Clough Acts Lesson 18
Moses,
The Christ Type – Acts
We’ll continue our study of Stephen’s
address. You recall that this chapter
marks the end of the first section of the book of Acts where the Word of God
had gone forth to Jerusalem and after this it’s going to forth into Judea and
Samaria and Stephen, one of the great early church apologists, was the man who
changed the policy. Stephen went back to
deal with the origins of Israel and pointed out something that we mentioned
last week, that Palestine is the soil on which only one religion, not three
began. The Muslims can trace their faith
back to
But typological interpretation consists of taking one historic point and another historic point and showing that the two have correspondences. For example, last week we dealt with Jesus and Joseph and Stephen’s point was that what you see happening with Jesus of Nazareth, or Yeshua, and what you saw with Joseph is basically a parallel thing. We listed five of these parallels that Stephen made. We saw first that both Joseph and Jesus were rejected by their fellow Jewish brethren. We saw that both these people who rejected were people who intended it for an evil purpose; God intended it for a good purpose and so we have the verse in the Old Testament of Genesis 50:20 which is equivalent to the New Testament Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.” It is not wishful thinking, that is not self-hypnosis, that is dependent upon God’s sovereign elective plan.
So we had those two parallels between
Joseph and Jesus. The third parallel
between the two was that Joseph was not recognized the first time he made
himself had contact with his brethren and Jesus was not recognized nationally
speaking as who he was, the Messiah of the nation
Now Stephen made, in this sermon, the Word of God his primary authority. And this is always a danger that religious people face, and that is using tradition as a source of truth rather than God’s Word as a source of truth. Stephen goes back to the Word of God, which in his day was the Old Testament canon and he does this to destroy the false tradition that had grown up around that word. Every religious group has its traditions. Now these traditions may be very good; they only become dangerous when you think that your little particular tradition happens to be the truth. In our own circles of fundamentalism we have various accretions that have grown up; in certain fundamentalist circles if you don’t have an invitation and five stanzas of Just As I Am with hand raising you have not had a proper teaching of the Word of God. And of course, that is something that just began in 1860 so one would wonder how people became Christians before 1860. This is provincialism, this is the result of people who do not understand history. In our circles we have certain fundamentalist hostilities to things like smoking, drinking and the use of language and yet, if you read Martin Luther in his writings he uses language that’ll curl your hair. If you read Calvin it’s the same thing. In the family training program we read C. S. Lewis, The Narnia Chronicles, we noticed the language that is used there. See, this language thing is something that just American fundies have a problem with, believers in other times and other places and other countries never had a problem with it; it’s only the fundies in America that have a problem with it. So this is one of the things that I hope I can do for some of you as your pastor and that is to introduce you to some of the great saints in other times and other places so you’ll have a real overall idea of what the body of Christ looks like and it’s not just your introductions from some little fundy some place. We have in C. S. Lewis another thing, how he utilizes the great theological themes, how he emphasizes these great basics. He goes back to the Word of God as Stephen did and this is what we must do.
Stephen is under pressure to defend the Christian faith. Stephen, therefore, is an apologist and Stephen is going to give the great events of the Christian faith. Stephen starts in his apology or his defense with the call of Abraham because the call of Abraham is the origin of the Israelite nation. And he can’t deal with traditions until he goes back to the origin of those traditions. So we go back to the call of Abraham, then we come down to the Exodus, he’s going to deal with Mount Sinai, he’s going to deal with the conquest and settlement and he’s going to deal with the time of David. So right here, Stephen in the course of one chapter is going to deal with five different events from history. Again, the reason Stephen does this is to focus people’s attention back to the original data and not upon the immediate tradition. This is why it is good to read, for example, C. S. Lewis and other men but even then you must go back to the writers of the New Testament or you do not have personal acquaintance with the source documents. And we live in a generation which is specializing in avoiding going back on their own to source material.
This is why you can walk out on the street to people who have had an excellent science education and ask them how it came to be that in the 1700 and 1800s men began to believe in the existence of something called the atom. Now there are some common observations that people had that led them to this belief in the existence of an atom. Now no one has ever seen an atom, it’s a deduction based on empirical evidence, but there were certain very clear empirical evidences that atoms existed and yet today a person can go through the greatest amount of scientific training and be told that atoms exist and go on and on and it’s perfectly accepted, and never ask the question, how do we know they exist? See, those questions are left out of the educational process because our educational process, in spite of what we’d like to think, is ultimately tradition, just like the Pharisees. They taught by tradition; they did not expose people to the original source documents.
Again, we may walk out on the street and ask someone, do you believe that the earth rotates around the sun. Well now since this was not commonly accepted until the 1800s by way of firm proof, why is it that for centuries believed that the sun rotated around the earth. If men believed that the sun rotated around the earth, what empirical evidence was it that led them to suddenly accept the fact that the earth rotates around the sun instead. Can you personally give the reasons why we came to believe that. And if you ask someone that they’ll say well, I don’t know, I just learned it; correct, you were taught a tradition but you weren’t to reason it out from the source material. Again we could go to a person on the street and ask them, do you believe in evolution or special creation. They would say evolution; fine, give me ten reasons why you believe evolution. And ultimately all ten would boil down to one—I was told to believe it, ultimately because our education is highly, highly traditional, in spite of what we like to think.
Stephen faced that problem and this is why, then, he goes back not to what Stephen thinks, not to what the Pharisees think, not to what Rabbi Gamaliel thinks, not to what somebody else thinks but he goes back to the Old Testament documents, the source materials.
In Acts 7:2-16 we had the first third of
Stephen’s address which dealt with the patriarchal period. Today we begin at verse 17 and go through
verse 43 that deals with the time of Moses and the Exodus. In other words, we move in terms of the
divine viewpoint framework from the call of Abraham to the Exodus and
So he begins in Acts 7:17, “But when the time of the promise was drawing near,” it’s an imperfect tense in the Greek, it means it was in the process of drawing near, “which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt, [18] Till another king arose, which knew not Joseph. [19] The same dealt subtly with our kindred, and evil entreated our fathers, so that they cast out their young children, to the end they might not live. [20] In which time Moses was born, and was exceeding fair, and nourished up in his father’s house three months,” and so on. Now for those of you who have been marking your Bibles to indicate where these are Old Testament quotes, which would be a good exercise for you to realize how little of the New is really new, but mostly rehash of the old, in a new light of course, but going back to the Old. In verse 17 the phrase “grew and multiplied” is a direct quote from Exodus. In verse 18, the “king arose, which knew not Joseph” is a direct quote from Exodus. In verse 19 the word “evil entreat” and “to the end that they might not live” is a direct quote from Exodus. And in verse 20, Moses “was exceeding fair,” is a direct quote from Exodus. So you see, Stephen again and again and again insists on the Old Testament text.
He says “the time of promise was drawing near.” What promise, when was this happening. In Acts 7:6 you remember that God had made a promise that for 400 plus years these people would be under a pressure situation in a foreign power and significantly in a non-Jewish country. They would be subject to harassment and at the end of this 400 years God said I will bring them out. Now this 400 year period has now drawn to a close. Remember all in the background Stephen is in a courtroom defending the Christian faith. So every time you read something like this as you listen to Stephen’s sermon you have to be thinking in your head, now what’s his point. His point is that somehow this points to Christ.
There is
another prophecy in Daniel that said a similar thing, that from the going forth
of the decree to restore the city of
Now that was the public sentiment at the time of Jesus Christ. So Stephen is making use of that in verse 17. He’s saying look you people, just like centuries ago God’s promise was about to be fulfilled, so it is today, and just as God brought Moses as that critical point in history, so today God has brought Jesus at this critical point in history. “…the people grew and multiplied,” they had a population explosion that was supernatural. Verse 18, “Till another king arose, who knew now Joseph.” Now we don’t know who this Pharaoh was because secular chronology in history, as you learn it, says that Egyptian history looks like this: three eras, the old kingdom, the middle kingdom and the new kingdom, and between these kingdoms were two intermediate periods. That’s been the accepted chronology the last 40 or 50 years, since a man by the name of James Breasted wrote the standard text on Egyptian history. But along in the 50s there came a man by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky who argued that this scene is wrong in history, that it’s not true that the middle kingdom began in 1600 and the old kingdom ended in 1800 and the Exodus, therefore, in 1400 occurred somewhere down in the middle of the new kingdom, but rather said Velikovsky, the Exodus happened in 1400 all right, but it happened at the end of the middle kingdom and between the middle kingdom and new kingdom were 1000 years. So the new kingdom began actually in the time of Saul and David.
Now what
reasons did Velikovsky have for rejecting a chronology that had been accepted
for some three or four decades? For the
reason that the middle kingdom ended in a series of catastrophes that are
remarkably similar to the book of Exodus’ ten plagues, that the kingdom collapsed
under a physical calamity, which Velikovsky went on to argue was a near
encounter of the planet earth with what was at that time the comet Venus. And out of this was a worldwide catastrophe
that ended the entire kingdom. And
Velikovsky subsequently argued that during this period of the Hyksos, that’s
what scholars call a group of Pharaoh’s that reigned in this period, that the
Hyksos were nothing more than the Amalekites that we know from Scripture, and
that these people were very cruel and reigned over
So the
Pharaoh of the Exodus is unknown, but the Pharaoh mentioned here in verse 18
prior to that was the head of a new dynasty, he “knew not Joseph,” because
Joseph and the Jewish people under Joseph had successfully organized Egyptian
bureaucracy and this country of Egypt, then, had lost track of the Jewish
contribution to its culture. Now every
time a country in history goes anti-Semitic it is physically destroyed. This has happened time and time and time again
in history. You don’t have to be a
believe to see it; it always happens this way.
And it happens because the Scriptures say in Genesis 12:3 that the
nation that curses Abraham, I will curse.
That doesn’t mean that one has to play favorites with the Jewish people,
it just says treat them fairly. And the
nation that persecutes the Jew will always suffer. And you can see this, for example you can see
it with
In Acts
And what is the analogy? Moses, as a baby boy was born amidst an anti-Semitic genocidal policy on the part of the government. Jesus, as a baby boy, was born amidst Herod’s anti-Semitic policy of destruction of Jewish male boys. So again we have another parallel between Moses and Jesus.
It says that
Moses was “nourished up in his father’s house three months, [21] And when he was cast out, Pharaoh’s daughter took
him up, and nourished him for her own son.”
Now we don’t know because of chronology problems who this Pharaoh’s
daughter was, she was a princess and the rumor has it from extra-Biblical
tradition that she was married later and became Queen, but she was a barren
queen and had no male heir, and therefore was grooming Moses for the throne of
It says
[Acts
Now one of the mysteries about Moses was this last phrase, “he was mighty in words and in deeds.” The interesting thing about that business of being “mighty in words and deeds” is the fact that Moses, according to Exodus had a speech impediment; he had a speech defect. When it came to vocally communicating with people he had a problem, so now we’ve got what appears to be a little hitch in the text. If Moses had a speech impediment, why does Stephen say that he “was might in words and deeds?” Well, again if chronology is correct according to Velikovsky and if some extra-Biblical tradition is correct it now turns out that not the Phoenicians but Moses was the architect of the alphabet. Up until this time men spoke in terms of pictures; they had some hieroglyphic picture here and that would be a word. Well that’s great except for the fact that to have a vocabulary of a thousand words meant that you would have to memorize a thousand pictograms, so it was very slow and only the scholars could write. With the invention of the alphabet it meant that by memorizing only 24-25 different signs you could put them together in all sorts of combinations and permutations and come up with a way of communicating by writing.
Now we don’t know, but it looks as though Moses with a speech impediment, and a genius, did what so often happens in history to people who have great capabilities but who are physically limited in some way. They compensate. And where Moses could not speak with his mouth orally and get his message across, he devised the method of getting his message across by writing. And thus it was that when on Mount Sinai to emphasize to Moses that it was God’s initiative, God’s sovereign initiative that gave the law, God said to Moses when He gave the Ten Words, He said stand aside Moses, I will write these words with My finger, get out of the way, I know that you’ve invented the alphabet Moses, I know that you’re great in writing and for precisely that reason I want you out of the process so that no one later can say oh, the Law came from Moses. No it didn’t; it came from Me, I gave the Law and you are but a witness and a recipient but you’re not the Creator and the initiator of this revelation.
So Moses was
learned, Moses was prepared and verse 23 Stephen gets on to the time of the
first incident in his life that he wants to emphasize. “And
when he was full forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brethren,
the children of
Now again keep in mind the purpose of Stephen’s discussion. Stephen is defending the Christian faith; Stephen is showing the parallels between Moses and Christ and so we have to understand as we read this portion of the Word of God to look for parallels between Jesus and Moses to confirm Stephen’s point. Again for those of you who are marking, verse 21, “Pharaoh’s daughter took him for her own son,” that’s an Old Testament quote; verse 23, “visit his brethren the children of Israel,” Old Testament quote; verse 24, “smote the Egyptian,” Old Testament quote; verse 27, “Who made thee a ruler and a judge over us,” Old Testament quote; and verses 28-29 are complete Old Testament quotes. So it shows you the heavy, heavy emphasis on the Old Testament and why people who do not read the Old Testament cannot understand the New Testament. No way you are going to understand the Christian faith without a background in the Old Testament; it’s just impossible.
So let’s
look what happened. Moses was forty, “it
came into his heart to visit,” the word “visit” here in the Greek has the idea
of coming down to inspect something first hand.
It’s the idea that you’re bothered with something and you want to go
down and look at. This again is a
parallel between the Son of man who comes from the Father’s right hand down to
earth to inspect humanity, and so the parallel of Moses’ first visit to his
brethren and Jesus’ first visit to the earth.
“…to visit his brethren, the children of
In other words, here you have the antecedents of what is today called karate, it’s not something that the Buddhist monks invented. Karate goes further back in time than that; it goes back to the ancient world where the army and the infantry would divide into three parts. You have the men with spears, they are the first group. The second group that they used in the ancient Egyptian armies were the slingers and you can see these big long slings that they have, they’re all drawn for you on some of the great tombs, and these men operated at a distance. So you had the spear men and you had the slingers but until recent years it wasn’t appreciated that there was a third division to the Egyptian infantry and that was men that they used to see in these frescoes just standing there like this, no weapons in their hands, nothing. And it turns out that these were all trained in hand to hand combat; they were taught to kill with their hands.
So Moses evidently had this skill and with one good chop he probably broke this man’s neck as can be done with the proper kind of strike. So it shows you what kind of a man Moses was; like Jesus he was not some sort of an emaciated character cranked out by medieval art, he was a person who was a man’s man. And in fact, this gives you background as to Moses temptation later on in his career, when thousands and thousands of people began to buck his authority in the wilderness, began to gripe, began to complain, and Moses got angry at the people; do you know what he was thinking about. [he must make chopping motions] That’s what he was thinking about; in other words it was a temptation to just knock off their block quick. Moses faced real temptation because of his background and his training, and this little incident in verse 24, “smote the Egyptian,” understand he didn’t just tap the guy on the shoulder; he knocked his head off probably, and then he hid him in the sand it says, according to Exodus. But somebody saw it and in the process of time the next day two Jews are striving together.
In other words, what Stephen points out here, he says I want you to look at the first time Moses visited, just like Joseph the first time, on that first visit what did Moses see? First of all, he tried a token deliverance. In other words, there was a genuine deliverance, it was only on a small scale, one to one, but it was a token deliverance, like the first time Jesus came He delivered people, small scale here, there, from disease and so on, compared to what He’s going to do the second time He comes. So there was a token deliverance. Another thing to notice about Moses’ first visit to his people was that he saw them in discord and Jesus saw His brethren in discord; there was no unity among the Jewish people at this time, they’re at each other’s throats all the time. And it was because of their failure to submit to the Word of God. Well Moses saw this and he thought, verse 25, he thought that “his brethren would have understood,” but they did not, as a nation, did not understand when Christ came the first time.
Notice in verse 26-27 that as these two Jews fight, and Moses walks up to them and it says that he “would have set them at one again,” it was the idea that Moses was naïve enough to negotiate with these kind of people, and of course, they’re sitting there fighting, carrying on, a big brawl and along comes Moses, and they say oh-oh, here comes the black-belt himself, now what are we going to do. And the one who was doing the wrong, notice, it’s not both of the men in this incident, it is only one of those two Jewish men who are fighting, the one who is doing the wrong that says what he says to Moses. And notice it says, “he that did his neighbor wrong thrust him away,” Stephen puts that verb, “thrust away” in the text twice; he puts it here at verse 27 and he puts it down in verse 39, “thrust away,” because the verb “thrust away” shows that they are on negative volition when it comes to God’s plan or God’s Word. The people of that day were not interested in the Word, they were interested in pushing it away, autonomous spirit again.
So after
this point Moses flees into the wilderness to a place called Midian. That place is on the opposite side of the
Notice it
says while he was in Midian “he begat two sons,” verse 29. And this shows what happened to Jesus after
He was rejected by His Jewish brethren, where did the Messiah go? Did He stay in the
Let’s
continue and see what else he did. Acts
[31] When Moses saw it, he wondered at the sight: and as he drew near to behold it, the voice of the Lord came unto him, [32] Saying, I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Then Moses trembled, and durst not behold. [33] Then said the Lord to him, Put off thy shoes from thy feet: for the place where thou stand is holy ground.
34 I
have seen, I have seen the affliction of my people which is in
Now this scene of Moses in Sinai goes back to the establishment of
the kingdom. God is about to establish
about the kingdom like the world has never seen before at this point. The
Now where all this happened was in the wilderness of Sinai, so again
lest we forget the trials and tribulations of the people and Moses as they
began to learn these elementary facts of their faith let’s look at what the
wilderness of Sinai is. The bush that
Moses saw was probably an acacia bush; [he shows slides] this has grown up into
a tree; obviously the only thing that grows there because of the tremendous
root system it has. The tree was burning
and obviously not being consumed. And
this, of course, caught Moses eye because this is dry wood out there in that
heat and you would think it would burn up very quickly. So as Moses went across the various areas of
Sinai, here’s what central Sinai looks like, you can imagine he wasn’t too
bothered with a crowd, all the pollution from the cities. This is a stopping point on one of the trails
into Sinai, and on this rock you have inscriptions in Greek, Hebrew and Coptic
of the various travelers that have traveled over that area through the
centuries, men seeking just to be alone, wandered from water hole to water hole
in the Sinai area at least one place left on earth where there’s some peace and
quiet. Every once in a while it will
break out into a plain; these are the plains where the millions of people
during the Exodus wilderness wanderings probably assembled. Then you come to the base of
That gives you an idea where this scene in Acts occurred.
It was on that point that God gave the words to the people and now Stephen is beginning to move into his other problem. So far in the text today he’s dealt with the problem of the parallels between Moses and Jesus and his proof is to show that Jesus belongs to Jewish culture as much as Moses belongs to Jewish culture. Now he is going to the problem of the Torah which is the Jewish word for the Law. Remember Stephen was being accused of talking against the Torah and he says no, you people who accuse me of talking against the Torah, all through history you have talked against the Torah and so he gives the attitude of them.
In Acts
Now hold the place and turn back to Acts 4:24. Remember the prayer the early Christians
prayed and it said, “”And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to
God with one accord, and said, Lord, thou art God,” and they went on to
describe Psalm 2, [Acts 2:25] “Why do the heathen rage,” [26] The kings of the
earth stood up, the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against
whom? “Against Christ. [27] “For of a truth against thy holy servant,
Jesus, whom thou hast appointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the
Gentiles, and the people of
So in Acts 7:35, “This Moses whom they refused, God made a ruler and a deliverer,” the word deliverer there is redeemer, He has made them a redeemer, “by the hand of the angel which appeared to him in the bush. [36] He brought them out,” this is the second time, of course, Moses showed, “that he had showed wonders and signs [in the land of Egypt, and in the Red sea, and in the wilderness forty years.]” Remember the theme we dealt with time after time after time after time in Acts; what’s the theme of Luke? Signs and wonders, signs and wonders, signs and wonders, so again the same old refrain, signs and wonders. Moses, the second time he comes to the nation, signs and wonder of deliverance.
Acts
[40, “Saying unto Aaron, Make us gods to go before us:
for as for this Moses, which brought us out of the land of Egypt, we know not
what is become of him. [41] And they made a calf in those days,
and offered sacrifice unto the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their own
hands. [42] Then God turned, and gave them up to worship the
host of heaven; as it is written in the book of the prophets, O ye house of
And so he goes on and he shows and he ties together this telescopic
interpretation, he ties together the beginning apostasy in verse 39 with a
final end in verse 43, “I will send you
to
How did it all start? It
started with the making of a calf, verse 41.
Now when I was a young Christian I used to think of a calf just
literally as a calf but we now know in archeology that’s not true; it’s a
bull. And the bull was used as an idol
in
Now why did these people use the bull? Here again is a misunderstanding on our part
of idols. We have idols today; he trouble
is we don’t recognize them. The Bible
says we shouldn’t have idols and we think well, no danger of that, I don’t see
any idol around. They’re all around. You see, these pictures, like this bull, they
didn’t believe that God showed up like that; sometimes you read Egyptian
literature and you see a picture of Pharaoh or something and his face is all
erased in the picture and he has a big
beak and what it is it’s a falcon and you wonder, do these people really
think that God was kind of half-man and half-bird. No, those pictures you see of the idols are
posters. The nearest thing that would
come to our 20th century thinking would be take the old ad for a
“tiger in your tank” when you buy some gasoline. Now if someone was really naïve they’d think
oh, you’re going to put a tiger in your gasoline tank, it won’t fit, how are
you going to put a tiger in yoru gasoline tank?
We all know when we saw that poster it wasn’t a literal tiger meant that
was going to be put I the gasoline tank; why did the designers of that
advertisement use a tiger? Get up and
go, it’s speed, power, agility. So the
tiger represented those traits that would be given, supposedly by buying the
gasoline. Now it’s the same thing in
What did the bull represent?
Power, the bull was used in the fields; he was also used to fertilize
the herds so you have fertility. Power
and fertility, the two basic needs of man.
Man needs to produce his crops and the ground needs to produce the food
so he needs fertility and he needs power. Now look how these idols operate. The bull represents power to do work; work
that man needs to do. It represents
fertility, which man needs to produce.
Man needs work and production, he needs energy to produce and he needs
nature to cooperate with him. We’re
going to die, all of you, you’re held together by something called
photosynthesis. If the chain of
photosynthesis breaks down tomorrow we have three weeks food left on the
earth. So you’d better be sensitive to
the fact that we live day by day on very tenuous grounds. So the ancient man recognized this and in his
apostasy, in his negative volition he
said he I want security, but I want the security apart from trusting in the God
of Scripture, the God of creation. I
need what He offers but I don’t want it on His terms, I want it on my terms; I
will have security. Now this isn’t so
true now but 5, 10, 15 years ago in
So we have a tendency to idols. We don’t make that silly bull but
the point still remains, we have idols and this is the point that he’s getting
through, the desire for human viewpoint security led them finally to that last
part of verse 43, “you took up the tabernacle of Molech,” do you know what
Molech is? We have a valley called
Gehenna outside of
And it was prophesied in Leviticus 26 that if they did not break this idolatrous habit, this business of going on negative volition to the Word of God, which then leads to a violation of your conscience so people begin to decide in terms of situation ethics, and then of course at that point you begin to have a mental vacuum in your mind that sucks in human viewpoint. Human viewpoint comes into the mind in the air all around us; ideas are in the air and you cannot keep them off your soul by any vaccination or inoculation. There’s only one thing that keeps your soul healthy from the ideas that hang in the air around you and that is the Word of God filling your soul up. And so when this happens and the people progress finally into idols, at that point God says if He really loves us there’s only one way to deal with it; compound carnality can only be handled by severe physical discipline and severe it was.
In that year of 586 BC as the Babylonian armies gathered around the
city of
Now we can remember those events and they seem gross and they were, and we can say well God certainly isn’t a God of love who does that kind of thing. Oh yes He is. You see, God had ordained for that nation to be something, and God so loved that nation that He would not let them permanently get away with apostasy. He would take whatever steps were necessary to bring them around again, and they were cured. Jewish people had problems in 586 but there’s one thing they never had problems with again and that was with idols. They learned their lesson real good and they became ardent monotheists forever after, even to this day. That was a lesson burned into their nationality and into their race by the suffering of those years.
And so the analogy follows in the Christian church, that God has ordained that every person who trusts in Christ is to be conformed to the image of His Son, and that goal will be reached if He has to beat us into submission. See, in our modern sloppy thinking we disassociate love and severity; we disassociate the men who trains the soldier to kill from the man who loves the recruit and wants to see him survive in battle so therefore he jams the hard nose on him because he recognizes that that boy, out on the battlefield is going to fall apart and lose his life and lose his fellow soldier’s lives if he doesn’t know how to handle himself, doesn’t know how to not freeze but keep moving and be an aggressor. He’s got to have that kind of training. And it’s not pleasant, it’s hard and it goes for pastors of churches. The pastor who loves his congregation is not the man who tells him how great they are. He’s a man who levels with them; he’s a man who teaches them the Word of God, whether they like it or not; that’s the kind of love our God has for us. He is going to make us conform, and all the while He’s making us conform to His Word we are pushing Him from us like the nation here. Stephen said to these people, you pushed Moses away, you pushed Joseph away, you’re always pushing against the Spirit of God, and so today our sin nature is the same way, insist on pushing the Word away always with pious excuses of course. But the net result is always the same: push the Word of God away and God keeps on, keeps on, keeps on. Why? One answer, God is a gracious God.