when he rapes. It’s always the one part of the body that has to be covered, the eyes.

Now when it says that Stephen had the face, as it were of an angel, it means there must have been something particular about his eyes, a kind of a concentration, authoritative condemnation of these people, for they are going to put Stephen on trial as blaspheming against the Law and blaspheming against the temple. When Stephen gets done he is going to completely reverse the charges and say no, there’s blasphemy against the Torah and blasphemy against the temple, but it’s not me, it’s you; you’re the ones that are doing it. And so he completely will turn the tables by the time his sermon ends.

Today I want to outline and acquaint you with parts of the sermon. We will spend three weeks going through the details of this sermon, for the reason that there is so much in it, it is so important for many, many different reasons, we’ll spend that much time on it. Nevertheless, today I want to go over the overview so we won’t lose the forest for the trees and you can get introduced to this. I suggest if you come regularly (and if you don’t you’re just wasting your time quite frankly) I recommend strongly that you read Acts 7 three or four times, just read it through and try to get the gist of it because this is going to be the first time you’ll see in Acts the distinct Christian message appearing, that later we know as the Christian gospel. Up to now it’s been kind of a kingdom invitation to the nation; it’s been a very Jewish thing, it’s been a very technical thing, very kingdom centered but as I’ve shown you time and time again in the outline of the book of Acts, Acts is a transition book and because it is we can expect that as time goes on we’re going to see more and more of the Church. So right here the Church is being shown in its doctrine. Stephen, not Paul, was the one to make the big break.

Now he’s going to do it in a classic Jewish way. If you read the Old Testament and read how Moses exhorted the people; how Joshua exhorted the people; how Samuel exhorted the people; how David exhorted the people, you’ll always see that the great Jewish exhortations had the same format. What is the format? Historical recital. It’s always a recital of God’s acts and words in history. That’s always the format. Why is that? One thing is clear, they don’t sit down and say oh how I feel about Yahweh. Oh, I met Jehovah God and He just gave me this creepy feeling between my naval and my Adam’s apple and now because I have this titillating feeling that means I’ve been slain in the Spirit or some idiotic thing.

God the Holy Spirit does not operate subjectively at the point of the gospel. He operates objectively in history; that’s what’s wrong with modern theology, it’s how you feel about something. God doesn’t care how you feel about something, who are you anyway? It’s what has happened objectively in history and this is why in the Bible time and time again, and you’ll see a very clear instance here, these men don’t describe to you their psychological state; they describe to you the historical facts of the case and that’s what they witness to. So those of you who are affiliated with some Christian group where you concentrate on Jesus’ feelings, and on what I feel and how I think about Jesus apart from Scripture, you’re out of line as far as orthodox Christian is concerned.

Now the historical recital format Stephen uses an adapts and he divides it in three parts. His answer here is going to be divided up in verses 2-16, the first part is what we will call the patriarchal period. He’s going to deal extensively with that era of history. Then in verses 17-43 he is going to deal with Moses and the Torah, Moses and the Law. And then in 7:44-50 he’s going to deal with the tabernacle and the temple. Those are the three parts of Stephen’s speech; the three emphases; he could recite 850 different things that happened in history but he’s only going to concentrate on three. These three are his answer.

Now critics have said Acts 7 is totally irrelevant to the trial. He’s being charged with blasphemy against Moses and blasphemy against God, what the heck does all this history have to do with it. It’s very simple; this is the answer. Notice the second point, what is it concerned with? The Torah. Notice the third point, what is it concerned with? The temple. So this answer is appropriate for the context.

Now we’re going to look at the parts, just to survey them this morning and I want you to see how Stephen very cleverly works the same theme over and over and over. When you read it quick you get the idea that all this is is history. Wait a minute; watch. Acts 7:2, “Men, brethren, and fathers, hearken: The God of glory appeared unto our father, Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran.” Now the critics have a ball with verse 2; they say in Genesis text it’s very clear that God appeared to Abraham in Charran, and there’s a conflict, they say, between Acts 7 and the Old Testament. Why this conflict? Well, it’s not a conflict, it’s supplementary but we learn from the critics one thing; verse 2 is saying something queer. Verse 2 is saying something about history that is not said in the Old Testament, at least it’s not emphasized in the Old Testament. Two things are said in verse 2 that should strike our eyes as very peculiar. First of all notice the title of God; he doesn’t say Yahweh appeared to Abraham, He doesn’t say God appeared to Abraham, he says “God of glory appeared to Abraham.” Now if you know your Old Testament, what bells does that ring. The “God of glory,” what glory? The glory that dwelt in the temple. Now isn’t that interesting. What Stephen has just said in his first point is that the temple-dwelling God, the God that you know is the glory of the temple, where did He first appear to the first Jew. Did He appear on this mountain? Did He even appear on the soil of Palestine? No, He appeared on Gentile soil in a Gentile city in a Gentile country; that’s where the God of glory appeared, Mesopotamia.

So, theme one in his first part is God’s Word appeared in Gentile culture, not in Jewish culture first. The second theme, as the passage goes on in verses 2-16 it speaks of the fact that he gave the covenant of circumcision, verse 8, “Abraham begot Isaac, and circumcised him the eight day; and Isaac begot Jacob; and Jacob begot the twelve patriarchs. [9] And the patriarchs moved with envy, sold Joseph,” so his second theme besides the first one which was the Word of God appears outside of the soil of Palestine, in Gentile soil, the second theme is: and who is it that was obstructing the Word of God’s ministry? Jews, not Gentiles, Jews, fellow Jews. So his second minor theme is that the obstructionists to God’s Word are the Jewish people themselves.

Now a third point, verse 10, “they sold Joseph into Egypt, but God was with him, [10] And delivered him out of al his afflictions, and gave him favor and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh…. [11] And there came a famine over all the land of Egypt…. [12] When Jacob heard there was grain in Egypt, he sent out our fathers first,” you know the story. So the third theme of Stephen’s speech is the Jew that was rejected became the Savior of the nation. The very Jew that they wanted to kill was the Jew who gave them their bread in the famine. Interesting, said Stephen; isn’t interesting how history repeats itself, said Stephen.

And so he goes to the second part of his speech, Moses and the Law, verses 17-43, and in verse 17, “But when the time of promise drew near … the people grew and multiplied in Egypt,” verse 19 describes the genocidal policy of the Pharaoh government and it describes how Moses undertook to carry out the Word of God in Egypt; sub theme one of his second point is identical to the theme of item one. When we dealt with the patriarchal period what was his first point? The Word of God came to the Jewish people on Gentile soil. He gets to the second point where does the Word of God come to the Jewish people? On Gentile soil. Now what happens when the Word of God comes to the people on Gentile soil? Verse 27, what’s the response of Moses’ fellow Jews, “Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? [28] Are you going to kill us like you did the Egyptian yesterday?” Who are the obstructionists to God’s Word. The Jews themselves. Second point under his second division is the same as his second point under the first division was back here it was Joseph’s brothers, fellow Jews who obstructed and opposed God’s program. Under the days of Moses fellow Jews opposed program, and we know the story of Moses well enough so we needn’t go into details right now. What do you suppose is Stephen’s third point? Same as the third point here, the Jew they rejected became the savior of the nation, Joseph. Here the Jew they rejected became the savior of the nation, Moses.

And so he moves to a third point, verses 44-50, the tabernacle and the temple. This one’s a little different. I’m not exactly sure why but we’ll get to that when we go into it. He starts out with the tabernacle, Verses 44-46 all have to do with the tabernacle. Then it says, verse 47, “But Solomon built him a temple,” so there’s a contrast and it’s first theme under the section here is… the tabernacle is what? What was the difference between the tabernacle and the temple? The tabernacle was mobile; the Word of God dwelt in the tabernacle but it didn’t get fixed to one location. It could be moved all around the place, so in a way his first point here is the same as it was here. The Word of God appeared in Mesopotamia; the Word of God appeared in Egypt; the Word of God appeared anywhere God chose to give His Word; flexibility of the Word of God.

Second point: Solomon built the temple, however, verse 48, “the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands, saith the prophet. [49] Heaven and earth is my throne,” in other words Solomon and the prophets were careful to day that though the temple had been built God was not statically and mobily confined to that one geographic point; God was bigger than that and therefore the second point, the Jews themselves opposed that because that whole historic period, when that doctrine was being promoted, they were saying God’s temple is the place God’s temple is the place, God’s temple is the place, no other place. Stephen never got his third point in on this last section. It’s missing and the reason it’s missing, his unbelieving hearers caught the subtlety of what he was saying. They weren’t morons, they heard what he said here, the Word of God came to you people, where did it? It came in Mesopotamia, and who are the obstructionists? Jews, and you obstructed Joseph, didn’t you. And who was it God chose to make your savior? It was Joseph. Here, second point, God’s Word came to Moses in Egypt; you people objected against Moses, you opposed him every way you could, didn’t you? And who did God pick to save you from Egypt? Moses.

This point: He has begun to establish the mobility of the Word of God, He has begun to point out their opposition to that mobility and He never gets to his third point here but if by analogy we can make the third point he was just about to say the One you objected to has become your Savior. And under that third point who was it that they were objecting to but God Himself. And God Himself has become your Savior. But he never gets to say that; they had quickly inferred this. As unbelievers they were so sharp and so well-grounded in the Word of God they saw where that speech was going and so they interrupted him and you have verse 51-52 where Stephen replies, apparently, “You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you do always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you.” And that led to his stoning.

What has Stephen done? Stephen, the lowly deacon, the Christian welfare officer, instead of moping around, oh I’m a second class Christian, didn’t go to college, didn’t have all that great education of the apostles, didn’t have all this fine opportunity the apostles have, blah, blah, blah. Stephen, instead of moping around, crying in his beer, went along and he studied the Word and studied the Word, and studied the Word, over and over and over and over, and we know how hard he studied because of the tremendous content of this sermon. When we get into the details of his citation of the text, we now he studied from at least two versions of the Bible and he begins to quote from and he adjusts the quotation a little bit, it’s fantastic. Stephen had carefully prepared himself; particularly you Christian men, please notice. Stephen did not get in the position where he was by running a religious gamut, by visiting everyone in the congregation twice a week, he did not go out and witness to 85 people each day to get brownie points. He didn’t go through all this programming. He did one thing; he took in the Word of God, took it in faithfully, took it in constantly, took it in over a time period and when the time came it was Stephen, not Peter, not John, not anyone else that made the breakthrough. Stephen made the breakthrough. Stephen discovered that Jesus Christ is going to appear in the Gentile world like He did in Mesopotamia and Egypt, that he’s mobile, that he’s a tabernacle, He goes anywhere and so is Christian missions going to go everywhere. And everywhere that Christian missions goes it’s going to be opposed by the Jew, the establishment Jew and it’s going to be precisely Jesus Christ whom the Jews oppose that will become the Messiah and Savior of the Jews themselves. The same theme repeated again and again.