Introduction – The Preacher who would not save his skin (Acts 6:12 – 7:1)
Last week, when we considered Acts 6, we noted how the preaching of the early Christians soon convinced their Jewish audiences that this was not some new form of Judaism that they were listening to. It sounded to the Jews more like blasphemy – an attack on what they held most dear. And when Stephen was given the choice to answer that charge in Acts chapter 6, Stephen did not make the sort of speech that would have been calculated to secure his acquittal. Instead he concentrated on making sure his judges understood exactly what Christianity was all about.
The English Reformer Hugh Latimer was Bishop of Worcester from 1535 to 1539, and was summoned once to preach before King Henry VIII. His strongly Protestant views so infuriated the king that Henry VIII demanded that Latimer return the next day and preach a more acceptable sermon before his Sovereign. That was the sort of summons that might make a bishop fear for his life in those bloody days. So Latimer duly returned, and preached exactly the same sermon, word for word. And King Henry (who was a bit of an enigma in spiritual matters) eventually thanked Hugh Latimer for his honesty and his courage.
Such was not to be the outcome where Stephen and the Sanhedrin were concerned. Stephen, like Latimer, was concerned only for the proclamation of the truth and not for personal safety. He was being accused of an attack on the Jewish faith, a faith based on the Old Testament Scriptures.
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In effect, that was what the Jews were saying: Stephen had broken straight across everything that God had done for them. And the teaching he was giving was blasphemous.
But Stephen was to show that Jesus was entirely in line with the Old Testament Scriptures. This was what they were all about, in effect.
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And it was the Sanhedrin, who by their rejection of Jesus, were actually guilty of blasphemy against God’s purposes revealed through the Old Testament.
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It was they who were actually breaking God’s purposes. Because they rejected Jesus, they were actually rejecting the Old Testament. That’s the gist of what Stephen is going to say in Acts 7. Because they wouldn’t accept the continuity between Jesus and the Old Testament, they were the ones committing blasphemy.
It was they who were actually trying to keep apart what God had clearly brought together.
Last week I tried the illustration of a space rocket discarding its boosters.
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This week I want to clarify that by saying that the discarded boosters are, as it were, Temple worship – approaching God by a religious ritual and human effort – not the Old Testament. Temple worship and human religion were what had to go as far as the Christians were concerned. Stephen very firmly claimed the Old Testament for Christianity in his defence speech, as we are going to see, with scant regard for his own safety. He didn’t so much defend himself as make sure he got condemned for the right reason.
You don’t often hear of a criminal doing that, do you? Criminals don’t usually defend themselves in court by saying, “I didn’t steal the silver from No 42, your Honour, but I was guilty of the stabbing at the Post Office. At least, if you’re going to convict me, convict me of the right crime.” But that, in effect, was what Stephen was doing here – although he was no criminal, and the truth of Christianity was at stake.
But the conviction is not going to happen until the beginning of chapter 8, and today we’re looking at just the first 16 verses of chapter 7, where Stephen takes his hearers back nearly 2,000 years in their national history: ‘To this he [Stephen] replied: “Brothers and fathers, listen to me! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran” ’ (Acts 7:2).
If there is a God, He has always been God. He was the same God when the human race lived in caves. He is the God of all time. So history is relevant. The Jews knew that. For them the proclamation of their faith naturally included the recital of how God had acted in their history. But God had not only been present and active throughout their history: there had also been patterns to His activity. And Stephen is going to highlight some of those patterns in his speech. We shall be looking at three of them: 1) that the God of glory is the God beyond boundaries; 2) that He is the God of patient purposes; and 3) that He is the God spurned by men. Although I shall put certain verses alongside those sub-headings, actually all of them run the whole way through the speech.
The God of Glory is:
1) The God beyond boundaries (7:2-3)
“Brothers and fathers, listen to me! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran. ‘Leave your country and your people,’ God said, ‘and go to the land I will show you’ (7:2, 3). The Jews trace their religion back to Abraham. But where did God first speak to Abraham? In an alien and idolatrous culture on the Euphrates, hundreds of miles away from Palestine.
The map shows the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East (with Egypt there at the bottom-left) stretching across that crucial land corridor, on the eastern side of the Mediterranean Sea, that connects the three great continents of Asia, Europe and Africa. All the arrows that are going from right to left indicate the course that is going to be tracked out in the verses that we are looking at today. In an alien and idolatrous culture on the Euphrates – hundreds of miles away from the Promised Land, from Palestine (which is in the little box to the left of the middle there) – that’s where God first spoke to Abraham. And from there Abraham travelled to Haran, and from Haran to the Promised Land. But that was not permanent: “So he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After the death of his father, God sent him to this land where you are now living [Palestine, the Promised Land]. He gave him no inheritance here, not even a foot of ground. But God promised him that he and his descendants after him would possess the land, even though at that time Abraham had no child. God spoke to him in this way: ‘Your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and ill-treated for four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves,’ God said, ‘and afterwards they will come out of that country and worship me in this place’ ” (vv. 4-7).
And so, in due course, they were in Egypt – another land proverbially far from God for the Israelites. But notice the emphasis that Stephen puts on Egypt, in his speech, as the place of God’s rescue (notice that the word ‘Egypt’ comes six times in seven verses): “Because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him and rescued him from all his troubles. He gave Joseph wisdom and enabled him to gain the goodwill of Pharaoh king of Egypt; so he made him ruler over Egypt and all his palace.
“Then a famine struck all Egypt and Canaan, bringing great suffering, and our fathers could not find food. When Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, he sent our fathers on their first visit. On their second visit, Joseph told his brothers who he was, and Pharaoh learned about Joseph’s family. After this, Joseph sent for his father Jacob and his whole family, seventy-five in all. Then Jacob went down to Egypt, where he and our fathers died” (vv. 9-15). And that generation only got back to the Promised Land as corpses: “Their bodies were brought back to Shechem and placed in the tomb that Abraham had bought from the sons of Hamor at Shechem for a certain sum of money” (v. 16). Six times there Stephen has brought in that word ‘Egypt’, to show that God was active throughout His world. From Mesopotamia, to Haran, to Canaan, to Egypt. The whole sweep of the Fertile Crescent from the Euphrates to the Nile, was the theatre for God’s revelation in these events.
But the Jews wanted to box God up: in a country and a city and a building (their Temple in Jerusalem). But that cannot be done. Glance at Stephen’s quotation from Isaiah that he is going to give later in his speech: ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me? says the Lord. Or where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things?’ (7:49, 50). He is a God beyond boundaries.
But I don’t think we can blame the Jews. I suspect you and I are very much the same. We want God to be where we can find Him when we want Him: in church; in the Bible; in quiet, holy moments; in the beauty of nature or of a painting or of a symphony. But not in the common cold, or between the sheets of our beds, or in the ugly humdrum routines of our lives. None of us find it easy to cope with a God that large, that omnipresent, outside and beyond all the boundaries that we can provide to keep Him safe. It would be very much more convenient to have Him confined. I suspect that in our own way we all try to box Him up.
You will remember the small boy chatting to his mum as he drank his glass of milk: “Mummy, is God everywhere?” “Yes, dear. Of course He is.” “Mummy, is God in this room?” “Well, I expect so, dear.” “Mummy, is God in this glass of milk?” Mother, a little more hesitant now, aware of potential metaphysical pitfalls: “Well, I suppose so.” Whereupon the little boy slapped his hand over the top of the glass and said, “Got ‘im!” I’m not sure that is not a caricature of you and me! We like a God who is where we want Him to be when we want Him to be there. We want to call upon Him, we want to say a prayer and He’s there to listen. But we don’t want a God we meet round a corner unexpectedly every day of our lives. We want there to be little bits of our lives where we can disengage from Him. We want to keep some parts of our lives just to ourselves, without His interference. But we cannot put boundaries around God. None of them fit. The God of Glory will reach us in any place and in any way He chooses. And the question before you and me today is, Am I open to that? Are you prepared for a God who will be in every single part of your life? If you let Him in there is nothing He will not put his hand on and lay His finger on: your leisure time, your pleasure time, your work time – all those thing that you would like to keep just to yourself. And if you are not open to that you are not open to God at all. Are you prepared for a God who is that much greater than you, and lays claim to every single part of your and my life? The God of Glory is a God beyond boundaries. But he is also the God of patient purposes.
2) The God of patient purposes (7:4-8)
Consider again verses 4-8: “So he [Abraham] left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After the death of his father, God sent him to this land where you are now living. He gave him no inheritance here, not even a foot of ground. But God promised him that he and his descendants after him would possess the land, even though at that time Abraham had no child. God spoke to him in this way: ‘Your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and ill-treated for four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves,’ God said, ‘and afterwards they will come out of that country and worship me in this place’ Then he gave Abraham the covenant of circumcision. And Abraham became the father of Isaac and circumcised him eight days after his birth. Later Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob became the father of the twelve patriarchs.” God’s purpose there is spanning generations; it’s spanning centuries. It was going to take over 400 years for this next bit of the promise to mature. Abraham didn’t even have a son when God’s promise first came to him. He had no inheritance in the land, even at his death: “He gave him no inheritance here, not even a foot of ground. But God promised him that he and his descendants after him would possess the land …” (v. 5a). It was the promise of the land, not the land itself, that mattered to Abraham (just as he was to show at Mount Moriah that it was God’s promise that mattered more even than his precious son, Isaac). Only little by little did God’s precise purpose emerge as the centuries of His dealings with His people rolled by. It would be a long time before they were ready for Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus.
But these patriarchs – these senior citizens, as it were, of the Jewish faith – are an example to us of the right response to the promises of God and the way He works in our lives. The Letter to the Hebrews provides a wonderful commentary on Stephen’s sermon: ‘All these people were still living by faith when they died. [He’s talking of these very people, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and the twelve patriarchs.] They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country – a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them” (Heb. 11:13-16). You see, if God worked slowly then – over the centuries – He probably works slowly now. His purpose for you and me (for believers) today is probably slower than we would like it to be. It will take time. Like the movement of the hands of a clock, it may even be invisible to the naked eye. It may only be visible to faith, which sees what is invisible because faith sees by hearing God’s promises and acting them out.
If I am a Christian, God has promised that He will complete the good work He has begun in me. But it happens by faith. So (I’m going to speak personally for a moment), I often despair of my progress. I don’t know about you, but I look at the recurrent sin in my life and think, How can this be? I’ve been a Christian 34 years, I’m ordained, I’m supposed to teach others the Bible – and I give in to lust like that; I feel irritated with members of my family; I lose my temper; I say that stupid, thoughtless, unkind, cruel, insensitive thing; I’m brash and arrogant yet again. How can it be? It’s not as if I don’t know these things are wrong. It’s not as if I hadn’t done them again and again.
But God says to me, “Mark, will you believe your experience, or will you believe my promise to you?” Abraham’s experience contradicted the promise of God again and again. My experience contradicts the promise of God to me. But God works His own purpose out in His own time in our lives – in His own way. He has a tough task to make me like Jesus (I can’t speak for you). But He tells me that He is doing it – and He will complete what He has begun.
There is a saying – Question: How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time. (It always reminds me of that man who dreamed that he was a eating a six pound marshmallow, and woke up to find that his pillow had gone). But that’s got nothing to do with it! Or another saying that you will know ‘A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step’. They are just proverbs, but they are helpful in the Christian life. My steps forward in righteousness may be very small and punctuated with many stumbles back; but if God can be patient with me, can’t I be patient with myself? If that is how long and how painful it is to get me to heaven, let me be patient as God is patient. He never gives up on my new starts. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life (another secular saying which is very, very helpful for the Christian). God never tires of forgiving me, of setting me up on my feet again and saying, “Keep going, Mark. Persevere.” And His grace and mercy take me into each new day. ‘Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning: great is your faithfulness’ (Lamentations 3:22, 23).
The God of Glory is the God beyond boundaries. Don’t put any limits on Him. He is the God of patient purposes, unveiling them stage by stage by stage. He is also the God spurned by men.
3) The God spurned by men (7:9-16)
This theme will sound more strongly in the story of Moses which Stephen will come to next (and we will come to next week). But it begins here: “Because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt …” (v. 9a). You will remember that the jealousy wasn’t entirely undeserved, because Joseph was a bit of a spoiled brat at first. But God uses unlikely material, and usually material rejected by men. See how that verse goes on: “Because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him and rescued him from all his troubles.” (vv. 9, 10a). And probably that rescue was more than just a physical rescue from slavery and prison. It was a rescue that was going on inside him, as God changed him as a person.
God delights to take what men despise and make what He will of it. That’s the positive side. But the negative side of the same truth is that you and I will tend to reject the word of God, and spurn those who speak faithfully about Him. In fact that theme will provide the climax for Stephen’s speech: “Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him” (v. 52). That’s the great climax of the sermon, towards which we are moving. As Christians we worship One whom men spurned, and whom they continue to despise and reject today. And we, too, will be tempted to spurn and reject Him; and if we do associate ourselves with Him we will face the same treatment as He faced.
Realising that God works in this way, we see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. As we look at Jesus, in His life and His death, God’s Glory is made clear to us. It’s a reversal of human thinking. God does not work in the way that we think. And as we look into Jesus’ face and see God’s Glory, we are enabled to live a life that is counter-cultural: that goes right against the current of the world in which we live.
I began with Hugh Latimer. Well, at the beginning of one of his sermons when he had to preach before the king, he wrote this: ‘Latimer, Latimer, thou art going to speak before the high and mighty King Henry VIII, who is able, if he think fit, to take thy life away. Be careful what thou sayest. But, Latimer, Latimer, remember also thou art about to speak before the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Take heed that thou dost not displease Him.’
What a perspective to have on life! As you (and I) go into this coming week you will be very aware of what other people think of you: your wife, your husband, your friends, your boy-friend, your girl-friend, your supervisor who is going to mark your exams. But to know that all of our life is lived and our every word is spoken in a different presence, the presence of the God of Glory, the timeless, limitless Lord, who loved us and gave Himself for us. He can’t be confined in a box this coming week. His patience with us is unending. I think as we live our lives in the light of that we can live as different people.