Clough Acts Lesson 17

Stephen’s Use of Typological Interpretation – Acts 7:2-17

We’ll review some of the principles we’ve learned from Stephen, from how God the Holy Spirit was using Stephen at this point in church history and then we’ll go on with Stephen’s address. Remember that this occurs at the end of the section of Acts dealing with Jerusalem and therefore is a testimony of how the Holy Spirit is using the situation, including the widow controversy, to lead the Church into fulfilling the great commission and from this we obtain a vital principle of the Christian life and that is that God the Holy Spirit operates in your life whether you are conscious of it or not. God leads whether you are conscious of it or not. When God has a certain sovereign path that He has chosen then He accomplishes that sovereign path, regardless of whether we’re aware of it. This does not excuse human rebellion, it just simply says that God is going to attain His stated purposes. That is why in Romans 8:26 it says the Holy Spirit is praying petitions for you with groanings which cannot be uttered, it means that you have no consciousness of His petition. It doesn’t mean the Holy Spirit is going ooh ugh ah oou, nothing like that at all; it just is the word for non-verbal unheard secret communication. And so the Holy Spirit is doing this secret communication here at this point in history.

The other thing that we notice from this by way of principle is that Stephen was a Hellenist Jew. He was a representative of the segment of Christians who came from cosmopolitan type backgrounds. These people were not provincial, they were not just native Palestinians; they were people whose families had lived in the big cities of the ancient world, Corinth, Athens, Alexandria, Rome and so on. Therefore, because these people had this cosmopolitan background they came to the Word with new fresh insight that the native Palestinians did not have. And this second principle will answer in our life to the fact that each one of you who is a believer brings to the Word of God a unique background. There never has been a person in history quite of your background and never will again, and therefore it means that you have the opportunity during your lifetime to make applications of the Word that no on else before you has made and no one after you will make. You have a created uniqueness. And Stephen is showing how God uses men who have this unique kind of background.

Stephen is going to use two techniques in this sermon; techniques that come out of his background of Hellenism. One of these techniques is classical because it has to do with the idea of historical recital. This was used time and time again in the Bible when exhortation was delivered to the nation. And that is that the person who is doing the encouraging, doing the exhorting, would not get up and give his glowing testimony about how he felt about the Lord. What he would do was get up and give you objectively what had happened in history, so the exhortation was not dependent upon how you felt, it was actually what happened that counts. Someone has recently said and they’re right when you stop and think about it, the gospel can never be experienced. Now Christ can be experienced but the gospel can’t; the gospel isn’t an experience; the gospel is good news about what happened 2,000 years ago outside the city walls of Jerusalem; that’s the gospel and that cannot be experienced. You can believe it which will then lead to the Holy Spirit giving you experiences in the present moment but those experiences are not the gospel. So when we evangelize, when we witness, understand you are not sharing your private experiences. You are, in fact, giving a historical recital of what Jesus Christ has done. That is the gospel. Testimony is fine but don’t make the mistake of thinking a personal testimony is the gospel. It isn’t.

So Stephen operates on the Biblical principle of recitation of history. Revelation is objective. But Stephen does something else, and he comes up with a second principle and it’s this second principle that Stephen shows his uniqueness, even introduces something brand new in church history, it had been around for some time but Stephen was the man who popularized it. Stephen operated using topological interpretation of the Bible. I’ll explain that but just notice what it’s all about first so you’ll appreciate why he does what he does in this 7^th chapter of Acts because it’s something new, you haven’t seen this yet as we’ve traveled through the book of Acts. It’s a way he arranges Scripture that is new. The way he arranges Scripture is not seen, probably elsewhere in the New Testament in a strong form except in the epistle to the Hebrews. The author of Hebrews uses typological interpretation. Now to a lesser degree Paul does and so on but it’s a new system of interpreting Scripture.

Now first let’s see what the system is, then we’ll understand why Stephen trotted it to use on this occasion. Typological interpretation takes one historic event, which we will call the type, and associates it with a second historic event which we will call the antitype, though in the Bible actually those terms are reversed. It doesn’t matter as long as you get the point that there are two events and the authors will show that this event has a set of characteristics and this event has a set of characteristics, and those two events may be separated by thousands of years. And yet they retain a fundamental similarity.

For example, during the 1 and 2 Samuel series we had the life of David; it was very obvious that David, first of all, was anointed by a prophet, he wasn’t accepted as king by his people, he went into concealment and hiding until the king, Saul, was removed from the throne, David then came back, he was then coronated, and he led his nation to victory. Well whose life does that also sound like? The Lord Jesus Christ. He was anointed by the prophet, John the Baptist; He was not accepted by His nation, He went into concealment, and will come back when Satan is removed from the throne of this world. So there’s an analogy, there are a set of parallelisms between David and Christ. That’s what we mean when we say David is a type, Christ is the antitype.

Why is that important for you as a Christian? One thing that’s important is that when you read the Psalms that are written by David, during what period of his life? The concealment period of his life, that’s why the Psalms, all through the 1900 years of church history have struck Christians again and again and again, hey, these Psalms speak to me in my spiritual situation. All the frustrations I have as a Christian, they’re all spelled out in the Psalms. How come the Psalms speak more, seemingly, than other portions of Scripture? Because it was written when David was fleeing, in concealment, and therefore it describes the spiritual state when Christ is in concealment, and not reigning publicly in this world and the Church is being persecuted.

So type and antitype is the system that Stephen popularizes in Acts 7. Why? Why is the topological interpretation used? Before we see why we want to warn you about something. And this is not typological interpretation, this is allegorical interpretation and that’s not the same as typological interpretation. Allegory, frequently if you read Ian Thomas’ works he’ll use allegory, somebody went down the river and they came up and this is symbolic of certain phases of the Christian life. Allegory may be fine but the danger of allegory is there’s no control. You can I look at that wall and that reminds me of something in the Christian life, and I say well, I look at the light and that reminds me of something else in the Christian life. It’s our opinion, there’s no way of judging the opinion and therefore allegorical interpretation is not really the way to go in Scripture at all. You get into allegory you just get into opinions you can’t check. Typology is different because in typology you have two givens; you have two absolutely exiting historical events or people and you can look at this one and you can look at that one and ten thousand people can look at the two events and see objectively there are parallels. That’s why typological interpretation can be controlled. Allegorical interpretation can’t be.

Having made that distinction, we return to the original question, why does Stephen at this point in his life, faced with a court trial, revert to typological interpretation? To some Christians probably, if you’re new to this you think well what’s this got to do with… it has nothing to do with the Christian life. Oh yes it has, very much so because Stephen is fighting for his life. Stephen is giving a defense of the Christian faith to people, not of provincial background but of people of cosmopolitan background and he’s got to therefore reason with these people in a conditioned way and he says the way to do it—typological interpretation. Now how come? For this reason, he’s going to show again and again there’s a type separated from its antitype by a thousand or more years and Stephen therefore is concluding the only explanation for this kind of typology in history is that you must have a sovereign God over all the details of history. So really it’s an apologetic for a sovereign historical Lord, that God is in control of every event of history. That’s why these men in the early days of the Church reverted time and time again back to types, over and over and over they did this because they pounded away that the God of Israel and the God of Abraham is the God of the Gentiles too; He’s the God of all areas of the universe, He is transcendent God over every area. Okay, that’s the reason he’s using this.

Now let’s look at the text. Stephen begins by having the question put to him by the high priest in Acts 7:1, “1 Then said the high priest, Are these things so?” Now Stephen can’t answer that question with a simple yes or a simple no. Why can’t he? Well, what is the question? What are “these things?” “These things” are the charges being leveled against Stephen, this Christian man. And in Acts 6:11 and 13 we have those charges. What are the charges that they claim this Christian man has done? He “speaks blasphemous words against Moses, and against God,” verse 11, and verse 13, “blasphemous words against the temple [this holy place] and the Torah [Law].” So Stephen is faced with this question: we have the Torah, we have the temple, the temple is the worship place of God, the Torah was written by Moses, that’s how Moses and God get into the picture. And he is being accused of maligning and undermining these two points.

Now question: has Stephen indeed spoken against the Torah? In a way he has, sure he has; he’s said in effect that the Torah is limited and it’s going to be supplemented by a whole corpus of new revelation and indeed Stephen has spoken what would be considered blasphemous words against the Torah. Has he spoken blasphemous words against the temple? Yes, for he has repeated the words of Christ, in three days I will cast down the temple and I’ll raise it up again, speaking of course of the new temple that will come in to replace the temple in Jerusalem. So yes, Stephen has done this and he could answer yes but if Stephen answered yes to the question it would mean immediate execution without clarification of the issues because really Stephen did not speak against the Torah from God’s point of view, did he? Was Stephen arguing against God? Not at all, he was simply taking the divine viewpoint of the Torah and the divine viewpoint of the temple and putting it in perspective of all of history. So he could have answered no, these charges, sir, are not true.

So faced with the question that could be answered by yes or by no, Stephen does what every Christian ought to do in this kind of situation, that is, he rejects an immediate answer to the question and explains the divine viewpoint framework instead. Now here we’ve got a principle that we can use that comes up over and over again in every day Christian experience, and that is Christians often times, particularly those of you who have a little doctrine, a little doctrine is a dangerous thing and you think you know more than you really do, and so you walk around like a gun that has its trigger ejected, the hair trigger, all cocked to go off and before you even look at the target your finger just touches the trigger and boom, the thing goes off and you’re nowhere near the target because you’re too itchy to give you little doctrinal answer to something before you hear the question. And that’s why oftentimes your testimony just seems to wash off; you haven’t got your gun leveled on the target before you cock it and pull the trigger.

Now let’s give three examples of modern type questions that are thrown at Christians that ought to be denied, just like Stephen denied an immediate answer to this high priest. The first question, the sucker question that is always thrown and Christians start firing away without even dreaming that the question is a set up; like one of these “how many times did you beat your wife last week,” how do you answer that question without incriminating yourself. You see, these are self-incriminating questions. The first one that’s often used against Christians. Prove that God exists; that’s all, prove that God exists and I’ll be a Christian. Well isn’t that nice. The problem is that the very concept of proof presupposes a certain philosophy of truth, a certain philosophy of the universe. I can’t answer the question; that proof in turn depends upon the existence or non-existence of God. I can’t independently come out here and I in all my finite glory sit here and come up with a standard of truth and then I pass judgment on whether God is there or not. How can a finite man legislate what can and cannot be true for the infinite God? It’s ridiculous; that’s what Archimedes said in ancient Greece, he said give me a fulcrum and give me a lever and put it in the right place and I can move the earth. Sure you can, but I can’t get the lever and I haven’t got the fulcrum. And it’s the same principle here, I can’t prove God exists and the Bible doesn’t. The Bible presumes He exists, because the question is a false question.

So if you are ever faced with that question back off and do what Stephen does in Acts 7; what does Stephen do? He starts going through what appears to be the biggest way around Robin Hood’s barn that you can imagine. What does he do? He goes through event and doctrine, event and doctrine, event and doctrine, event and doctrine. You remember the divine viewpoint framework, we’ve shown it time and time again how you go through from creation forward in time, we’ve seen these events, and that’s what Stephen is going to do. He’s going to say hold it, before I answer this question let me explain something. Let me give you the Christian answer to origins; let me give you the Christian answer to the problem of evil; let me give you the Christian recitation of ancient history, that idea of election, the giving of the Law, etc. etc. etc. and when we get all the cards laid on the table, then we’ll discuss the question. Let’s get all the data out on the table. You see, while you’re doing this you’re providing the soul of that person who asked the question data from the Word of God and when you do that the Holy Spirit can work. So this is a technique of apologetics or a technique of answering questions to get off this hair trigger idea of just kind of squirting out a few verses and thinking that’s going to solve the problem.

A second kind of incriminating question that Christians are often faced with. This was passed to me by a minister of one of the largest churches in Lubbock this week who does not accept the inerrancy of Scripture. He said: how can sinful finite man give inerrant revelation? How can inerrant, that is revelation without error, spring forth from finite limited sinful creatures. It’s got to be mistaken, there has to be mistakes in the Bible, the Bible was written by men, so therefore it’s got to have error. Now that’s usually an interesting question thrown out but it completely misses the point, it’s s self-incriminating question. Does revelation come, ultimately from man? Not at all; it comes from God. So you see the question was asked wrongly; obviously if revelation was coming just from finite sinful man it would be errant, of course, but it’s not coming just from finite man; that’s the whole point of the question. So again, you could get in there and get that gun and start firing verses off that wouldn’t mean beans to somebody like this because you see, they cut you off in the very way they ask the question. They would simply listen to you for about five minutes and then they’d turn you off and say you haven’t answered the question.

Third kind of question which often comes, particularly from Jewish people about Jesus. How can a mere man become God; how can man become God? That’s again a very loaded question because the question isn’t how man can become God; the question the Christian would counter with is how can God become man? And if it’s phrased that way then obviously God can become man because Jesus wasn’t man who became God; He was preexistent God who took on the form of a man. So you see again, the answer was determined by the way the question was asked. So understand as we begin Acts 7 that Stephen is not just trying to play games. Stephen gives this big long… look how long the answer is; see how long his answer goes, see that big long answer. That’s all because he couldn’t answer the question with a simple yes or no. He had to give all this data, it was the only way he could answer this kind of a situation.

All right, in Acts 7:2 he begins. Now I’ve said that it would help some of you more serious students of the Scriptures if you had a light colored pencil, preferably yellow or something like that that you can see through, and when you come to passages like this if you color very lightly the areas that are quotations out of the Old Testament, you will discover that 50% of what you think is the New Testament isn’t new at all, it’s just the Old Testament. So for purposes today for those who like to do that, I will cite most, not all, most of the major quotations and allusions as we go through verse by verse. I won’t necessarily give you all the exact references, you can look that up if you have a chain reference but I will show you things that come out of the Old Testament.

“And he said, Men, brethren, and fathers,” this is the address of one Jew to another Jew. Doesn’t that sound familiar? You bet, that’s how the epistle to the Hebrews is set up; brethren, “hearken; The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran, [3] And said unto him, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall show thee. [4] Then came he out of the land of the Chaldeans, and dwelt in Charran: and from thence, when his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein ye now are dwelling.”

Let’s to back to verse 2 and look at the title, “the God of glory.” Literally it reads: “the God of the glory.” Now those of us who have been Christians for some time see the word “glory” and we kind of just trot over it at 60 miles an hour, oh, yeah, glory, blah, blah, blah and it doesn’t mean a thing. So let’s just stop a minute and say what are we talking about when we’re talking about “glory of God.” The word “glory” would be analogous in our vocabulary today of radiation. For example, fluorescent tubes, we have an ionization occurring with the electricity in these tubes and you get a glory; that, if you had a person out of the first century that looked up here he would say that’s glory. We wouldn’t use the word “glory,” what we would use would be some sort of radiation or light. That’s what the word glory means, it’s something that you can physically see. So “the God of glory” must refer to the various radiations surrounding His throne. We don’t have to guess at what Stephen means; for one thing, “the God of glory” is a quotation from the Old Testament, it actually comes out of Psalm 29:3, but another thing, at the end of the sermon Stephen uses this phrase again in verse 55, Stephen “being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God,” so obviously what Stephen talked about here is the radiation that is seen, the light radiation that is seen around the throne, whatever radiation we don’t know but every theophany or appearance of God, everybody reports, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Moses, all the men in history who have actually seen this thing say it’s a phenomenal kind of light and that’s all they can report; the only thing that they can see in our physical world that looks like it is light, physical light.

So Stephen uses the word that refers to God in His prime essence, separate and distinct from creation. Also, where in Jewish history did the glory of God appear? It appeared in the temple, the Shekinah or the dwelling glory appeared there. So Stephen deliberately begins with a title of God that would remind his Jewish hearers that the God he speaks of is not just a God of Israel, but He’s the God who is over the entire universe. Remember, he’s a Hellenist Jew, not a native Jew, and therefore he’s got a cosmopolitan type background that things in terms of questions men in Athens were raising, men in Alexandria and elsewhere in the world were raising. So, “The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham,” he says, and notice Stephen’s answer to the question goes back to the origin of the Jewish nation; he does not start with Moses. And that’s the way all questions should go, go back to origins; evolution creation is not a random issue; When we get to the racial problem, the reason men can’t handle the racial problem, the culture problem, is they never go back to Genesis 8, 9 and 10 where cultures of men got started in the postdiluvian world. Therefore they don’t define where they are. And so here when Stephen starts he goes back to the origins. You have to know history and have to know origins.

“…appeared” unto the first Jew, “our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran, [3] And said unto him, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred,” now there’s a puzzle here. Stephen’s got hold of some information that just isn’t in the Scripture as far as we can tell. Now he apparently got this by bona fide extra Biblical tradition. It’s hinted at in Genesis but let’s look at a map. This is the eastern Mediterranean, this is Israel, the Persian Gulf here and the Tigris-Euphrates River. Down here is a place called Ur; that’s Mesopotamia. Up here is a place called Charran, and here’s Canaan. Those of you familiar with geometry wonder why, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, Abraham didn’t go across this way, instead went up here and back down. Reason: because that’s where the trade routes, plus the fact he’d get suck in the sand if he tried to come across there, camel or by car, it doesn’t make any difference. So he moved to Charran. Now to show the tension and why people say there’s a contradiction in the Bible we’ll go to that passage, Genesis 12.

Someday you’re going to be discussing this with somebody and they’re going to come out with a statement, well, there are errors in the Bible and if you’re a sharp Christian you won’t let that one go by, you’ll just say oh really, show me one, because most people who say that can’t for the simple reason they haven’t read the Bible, they just heard someone say who heard someone say who heard someone say there was an error. But you ask them and challenge them to show me an error in the Scripture. This will tell you a lot about how familiar the are with the text. And much to your chagrin they’ll take you back here and show you the following “error” in the Scripture. Let’s see if you can follow “the error.” There’s two errors, they will say. Genesis 11:32, “And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in Charran.” So where’s the text taking place? In Charran. Now Genesis 12:1, “And the LORD said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.” Precisely what Stephen said was quoted. And then in verse 4, Abraham departs, not from Ur but from Charran. So from verse 12:4 and 11:32 it looks like verse 12:1 was addressed up here in Charran, not down here in Ur and thus Stephen is wrong. Well, if Stephen is right, then Genesis 12 must be wrong, one or the other. But in the way the Bible is written it writes topically, not necessarily chronology. And if you have a King James translation in particular you’ll notice what the translator has done for you in verse 1, he has said, “the LORD had said to Abram,” he didn’t say “the LORD said,” he said “the LORD had said.”

Now back in the days before creative writing in the public schools they had a thing called grammar and when they studied grammar they had something where they went through the various kinds of verbs, one of which was the pluperfect tense of the verb. The pluperfect tense refers to action prior to time past, so what it would be is “while Abraham was in Charran, it was true that God had spoken to him some time before that,” the following thing. You see, the Hebrew verb doesn’t distinguish the perfect from the pluperfect; that has to be done in contextual consideration. So the King James translators in verse 1 did translate it correctly and run this as a pluperfect. See why it’s so important to know grammar; if you don’t know grammar you can’t defend the inerrancy of Scripture. It depends on your ability to see what tenses occur in the text. So you get your way out of that little error.

But then the person has a little trump card they play on you and now they really pin you back and they say aha, but Christian, there’s an even bigger mistake in this text and surely, since I can prove this to you mathematically you can’t get out of this one, there has got to be a mistake, for the person will refer you back to Genesis 11:26 where it says, “Terah lived seventy years, and then he begot Abraham….” Seventy years, and then in verse 32 the days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died,” and then Abraham left, according to Stephen after his father died. Well, if he lived 205 years, then it must mean that 135 years elapsed between Abraham’s birth and his leaving Charran. Now the high age isn’t a problem because high ages are typical in this period of history, men still had fantastic bodies until we deteriorated after the flood. So 135 itself isn’t the problem; the problem is we would expect Abraham to be 135 when he left Charran, but if you look in Genesis 12:4, “Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken to him; and Lot was with him: and Abram was seventy five years old when he departed….” Slight discrepancy. And so the unbeliever smiles at you and says, you still want to defend an inerrant text Christian?

Now instead of panicking when you’re in this kind of a situation the best thing to do is look over the evidence once again to see if you might have slipped and you needn’t go further than verse 26 of chapter 11, for if you look back carefully at verse 26 it says, “Terah lived seventy years, and begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran,” not the place, this is a man. Three sons; it doesn’t say he begot all three sons at that particular time; these boys were not triplets, one was a lot older than the others, he died far before, Nahor. So what verse 26 is saying is that Terah was 70 when he began to have children and then after that he had children, and Abraham apparently was his youngest sons, the last one he had. But verse 26 does not compel a birth of Abraham with Terah at 70. See, in that time God gave parents considerably more training than he does now before they had children.

Let’s to back to Stephen in Acts 7; Stephen cites this but what’s Stephen’s point. Where was it he said that God spoke to Abram? On this great sacred soil of the city of Jerusalem? No, it was in Mesopotamia, thousands of miles away, said Stephen, so you people who are accusing me of being against the Torah and temple because I’m a Christian, I want to take the gospel to the Gentiles, you accuse me of being anti-provincial. Wait a minute, he says to his fellow Jews. Where was Abraham when God spoke to him? Here at the temple cite? Not on your life, he was thousands of miles away. God started Israel in Mesopotamia, not elsewhere. And the Jewish people today are increasingly aware of this. Here’s a letter to the editor of the Jerusalem Post, dated June 1, 1976. This man writes back in answer to an article which had been talking about Palestine as the focal point of the three great religions of the world; that Palestine was the soil from which all these three religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity came from. A very sharp Jewish man, an Israeli.

He says this: “Sir, the phrase, Eretz Yisrael, as the cradle of three monotheistic religions is being repeated ad nauseum by Christians, and also by de-Judiazed Jews. It should be critically analyzed from a Jewish point of view.” And of course we could say with him the Christian point of view because what he says is absolutely right. “One, this country is certainly not the cradle of Judaism.” How’s that for an Israeli? “This country is certainly not the cradle of Judaism; Abraham recognized God in Iraq. The Torah was given in the no-man land of Sinai, the foot of the lawgiver of Israel never touched the soil of Canaan; Eretz Yisrael” that means the land of Israel, “was acquired by Israel; it did not begat Israel. Jerusalem became the holy city of Judaism at a late stage of the history of Israel and Judaism some 800 years after Abraham, some 400 years after Moses. So Israel and Palestine was not the soil on which Judaism began. Two, Islam is a supreme achievement, not of Palestine, but of Arabia. Islam has no roots in Palestine, it acquired Palestine and conquered it. The prophet of Islam visited Jerusalem only once and then it was in a vision. Three, only Christianity originated in this country. The God of the Christians was born here, lived here, and died in Jerusalem. The Christian church was first established in Jerusalem. To sum up, the two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, do not have their cradle in Eretz Yisrael. The country is the cradle of only one religion, Christianity.”

It’s very interesting, an Israeli interested in the true facts of history. And with Stephen would confess that “the God of glory” appeared outside of Israel. So it goes on in verses 4 and 5 to relate the familiar story of Abraham coming to the land; in verse 5, it relates that, “He gave him no inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on:” Old Testament quotation from Deuteronomy 2:5, “yet He promised that He would give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him,” Old Testament quote from Genesis 17:8, “when as yet he had no child.” So he’s describing in verse 5 the way of Abraham’s life; he says Stephen, Abraham’s roots were in Iraq or Mesopotamia and his way of life was the faith technique. His trust wasn’t in the soil under his feet; his trust wasn’t in some provincial idea of Israel; his real roots were in heaven with the God of glory and he was a pilgrim in this land. Don’t, says Stephen to his fellow Jews, get your feet set in cement on this land; get your feet set on the Word of God, not the land.

And he goes on then, Acts 7:6, “And God spoke on this wise,” and the rest of verse 6 is a quote from the Old Testament, Genesis 15:13, “That his seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years. [7] And the nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge, said God,” continuing the Old Testament quote in verse 7, “and after that” (quote) “shall they come forth, and serve Me in this place,” Another Old Testament quote. Do you kind of get the impression that Stephen knew his Old Testament? And also his hearers knew the Old Testament. In fact they knew it enough to get the point very clearly.

So he describes the foundation of the nation. Now watch how he starts to weave because, remember, let’s not lose the forest for the trees, the woods are getting thick at this point so let’s just keep in mind the big picture. What’s the big picture? Stephen’s defending the plan of God from provincially being limited to the land of Israel. He’s saying it encompasses all men everywhere and he does this by showing how Abraham came out of the Gentile land. Notice “the nation to whom they shall be in bondage,” verse 7, with another Gentile nation.

Acts 7:8, “And He gave him the covenant of circumcision: and so Abraham begat Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat the twelve patriarchs.” Now the covenant of circumcision is what distinguished the Jew in history. The Abrahamic Covenant and circumcision was an act performed on all Jewish baby males at the eighth day, for various reasons. Here are the reasons: Circumcision, because it has a certain sanitary effect physically becomes a picture of regeneration. And it’s referred to as such in Old Testament doctrine, the cleansed heart; I will cleanse your heart and so on, be circumcised in your heart. So it is a physical picture of the spiritual act of regeneration. That’s one reason for circumcision.

Another reason for circumcision, and this has to do with a practice the Jewish people began, no one else has. Other people had circumcision in the ancient world but it was circumcision of the boy when he reached adolescence, never as an infant. It was the Jew who began circumcision at infancy. So now we have to back off and say why? What caused God to make circumcision at infancy instead of at adolescence? Because circumcision was a picture also of the transmission of the sin nature, to show that we possess our sin nature from the time we are born physically we have it, and it was done on the eight day, God told them to do it but now medically we know why; someone did research and they found out the clotting, if you plot it on a piece of graph paper, take a baby, the number of days after birth and you look at the chemicals of the blood and how they have the ability to clot, it has maximum ability to clot on the 8^th day. I wonder how Moses knew that; do you suppose he took a little lab test out at Mount Sinai and very carefully analyzed the blood and said, oh, coagulation is most effective on the 8^th day so I guess, thinking as the liberals do, that he trotted up to Mount Sinai for a little religious experience without really encountering God but just having dreams, that Moses dreamed about his science lab and came up with this eight day circumcision bit. Of course today circumcision is on the second or third day but that’s for the interest of cost of hospital, not for the interest of clotting of blood.

Third thing about why circumcision was given in Old Testament times and very important, was that it pointed to the role of sex and reproduction in the passing on of the sin nature. The sexual process itself has become fallen. Now be careful, the Bible is not saying that sex itself is sinful, the sex act is sinful. It is saying, however, that the sex act, like with everything is tainted with sin and in particular physical corruption. And so therefore as the mother and the father conceive a child, the child has just received the sin from both parents. There’s no way of escaping it, we are all the flesh of Adam.

A fourth reason for it was that it was a means of cultural separation for the Jewish people. No Jewish man could marry a Canaanite woman without being reminded that he was different. Circumcision was a sign of setting the Jew apart, and this is why when Joshua’s army crossed the Jordan River, the first thing he did was he circumcised them. And obviously placing great faith, you have a circumcised army and it kind of keeps your mobility down for 2 or 3 days. Well, Joshua had to trust the Lord while this was going on and it shows evidence of his trust and that he would move on and take Jericho. So circumcision was the outward physical sign of this Abrahamic Covenant and it’s mentioned here.

Now watch, beginning in Acts 7:9 for the very, very clever typology of Stephen. He plays it real cool because he never really tells you that’s what he’s doing. But you know and I know and his hearers know that’s in fact what he’s doing. But you kind of have to play the game with Stephen, so we’ll read over the verses and you read down with me. I’ll read verses 9-16 before we go through it in detail and I want you to see if you can pick out the type/antitype relationship.

[9 ] “And the patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt: but God was with him, [10] And delivered him out of all his afflictions, and gave him favor and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and he made him governor over Egypt and all his house. [11] Now there came a dearth over all the land of Egypt and Canaan, and great affliction: and our fathers found no sustenance. [12] But when Jacob heard that there was corn in Egypt, he sent out our fathers first.

[13] And at the second time Joseph was made known to his brethren; and Joseph's kindred was made known unto Pharaoh. [14] Then sent Joseph, and called his father Jacob to him, and all his kindred, threescore and fifteen souls. [15] So Jacob went down into Egypt, and died, he, and our fathers, [16] And were carried over into Shechem, and laid in the sepulcher that Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem.”

Now that is just loaded, one right after another with parallels between Christ and Joseph, and what is Stephen’s argument. The sovereign God of glory of all history, who controls Mesopotamian history, Egyptian history and Jewish history worked it all out so that He says I preach to you Jews today about this Yeshua, this Jesus, I do not transgress orthodox Old Testament Judaism. Old Testament Judaism teaches the same thing; Jesus is just a perfect type of what you guys have been teaching for centuries about Joseph. Now he starts.

In Acts 7:9 “And the patriarchs, moved with envy,” notice mental attitude sin, by whom? The Canaanites or Jews? Jews! So he says, who were the people that gave you people the hardest time? Jews! Who gave God the hardest time with Joseph? His brothers. Why? If some of you have family problems with sibling rivalries between sister and sister and brother and brother and brother and sister and so on, the best book of the Scripture to read to see why sometimes you have these family problems and to show that God recognizes sibling rivalry is the book of Genesis. In the stories of Genesis you will notice constantly the theme of sibling rivalry; rivalry between the older brother against the younger brother; between the sister and the brother, the brother and the sister, the older sister and the younger sister, hassle, hassle, hassle. That’s all the story of Genesis. Now one of these hassles involves Joseph.

Joseph was kind of a little brat; he had older brothers and he was the little one and you know what happens in that situation, either the little guy, everybody fawns all over him and makes a big deal out of him and he’s spoiled or he just becomes the off scouring of his older brothers, that kind of concept. Well, Joseph was the little guy that was always run over by his big brothers. And or course Joseph didn’t help the thing out because God gave him a dream one day, a dream in which he dreamed that his older brothers were bowing down to him. Now psychiatrists would have a ball with this kind of thing, saying oh, this little kid with all his repressions. It turns out, however, this dream was a revelation given to him, a prophetic revelation. So Joseph dreamed that his older brothers bowed down to him and he came up to them and said hey guys, I had a dream last night, I want to tell you about it. You can imagine how you would have felt if you were the older brother and your little brother came up to you, yeah, last night I dreamed a good one on you, you came down, you kissed my big toe. This is why Joseph’s brothers didn’t take to him to kindly. And that’s the story of the envy that’s developed here; the patriarchs.

Notice he calls them “patriarchs,” not brothers. Do you know why he does? Sarcasm. These boys who became your patriarchs, these little boys were moved with envy against their little baby brother, so they dropped him in a hole and were going to take care of him and finally Judah pleaded with them, hey look, hold it, and they sold him to the Midianites, you know the story, he went down to Egypt. They “sold Joseph into Egypt,” but it says “but God was with him.” It’s an exciting tale that you can read, if you’re unfamiliar with this it’s one of the great stories of Scripture, how Joseph got down into Egypt, was hired as a slave, he came into the house of a man by the name of Potiphar. Potiphar was a eunuch and that caused problems in his sex life with his wife and so his wife had her little problem, she saw Joseph and Joseph was a good-looking male, the first one she’d seen recently, and he came in the house and she started on the make for him.

And the Genesis text describes very graphically how she tried to seduce Joseph and one day she caught him alone in the house and she grabbed him, and this is one of the humorous points of the Hebrew text, it’s the modus operandi for every guy that gets himself in this kind of a position, Joseph walks in the room, I’ll never forget this because this is one of the first Hebrew texts we had to translate in seminary and the professor was getting on the picturesque-ness of the text and it sure was because she grabbed Joseph and the Hebrew has it: he left so quickly that he walked out of the outer garment he wearing and she was left holding this thing; he did a 180 and rolled out, because he obviously couldn’t handle the situation any other way and he did what any sensible male would do in that situation; and that is don’t be too proud to retreat. So he retreated, evacuated the area.

And no sooner had he done that and Potiphar’s wife was the kind of kiss and tell type and she went down and said he tried to rape me. So Potiphar had Joseph thrown in jail and he was in prison for a long time, probably because he had to be trained in the use of the faith technique. He wanted to get out of jail and he tried all these gimmicks and God wouldn’t let him; he had all these messages, hey, tell Pharaoh I want out; tell Pharaoh I want out. And everybody he told the message to forgot, until finally Pharaoh had his famous dream of the coming famine and somebody remembered little old Joseph down in the prison; hey, there’s this kid down in prison there, he tells dreams, a good man to talk to Pharaoh. So Pharaoh got him up and later Joseph, of course, became the prime minister of Egypt, he was at the right hand of Pharaoh. That was his exultation.

So it says in Acts 9:10 that God “delivered him out of all his afflictions, and gave him favor and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and he made him governor over all his house.” Now that little phrase, “all his house” in verse 10 is also taken from the Old Testament. It’s a signal to you, watch it, watch carefully what it’s saying. I’ll pull all these parallelisms together but I want to see how you can guess and anticipate what we’re going to do here as you work with the text. Just think, what are the parallels here that you see between Joseph and Christ. So Joseph was made governor over all his house.

Acts 9:11, “Now there came a dearth” or famine “over all the land of Egypt and Canaan, and great affliction: and our fathers found no sustenance. [12] But when Jacob heard that there was food in Egypt,” notice not in Palestine, in the Gentile land of Egypt, and “he sent out our fathers out first.”

Then in verse 13, “At the second time,” now for those unfamiliar with the Joseph story, what happened here was that Jacob came down, sent his sons down, except one, Benjamin, and they came down to Joseph and Joseph saw them coming in, he said, I know who you guys are. Now from the human of view Joseph probably hated them; think of all the years he spent in prison just because of these guys. But his own brothers walk up and Joseph plays it real cool, pretends he doesn’t know them, oh yeah, where do you come from? Palestine. Oh yeah, and he goes through this song and dance with them and finally he gives them grain, but he pulls a little trick of. He tells the Egyptian officer, he says look, when you fill their bags with grain, take their money, put it in a little bag, stick it on the top of the grain and then tie the bag up over that. Do it for every one of them, and also in the meantime he said, and also I don’t trust you, I think you’re spies, you came down here to spy out the land, didn’t you. Oh no, no, who us, me, what? No, you’re spies, so I want to keep one of you guys as a hostage so we’ll pick out Simeon. So Simeon you stay here, and you’re going to be a political hostage, the rest of you guys, you can take your grain, get out of here and go back to Palestine where you came from and if you cause me any trouble and we see an army coming down from Palestine to invade this heartland of grain I’m doing to destroy your brother, Simeon, just so you don’t get any ideas.

So they go back and poor Jacob is heartbroken; these clowns have already lost his youngest son, Joseph, in the meantime he’s had another one, Benjamin, and so they have to bring Benjamin back next time and he says if you lose this guy and if you lose Simeon, if you lose any more of my sons I’m going to drop dead. So with this threat and pressure from the old man the brothers come back down to Pharaoh; they come back in, and of course they’re terrified because they know what he’s going to say because if they go in there he’s gonna say well, you stole our money, how did this money get in our bags. So they come in and Joseph plays it cool again, pretends he doesn’t know them. He goes through this routine for a while and then finally, after a long story, Joseph says to his brothers, you come here, and the Hebrew says you come here right in front of my face and look at me, who am I. And they suddenly realized it’s Joseph; Joseph makes himself known the second time his brethren come to him.

And after this, it says, in verse 14-15, when Joseph is made known then all the family of Jacob is gathered around Joseph. Now let’s pull this together; the analogies or the parallels between Joseph and Christ. There are five of them, there are actually more but we can settle with five. The first parallel: Joseph is rejected by Jews. Christ was rejected by his fellow Jews.

Second: it was God’s plan to bless Israel through the rejection of Joseph, because you see, if little Joseph hadn’t been sold down to Egypt he wouldn’t have gotten to the throne; it he hadn’t gotten to the throne there wouldn’t have been any grain down in Egypt either. Now isn’t it interesting; what did Joseph cause to the Gentile nations? Did he cause blessing in Egypt? You bet he did. Remember, it wasn’t Egyptian grain that solved the famine; it was Joseph’s administration of the Egyptian foreign program that caused the solution to the famine problem. So Joseph caused blessing to the Gentiles; the Jewish people then benefited from the blessing that Joseph had in turned caused the Gentiles. So God blessed the Gentiles and Israel through Joseph’s rejection. Now look at it spiritually? What has happened to Christ? Christ is rejected by the Jews and is crucified. Now who gets blessed? All men, because Christ died for our sins; He’d never have died for our sins if the Jewish people hadn’t rejected Him. And then out of this rejection comes the body of the Church and today Jewish people are won to Christ through the richness that the Gentiles have received by the rejected Jew, and so the blessing comes full circle.

Third parallel: the first time that the brothers go to Joseph they don’t recognize him. The first time they meet they can’t see who he is. The first time Jesus comes to the nation Israel they don’t recognize Him and see who He is.

Fourth parallel: the second time they meet they understand who He is and the second time Jesus meets the nation Israel they will know who He is for He said I will not come until you say “Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord.” “They shall look upon Him whom they have pierced,” and then they shall know. So the second time Israel meets her Messiah she’ll recognize Him.

Finally, a fifth parallel is after Joseph is recognized, all of Israel is regathered around their savior and when Christ comes again all of Israel will be regathered around the Lord Jesus Christ.

Is this an accident? This is, in effect, what Stephen is challenging the high priest; high priest, do you think these parallels are an accident, did it just happen, that Joseph’s life so perfectly typifies Jesus’ life or is that just chance, Mr. High Priest? You’d think that would be the climax to the whole story, verse 15, but it isn’t because this section of Stephen’s speech doesn’t terminate until the end of verse 16. So now we have to ask one more question. Why verse 16? What’s the deal with them being carried back, this is their bodies, being carried back into the land and buried at Shechem? Now there’s another little by-product of an error here; some people will say oh, but Jacob was the one that bought this grave in Shechem, Abraham bought the grave down in Hebron. This is telescopic interpretation that Stephen is using, he’s just taking the first event and the last event of a chain of events and linking them as a package. Abraham was the guy that was basically the grand patriarch of all, he had to buy things, so ultimately the grave for the patriarchs were bought graves.

But that’s not Stephen’s major point. Stephen’s major point is the place; where is Stephen giving this sermon? Where is he preaching to defend himself? The city of Jerusalem; the place that all the Jews came to be buried. Wasn’t that the cause of the widow’s problem, all the Jewish men used to go to Jerusalem till they’d die, be buried in Jerusalem, Jerusalem the sacred place, Jews from the sacred sanctuary, Jerusalem the place where Stephen kept being accused of pushing down. He said look you Jews, did it every occur to you to ask yourself one simple question: did the patriarchs of the Jewish nation get buried here? Or did they get buried somewhere else? Where’d did they get buried? Way up the road, it’s about seventy miles north, Shechem is the [can't understand word] place where all the rioting is occurring now. Seventy miles or so north of the city of Jerusalem, that’s where the grand patriarchs of this nation are buried. So, concludes Stephen, how can you stand there and exalt the city of Jerusalem above all things, above the Torah, exalt the temple above everything, when obviously the great plan of God began in Iraq, was done in Egypt and wound up at Shechem. Jerusalem was just one chapter in the story from the beginning to the end. Jewish history is concerned with Jerusalem only in the middle and therefore Stephen says this whole business of you guys clutching on to Jerusalem and not letting go and getting the word out into other areas is against the whole thrust of the Holy Spirit. I’m not unorthodox Jew, you are.

And were carried over into Shechem, and laid in the sepulcher that Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem.”