biblestudy: Acts (Part Eight)
Acts 7:1-50 Rejection of the Deliverer Leads to Idolatry
John W. Ritenbaugh
Given 18-Oct-88; Sermon #BS-AC08; 88 minutes
Description: (show)
The last time we went through chapter 6, and there was introduced in chapter 6 a group of people called the Hellenists. I mentioned to you at that time that they were Jews, but they were primarily Greek speaking Jews and if that were the only difference that they had with the Hebrews, why it probably would not have played such a big part in the book of Acts.
But they were not only primarily Greek speaking Jews, but they also had a great deal of influence from the Greek culture that they carried with them. They did not look at things in quite the same way as, I will just call them the Palestinian Jews did, and this began to cause some problems within the church, and as we are going to see, I think at least a little bit of in chapter 7, that not only caused problems within the church, but it also caused a great deal of persecution.
The problems that it caused in the church apparently was because of some prejudicial factors in people's minds so that the widows of the Hellenistic Jews were being neglected in the daily care, and apparently all the care was going to the Palestinian Jews. Well, that problem had to be solved and it was resolved by the appointment of the group of people who eventually became known as deacons, and it became their responsibility, then, to make sure that the widows were taken care of so that the apostles could turn their attention fully to the preaching. And feeling that that was their major responsibility, then they left the other responsibility to those other men.
Now from there, we are introduced to Stephen. Stephen was one of the seven, and I think it is interesting and probably pointedly so, that he is the first mentioned of the seven, and he is the only one who has any kind of a really positive comment made about him. The others are merely named or they are named only in addition to where they were from.
But Stephen was a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit. I am sure that is meant to serve as kind of an introduction for the things that are recorded in Acts the 7th chapter. But whatever there was about Stephen, he kind of stood out from the rest. And I do not exactly know what it was about him that made him the way he was or caused him, maybe motivated him to do what he did, but nonetheless, maybe the motivation was entirely from God. Maybe it was not a personality thing with him at all. Maybe it was entirely due to his having the Holy Spirit. Maybe it was a combination of the two, but we do not find the others doing quite the same thing that Stephen did, and that of course led to his being martyred.
Now, in Acts 6:8, we find not only that he was a man full of the Holy Spirit, but also a man full of faith and power. And this man did great wonders and signs among the people. Now the great wonders and signs are not specified in any way. I think we are left to assume that it was some of the same things that we saw the apostles doing, that is, that people were healed, demons cast out as a result of the things that Stephen prayed for. Now, if that is so, it is very interesting to consider that here was this man who apparently we are left with a question mark here. Was he doing these things before or after his ordination? It seems to indicate that the things were being done even before his ordination and it is one of the reasons why he kind of stood out.
And so it is just interesting to consider the part of an ordination. God was using anybody and everybody who would yield to Him. Maybe all of the 120 were doing things. I do not know. But Stephen certainly stood out and he was not even ordained, let us say, as an elder. But he was ordained to wait on tables, but it did not restrict God using him in the way that He did.
Well, he got into arguments with a group of people called the Freedmen. And I do not know whether I mentioned this to you last week, but all of these people were Hellenists. There does not seem to be any indication at all that these were Palestinian Jews.
The Freedmen, from the best that the commentaries are able to describe, were Jews who had at one time been prisoners of Rome. Now whether they were taken in wars, I do not know. That seems to be the indication. But they were taken prisoner by Rome, used in some way, maybe as we would say as a POW (a prisoner of war), and then after a period of time, either they or their heirs were given their freedom. There is an account of apparently the Romans, that a large number of Jews were transported from Palestine to Rome and then immediately upon their arrival there were given their freedom. The were not detained in any way but were made simply part of the city. And so as a freed man, they became citizens of Rome.
And we find the apostle Paul, born in Silesia [Tarsus?], which is a city in south central Turkey today, that he was a Roman citizen and apparently either he or his family had been given their liberty in much the same way.
So these people were Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Silesians, and there is even a little bit of conjecture over how many synagogues were actually involved here. Some people go as high as five, some say as low as two, but at any rate, that is not a big deal. But I want you to see that during the course of the action here between Stephen and the Jews that the primary persecution is coming from the Hellenists.
Now you might wonder why. Well, the reason is they had a much more volatile, passionate feeling about the Temple and about the land and about the law than did the Jew who lived in Palestine. Part of the reason for that apparently was because of their separation from Palestine, and it became something that, you know, every year they would say, "Well, next year in Jerusalem," and to reach Palestine and to be able to see the Temple once again was, well, they would be in heaven if they were able to do that. Maybe they had worked their entire life somewhere in their captivity in Rome, or some other part of, let us say, the Grecian or Roman world, and then saving their pennies, nickels, dimes, drachmas, or whatever they were that were saving, at the end of their lives they pulled all their money together and went back to Jerusalem so that they could be buried there.
Now the Jew, the common Palestinian Jew who was living there all his life, you know you begin to take where you live somewhat for granted. And they did not have the same passionate feeling toward these things that the Hellenists did. Well, Stephen was a Hellenist too, which is kind of interesting. He at least has a Greek name, Stephen, and it is felt that he, let us say, intruded himself upon these people because of the commonality that he had with them, that he had things in common with them that Peter and John and Andrew and Philip did not have. They were Palestinian Galileans, they were part of the people who were on their home territory. And so we find, did not Peter and them always did their preaching somewhere around the Temple, apparently doing the preaching to those people who were, let us say, from the same general area.
But it seems as though Stephen sought out those who had a Hellenistic background. And I do not know whether he was aware, but he had picked himself a very hot-tempered, passionate-feeling group of people against which to argue. So we find, then, him beginning to get into trouble there to the place where they were getting false witnesses to testify against him. And so in verse 15, the last verse of chapter 6, we find him before the Sanhedrin. He is before the council in much the same way that Peter and John were before the council just a chapter before in chapter 5.
Now chapter 7. One more thing that I want to say in introduction to this chapter and that is that if length or space devoted to what he said is any indication at all of its importance, then what Stephen said is quite important to the entire book of Acts. In fact, what might be able to be said very safely is that what Stephen said is important to the spread of the gospel. I am sure that God could have used other means, but there is no doubt that what Stephen said incited these people to persecute the church, and it was just like persecuting a thistle and they blew the seeds all over the place. Whereas if the Hellenists had done nothing, then it probably would have taken some other kind of motivation to get the church to spread the good news of the Kingdom of God, as they eventually did. But this got it done in a hurry because once they blew on the thistle, that is, blew on Stephen, then people were scattered all over the place and the gospel began to be spread very quickly. In chapter 8, the first thing you know, they are out in Samaria, and by chapter 9, Saul was converted, and in chapter 10 they are preaching to the Gentiles all the way up in Caesarea. So things began to happen very rapidly after this, and so I am sure that Luke included it to show that this was the catalyst. This was the thing that motivated the spread of the gospel out away from Jerusalem, and it did it with a great deal of force.
Now, there are two themes that run through Stephen's speech. I do not know whether we can call it a speech or a sermon. In the commentaries, they do not call it a sermon, they call it a speech because they feel that it was something that in which he really did not begin sermonizing until the last few verses. Instead, he was speaking to them as an orator would. It does not even fit the mode of a defense. Because he was never on the defensive. From the very beginning he was drawing conclusions from historical facts to show them that they were wrong in their approach. Now certainly there is some measure of defense there. But it is not your normal defense. I do not really want to go so far as to say that Stephen was attacking the whole way because he really did not attack until what is now about verse 51 or 52 of chapter 7, but leading up to that, he gave a very sound and reasoned appeal to the Jews regarding the positions that they were holding.
There are two major themes here and one is that Stephen shows that throughout history that God has raised people up as deliverers and Israel repeatedly rejected them and disobeyed God's law. That is the one thing that we are going to find quite a number of references to as we go through. And the second one is that Israel had the Tabernacle and the Temple but still fell into idolatry and made the mistake of thinking that God actually dwelled in the Temple. This has very much to do with Jewish religious thinking at the time. It is playing a very strong force in why they reacted to Stephen and the Christian church in the way that they did.
Now the three great pillars of Jewish religious teaching at the time involved the land, the inheritance (Palestine), the law, and in this case, they would probably say the Mosaic law, and the Temple. Stephen touches quite strongly on all three of them. Now he does not renounce Israel's possession of the land but he argues that much of God's activity has taken place outside the land and that wherever God meets with His people is holy ground. And that God requires His people to move forward in their religious experience and therefore, even for a person living in the Land of Promise, that he should adopt the attitude of a pilgrim to his thinking.
I want to go back just briefly to a verse in I Peter. And I am just drawing on this to show you that this theme about the land was something that I feel that the apostles, whenever they were addressing Jews, had to pay some attention to. You have to understand this in light of, let us say, their feeling about this, in light of maybe our feeling about the Kingdom of God. Now to us, the inheritance that we look forward to is the Kingdom of God. To them, the inheritance was the land, and they were in possession of the land. See, it was theirs, and therefore maybe we might almost say that they rightly concluded that this was something that they should consider very strongly.
Now you might begin to think a little bit about what I had to say last week about Meir Kahane and the Jews of today. The Jews feel that Palestine is theirs. And they have fought a number of wars over the last 40 years both to get it and to hang on to it. And in a sense they have wedged their way in with the help of some other nations. They have wedged their way in because they feel that they have a right to be there.
On the other hand, we have Kahane and here he is trying to prick the conscience of the Jews over there to put some reliance in and obedience to what appears in the law of Moses, and they will have none of it. Because to them it is politically explosive for them to obey what is written in the law of Moses regarding the proper use of the land and who should be living in the land, and so they compromise, you see, and they are thus showing this generation that the Jews of today are reacting in much the same way. Maybe not over the same things, it may not be specifically the same, but the principle was the same: the rejection of the law of God for some reason or another. They compromised then with God's law.
Now that is really the thrust of what Stephen is saying here. Now Kahane, the purpose of God, the Plan of God, has passed him by. He is undoubtedly a sincere man but yet the Plan of God has passed him by. Kahane is in pretty much the same position as these Hellenist Jews were back in the first century AD. Almost having a reverence for the land and the law and if the Temple was there, I am sure he would have that too, that is not within the bounds of God's purpose.
I Peter 1:3-4 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you.
The Christian approach is entirely different from the Jewish approach. To them, the inheritance was the land. Peter said the land is defiled. The land is corrupt. The land is material. Do you not see that God has something better than that? Well, that is what Stephen is saying. He does not say exactly the same words. But in effect, what he is saying, the overall theme through this entire speech of Stephen's is that you people are stuck in the past. The Plan of God is moving forward and you are too obstinate to recognize the direction that it is headed in. And your obstinacy shows in the rejection of Jesus Christ, and as we are going to see, in the rejection of the law and in a superstitious belief in the Temple.
Back to Acts. Now the same principle applies in the other two areas as well. The same thing, the same principle that applies to the land also applies to the law. Again, holding your finger in Acts 7 and go to II Corinthians the third chapter. Now this succinctly states what Stephen spent more time saying.
II Corinthians 3:5-6 Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
Now Stephen is saying that the law is not being degraded at all. That was one of their accusations, that he was degrading Moses and he was degrading the law. But what Stephen was saying is that the law is being elevated to its rightful intent, its rightful purpose. We could read back in Isaiah 42:21, where Isaiah prophesized that the servant of God was honorable. And He would magnify the law. He would magnify [exalt] the law and make it honorable. That is is the way that actually reads. That is, He would lift it to its original intent. Now He did that. He began His ministry, at least it is listed there very early in Matthew the 5th chapter, the Sermon on the Mount, how Jesus showed the intent of the law went far beyond the letter, reaching all the way into a person's heart. And it was there that sin had its start, and it was there that the law was intended to correct the situation before it ever got out of the person in terms of a lie or deceit or malice or murder or rape or anything else.
So in order to affect this, it meant that the sacrifices had to be relegated to the right place, that they were nothing more than a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ. However, the intent of the sacrifices were something that we should live by. But whenever Stephen spoke to these people, it went right over their heads. And they said, "You're trying to do away with it." And Stephen says, "No, I'm not trying to do away with it. We're going to live by its intent, by its spirit. But we're still going to live by it. And that law is still binding on us."
Now the same with the Temple. They misunderstood everything that he had to say about it. Why we can go back right into the Old Testament and show where God Himself showed in the Old Testament—and the Jews should have been able to see this—that God did not live in that building. What kind of a building could man build that would contain the God of heaven, the Creator?
Isaiah 66:1-2 Thus says the Lord: "Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool. Where is the house that you will build Me? And where is the place of My rest? For all those things My hand has made, and all those things exist," says the Lord. "But on this one will I look: on him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word."
See, that is very clear.
I am going to take you back even further, back to the book of Deuteronomy the 30th chapter where God shows His real intent as far as a place for Him to dwell.
Deuteronomy 30:11-14 "For this commandment [the commandment that He gave just prior to that in verse 10: "If you will obey the voice of the Lord your God and keep His commandments" and so forth.] which I command you today is not too mysterious for you, nor is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will ascend into heaven for us and bring it to us [does it dwell on some kind of a building somewhere?], that we may hear and do it?' Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it."
That is very clear.
John 4:19-23 The woman said to Him, "Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain [The people who were suffering from this form of idolatry always had a place that they had to go.], and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem worship the Father. You worship what you do not know [idols, demons]; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him."
Now in John the 14th chapter. It is interesting the way this 14th chapter begins: "In My Father's house are many mansions." And then in verse 15 it says,
John 14:15-17 "If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever—even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him [It is something that is unintelligible to them. They are insensitive to it, unrecognizable by them.]; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you."
God does not dwell in temples. He wants to dwell in people by means of His Spirit so that the Word of God is right in us. It is in our heart. Is that not what the New Covenant is? "I will write My law in their heart and in their minds."
John 14:18 "I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you."
John 14:23 Jesus answered and said to him, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him."
That is very clear.
Now, it was these concepts that brought Stephen to his death. Unfortunately, these people never grasped what he was driving at because their mind was so set on their own belief that it would not be open to a change—a change that would have put them on the right track. So the purpose then of all that he said was to unmask before them, before the world, the continued obstinacy of Israel from the fathers all the way up to Stephen's time, and we might say, we might add here that it continues to today. Because Israel, the Jewish ones, and Israel, the Josephites or whatever you want to call them, we are not responding either to the appeal of God's Word.
Acts 7:1 And then the high priest said, "Are these things so?"
These accusations; that is, that he was challenging the Temple, that he was challenging the law, and that he was challenging the inheritance of the land.
Acts 7:2-3 And he said, "Brethren and fathers, listen: The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran, and said to him, 'Get out of your country, from your relatives, and come to a land that I will show you.'
It is interesting that he did not go through much in the way of formalities, just a very brief address, "brethren and fathers" and boom! he jumped right into a subject. Sounds to me like he was about ready to explode with this subject, and he was just waiting for the chance to unload on these people. He plunges directly into a subject and immediately goes back to the call of Abraham.
Now he is going to do this because Abraham, one of the very revered fathers, the father of the faithful, and the man through whom God chose to work, and everybody would respect Abraham and also know whether or not Stephen was telling the truth. You know, he did not talk about anything obscure.
I wanted to just insert one more thing and that is most of this is delivered with the Hellenists in mind. It is not so much the Jews who were Palestinians, but we are going to see by the end of what he said that the Palestinian Jew was just as as angry as the Hellenist was. But most of this was delivered directly against the Hellenists.
So he plunges right in, gets back to Abraham as a base from which he is going to build. He immediately shows or calls God the God of glory, and I am sure that he did that in order to emphasize the transcendence of God, who cannot be contained in a Temple. He is a God of glory. No building is going to be able to hold Him, at least no building that men have built is going to be able to contain Him. And they should have understood that that building was a symbol and that is all, and certainly have respect for it because of what it was. But they should have understood, and in fact there are writings of the Jews who show that they understood that God really did not dwell in the Temple. But you know how these things happen. It seems to be the natural course of the carnal mind to attach an undue amount of reverence to something that men have made.
You might recall the experience that the Israelites had with the golden serpent. Remember the serpent that they made in the wilderness? Moses had it made, and all those people had to do whenever they had been bitten by those snakes was gaze up at that serpent and they were healed. It was as though their sins were being forgiven, the serpent being a representation of evil, and that they were looking up to God for forgiveness in faith and their sins were forgiven and they were healed. Well, by the time we get to Hezekiah, he had to destroy the thing because people were bowing down before it.
Well, that is what was happening here. They were revering the wrong thing. They should have been revering God rather than the building.
So he is laying foundations and there are little pearls all along here that once you know what the themes are, you can begin to see why he said what he did. Where did God appear to Abraham in Mesopotamia? He did not have to do it in the land. God is the God of all the earth and He is not restricted to a temple, He is not restricted to one land. God can do whatever He wants to do, whenever He wants to do. If He wants to do it in Mesopotamia, that is where He is going to do it. He does not have to do it in Israel.
Now think about what this did to the Jewish line of thinking in regard to other nations. It was part and parcel of them feeling superior to others because God dwelt in their Temple, God dwelt in their land. It was not very attractive to convincing people that this was the true God. And it did not help them to make the right kind of witness before the world. So God's revelation of Himself is not in any way confined to Israel. God can do whatever He wants in the way of revelation, anywhere at any time.
Acts 7:4-5 "Then he came out of the land of the Chaldeans and dwelt in Haran. And from there, when his father [Terah] was dead, he moved to this land in which you now dwell. And God gave him no inheritance in it, not even enough to set his foot on."
Now Abraham did buy the burial plot from Machpelah in Hebron. But that is hardly a place to live, is it? You do not live in a burial plot. And the emphasis here is on a God who lives and a God who works, and His people work and live, Abraham. So he does not even mention the burial plot because that does not figure in to what he is heading toward.
Acts 7:5 "And God gave him no inheritance in it, not even enough to set his foot on. But even when Abraham had no child, He promised to give it to him for a possession, and to his descendants after him."
The point here is that Abraham's destination was the land in which they were now living, and the point is that God worked with Abraham without giving him the land. It is essential that they understand that. The father of the faithful did not need the inheritance for God to work with him and for God to reveal Himself to him. It was still something promised. You understand God has not given us the Kingdom of God yet. We do not have to have it for God to work with us. It is something that is promised. And so we have to always have a pilgrim mentality. We are going somewhere, we are not putting down roots here. If we put down roots here, our spiritual development is probably going to be hindered very greatly and will maybe even stop altogether because our heart will be where our roots are down. So it is important that we understand that. And eventually this was the land where the Temple was built, so the land and the Temple are not necessary for God to fulfill His purpose.
Acts 7:6-7 "But God spoke in this way: that his descendants would sojourn in a foreign land, and that they would bring them into bondage and oppress them four hundred years. 'And the nation to whom they will be in bondage, I will judge,' said God, 'and after that they shall come out and serve Me in this place.'"
The inference again is that Abraham's descendants would be aliens in a land that was not theirs. And again, you see, God is able to carry out His purpose without the land. But He did fulfill His promise because they were Abraham's descendants. That is, the people to whom Stephen was speaking. They were Abraham's descendants, and they were living in the land. But again, step by step, he is shooting the props right out from under them in the hope that they would be able to see that their position from the Scripture was totally untenable. That they really did not have a leg to stand on. But you know that they could not be convinced, but it is interesting to see the arguments that Stephen is placing before them here.
Acts 7:8 "Then He gave him the covenant of circumcision; and so Abraham begot Isaac and circumcised him on the eighth day; and Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot the twelve patriarchs."
A submission to circumcision was the sign of commitment to God. It has been replaced by baptism. That is the sign of our commitment to God now, and so Stephen makes his point. Even though there was no land, no holy place, all the essential conditions for Israel's religion were already in place. That is, to worship God in spirit because the commitment was made.
See, circumcision was the sign which indicated that Abraham understood. That he knew that he was going to commit his entire life to God—and he did. He knew what God had promised. He knew what God would do. He was confident that God would carry through in much the same way as we counsel you before baptism. We talk about your commitment to God, and then you say, "Yes, I agree. I have repented. I believe in the blood of Jesus Christ. I understand what God is working out in my life, and I am in faith going to commit myself to it."
Now, you can do that in Antarctica if you want. There is enough water to baptize you. Antarctica may be not a good illustration. In the summertime, when there is a little bit of water around. But you see, you do not need a special land, you do not need a special temple. You need the things that God dealt with Abraham on, that personal relationship, and Abraham understanding by means of God's Spirit and then making the commitment.
Acts 7:9-10 "And the patriots, becoming envious, sold Joseph into Egypt. But God was with him and delivered him out of all his troubles, and gave him favor and wisdom in the presence of Pharaoh, king of Egypt; and he made him governor over Egypt and all his house."
We are moving chronologically through time here and we are now up to Joseph and the brothers. He introduces Joseph in Egypt, where he says God was with him. You see, Joseph did not have to be in Palestine. He did not have to be in Israel in order for God to be with him. We might say God was with all of them. It was not just Joseph, but God was with all of them.
Now, this section that we are beginning right here also is going to have a little twist in it, because this section is going to begin to show how that the Israelites have consistently rejected the deliverer that God raises up, beginning with Joseph. Joseph was the deliverer. Joseph becomes a Christ figure. You see, he is heading toward the ultimate rejection, which is the rejection of Jesus Christ. But he has got to lay his groundwork and show how that every time a Christ figure came along, every time God raised up a deliverer, Israel rejected him.
And so we see that here with Joseph. Joseph was rejected by his brothers. We find that they envied him. I am sure that played a major role in the killing of Jesus Christ, that the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, they envied Jesus' holiness. They envied Him that He was so superior to them and everything. That He always had better arguments than they did. They just could not put the Man down. He was pure, righteous, holy—and they were envious of Him.
It is interesting, if we would go back to Genesis 37. That is where Joseph had the original dream, when he was still a young man, a boy, probably 16-17 years old. And God gave him the dream and it showed his brothers in symbol bowing down to him and even Jacob and his mother bowing down to him. Well, immediately there was a rejection of that. Now Jacob did not reject it. It says that Jacob thought on those things. In other words, he put it in the back of his mind and he did not fight it the way the other sons did, but he was not sure all of what it meant. But we find here that God vindicated His chosen one, and He gave him favor.
Now it is interesting here. I am not going to go into this, but it is interesting how wisdom is associated with Egypt. Evidently there was a measure—I do not know whether they mean wisdom here in the same way that we mean it spiritually, that is, associated with God's Word and with character and with making right choices. But it may have more to do with just having good worldly, carnal common sense and having a lot of technology and understanding the workings of many of the laws of God, the physical things. But at least I feel that that is what it means more than the wisdom that we would associate with God's Word, because if they had the wisdom associated with God's Word, I think they would have been God's people. They did not. They were about as idolatrous a people as you could get, and yet they were a great nation, much like the United States.
I think that we have wisdom in much the same way that the Egyptians had it. And we are a great nation carnally. We have a lot of economic and military power and political power the same way Egypt did, but boy, spiritually, why, we are probably not anywhere near as good as the Egyptians were. We would probably fall short as a people generally to what the Egyptians were.
But at any rate, He gave him a lot of wisdom in the presence of the Egyptians.
Acts 7:11-13 Now a famine and a great trouble came over all the land of Egypt and Canaan, and our fathers found no sustenance. But when Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, he sent out our fathers first. And the second time, Joseph was made known to his brothers, and Joseph's family became known to the Pharaoh.
So here we just have a very brief story of how Jacob and all of his sons then got into Egypt. There is one interesting thing there, at least I find it interesting. I never noticed it before. That it was on the second visit that Joseph became known to his brothers. See, we have a Christ figure here. The first time Christ came his brothers did not recognize Him. See, He came to His own and His own knew Him not. They rejected Him. The second time He comes, they are going to recognize Him. He is going to reveal Himself. I am Joseph, your brother, or I am Jesus, your God, who used to be your brother, and I will be your brother when you repent and you receive the Spirit of God.
Acts 7:14-16 Then Joseph sent and called his father Jacob and all his relatives to him, seventy-five people. So Jacob went down to Egypt; and he died, he and our fathers. [Now they all died there and that is the point.] And they were carried back to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham bought for a sum of money from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem.
Again, the point is that they all died there. And God was working out His purpose without the land or the Temple. Now, in addition to that, Jacob and his sons kept the law. They knew the law and they were keeping the law wherever they were. Now how do I know that they were keeping the law? Well, to show it more completely, we would have to go to quite a number of scriptures. But let us just go to two of them. In Genesis, 26 (a very familiar scripture), verse 5. God is talking to Isaac.
Genesis 26:4-5 "And I will make your descendants multiply as the stars of heaven; and I will give to your descendants all these lands; and in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed; because Abraham obeyed My voice and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws."
Go back to chapter 18 of Genesis, verse 19. In verse 18 you can very clearly see that,
Genesis 18:18-19 since Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. For I have known him, in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what He has spoken to him.
I just picked those two verses to show you that God chose Abraham in order that Abraham would teach his children, and Abraham did. He kept the commandments himself, and he passed it on to Isaac. Isaac was circumcised. Isaac passed it on to Jacob, and Jacob passed it on to his children. And when they were in Egypt, I have a sneaking suspicion that they were all converted there. I am almost positive that Judah was. If you see the difference between Judah in Genesis 37 and the Judah in chapter 39 or 40 it is, when he pleads for the lives of his brothers and tells what he did to Joseph, not knowing that he was speaking to Joseph, I think that you will see a monumental difference that indicates a converted man.
Now there is one more interesting thing here. He said that they were buried in Shechem. It is no wonder these people came to hate Stephen in such a very short period of time. But Shechem was in the hated land of the Samaritans. As far as the Jews were concerned, the worst people on earth. And here were all of the fathers, all of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and all his brothers were buried in what was now Samaritan territory. Ooh! You know that would hit their pride. And that is exactly what happened. God did not need Palestine to bury His people in. That is the purpose for what Stephen is saying here. There is nothing holy about Judah as a place of burial. And why did all these people come to Judah? They wanted to be buried there, and yet the greatest men that they knew in their history were not buried in Judah.
Acts 7:17-19 "But when the time of the promise drew near, which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt till another king arose who knew not Joseph. This man dealt treacherously with our people, and oppressed our forefathers, making them expose their babies so that they might not live."
This begins a new section in his speech. (And incidentally, it is the longest section.) Moses is the focus, but the land is still the subject. But a lot more is going to be said about Moses here.
This Pharaoh did not know Joseph. Either he was ignorant of Joseph and all that he did in the way of good things for Israel and for Egypt—and I find that hardly likely because here we are talking about the wisdom of Egypt and I am sure that these people would have been schooled at least to some degree on their history and all that had preceded them. And this non-Egyptian king, the Semitic king that they had by the name of Joseph, and all of the wisdom that he showed there surely would have been something that they would have been taught in order to emulate what he did and try to produce the same kind of prosperity that was produced under Joseph.
I think rather he preferred not to think about Joseph, to forget about him in the light of the menace that he saw growing in the expansion of the Israelites. And so he persecuted, he made them expose their babies, which is another way of saying that they had to be put to the sword, to be executed.
Acts 7:20-22 "At this time, Moses was born, and was well pleasing to God; and he was brought up in his father's house for three months. But when he was set out, Pharaoh's daughter took him away and brought him up as her own son. And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds."
Again, notice that the deliverer, Moses, was raised up in Egypt, outside of the land. He was not only raised in Egypt, he was educated in Egypt. He was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. You see, the vital point in all of this is that no inheritance, even an inheritance given by God, can be claimed to possess so much sanctity as to preempt God's further working on behalf of His people, anywhere any time. You see, the Jew was of the mindset that if it was not done in Judea, if it was not done at the Temple, and if it did not have a direct connection to the law, it was not authentic. And so their prejudice would make them reject anything just out of hand that did not conform to the parameters that they had laid down themselves. That is a dangerous position to get ourselves into.
Now, what Stephen is doing is he is preparing these people. No, he is not really preparing them, he is preparing himself. He really did not prepare them, but he is clearing the way, that is a better word, to introduce the centrality of Jesus Christ to God's plan so that He will be able to show that God's plan is of universal proportions. The Jews would somehow or another have to get over their concept that they and their land and their Temple were central to God's purpose. No, it is Jesus Christ who is central to God's purpose, and God's purpose is universal. It is worldwide.
I might mention in verse 22 that God took care to prepare Moses well for his responsibility as deliverer. Certainly in causing him to be reared in the Pharaoh's own house, to be a part of the government. He, I am sure, learned a great deal either about how to do or how not to do things and that would stand him well whenever God led the people of Israel out of Egypt. They would be under a man who had a great deal of experience in governing people.
Acts 7:23-25 "Now when he was forty years old, it came to his heart to visit his brethren, the children of Israel. And seeing one of them suffer wrong, he defended and avenged him who was oppressed, and struck down the Egyptian. For he supposed that his brethren would have understood that God would deliver them by his hand, but they did not understand."
Now at age 40, a crisis occurred in Moses' life. And I think that we would have to conclude from what Stephen says here that Moses' concern for the Israelites was positive and that it was probably put there by God. His concern was expressed by his defense of the Israelites at the expense of the Egyptian. So you might think that by nature, because of all the training that he had in Egypt, apparently also being a general of the army in Egypt and thinking that his future lay in Egypt and that he did not want to do anything to jeopardize his future there, that he would have naturally sided with the Egyptian against the Israelite who was nothing more than a slave. And that is why I think that God just had to be involved in putting those thoughts into his mind. Instead, he sided with the Israelite, the Egyptian died, and Moses hurriedly apparently buried him somewhere because he did not want any hostile eyes to see him.
I might mention here that it was Moses's hope that the Israelites would recognize that they had an influential friend in high places. But they did not see that. So, he supposed that his brethren would have understood. Now, it just makes one wonder how God was working with this man. What kind of thinking, studying was Moses doing? He undoubtedly knew that he was an Israelite. Not like in the Ten Commandments movie where he suddenly is confronted with this Levitical cloth, and he says, "Oh, I'm a Levite" kind of thing. I do not think that that was ever hidden from him. That he knew all along that he was an Israelite. And that background there was already precedent for something like that in Egypt because Joseph was a Semitic ruler in Egypt, and that did not stop them from using Joseph in a very high position. Moses could have been used in spite of him being an Israelite, so there was no problem there.
But God was leading and guiding him in his thinking, and Moses was beginning to realize that somebody was going to have to deliver Israel or they were going to be in such a position that they would never be free. And when he looked around to see who would do it, he was the only candidate. And that is why he tried to bury the Egyptian, so that he would be able to continue in the Egyptian court, in the Egyptian government, and use his influence there to free the Israelites in a political way.
He was going to do just like everybody would naturally think, well, let us work through the system. Let us get them free through the courts. All we need is a few more liberal judges, and the Israelites will be free. See, let us pack the Supreme Court with a couple more liberals, and then they will make some laws, and the first thing you know, all the Israelites will be free. That is probably what he was thinking because that is the way a man would naturally think. Let us work through this government that we already have, but God had something else in mind. So this was quite a crisis that occurred here because Moses' plan was smashed to smithereens.
Acts 7:26-29 "And the next day he appeared to two of them as they were fighting and tried to reconcile them, saying, 'Men, you are brethren; why do you wrong one another?' But he who did his neighbor wrong pushed him away, saying, 'Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you did the Egyptian yesterday?' And then at this saying, Moses fled and became a sojourner in the land of Midian, where he had two sons."
In this second incident with the two Israelites fighting, Stephen is showing Moses as a reconciler. And Moses was a reconciler. He was always mediating for Israel, in their behalf before God, and trying to reconcile the two. Well, his efforts failed and the man's hostile awareness of Moses' killing of the Egyptian then motivated Moses to flee to Midian. And there he married and had a couple of children.
Now this statement "Who made you a ruler and a judge over us?" becomes important a little bit later on. Because again, here we find another incident where God is raising up a deliverer and already the deliverer's brethren are beginning to reject him even before he officially gets in the position! Boy, what powerful influences we have to reject the ones that God raises up to help us out.
Acts 7:30-34 "And when forty years had passed, an Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire in a bush, in the wilderness of Mount Sinai. And when Moses saw it, he marveled at the sight; and as he drew near to observe it, the voice of the Lord came to him, saying, 'I am the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' And Moses trembled and dared not look. Then the Lord said to him, 'Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground. I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt; I have heard their groaning and have come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send you to Egypt."'
Another 40 years pass and another decisive turning point in Moses' life, a bush that burned and yet was not burned up. And again, a very strong statement by Stephen about the holy ground. God was there. He was there at Mount Sinai where the bush was burning. And that was certainly not in Judea. It was nowhere near Palestine. It was a good 50, 75, 80, 100 miles away. However far it is, Mount Sinai is not in the Promised Land.
Acts 7:35 "This Moses whom they rejected, saying, 'Who made you a ruler and a judge?' is the one God sent to be a ruler and a deliverer by the hand of the Angel who appeared to him in the bush."
Now this first phrase, "This Moses" is very emphatic in the Greek. It means that this very man that the Israelites rejected was the deliverer. And that this deliverer had been with God, and that God showed signs and wonders through him in the sight of all, and they still rejected him.
Acts 7:36 "He brought them out, after he had shown signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and in the Red Sea, and in the wilderness forty years. [here is the same phrase again] This is that Moses. . .
What it is signifying is that beginning in verse 35 Stephen is beginning to intensify his argument. Now it is probably that he was beginning to raise his voice. And probably he was beginning to gesture a lot more commandingly. His voice was probably booming out and maybe he was beginning to point the finger at these people, jabbing the air as he begins to help them to understand that they were the sons of the ones who had rejected Moses and they were doing the same thing in principle. So it indicates an intensification of his argument, his much more passionate approach to things. Please notice that Stephen is not in any way disparaging Moses.
Acts 7:37 "This is that Moses who said to the children of Israel, 'The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your brethren. Him you shall hear.'
Now how was he intensifying his argument? It was not just through his voice and through his gestures that he was showing that the whole point that he has reached here right now, it was this very Moses that they revered who was pointing to Somebody who was to come, who was beyond Moses and greater than Moses. Now, how could they refute that? Well, the only way they could refute it was to passionately shut their eyes to the truth. That, of course, they did. They set their jaw and we are going to see, they put things in their ears, fingers or whatever, so they could not hear. They did not want to be talked to anymore.
That prophecy there is in Deuteronomy 18:15 about "that Prophet." Peter used the same thing. He used it in a little bit milder way though back in chapter 3, verse 22 where he says, "For Moses truly said to the fathers, 'The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your brethren. Him you shall hear in all things, whatever He says to you.'"
Acts 7:38 "This is he [there is that same phrase again] who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the Angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai, and with our fathers, the one who received the living oracles to give to us."
He said this, I am sure, in order to show his audience that he shared the same view as they did as to the importance of the law because it was a mark of their high privilege before God, that they had the law of God and other nations did not. In fact, God said that through Moses back in Deuteronomy 7, that the law was their wisdom before the world. So he has gotten to the point now where he is trying to show these people that he is not against the law. That the difference was great in terms of the result that it was going to produce. But in principle, he had every respect for the law and for Moses.
Acts 7:39-40 "Whom our fathers would not obey [meaning the law], but rejected. And in their hearts they turned back to Egypt, saying to Aaron, 'Make us gods to go before us; as for this Moses who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.'
This verse is part of the longest section in in Stephen's speech, but nonetheless, it is an important turning point. Because now he is going to make it very clear that Israel, though privileged, rejected the deliverer, rejected the law that was given through him, and he cites almost verbatim, Exodus 32, beginning in verse 1, the Golden Calf incident. And Stephen is beginning to draw on what the Jews themselves at that time believed regarding the Golden Calf incident.
Now let me give you a quote that comes from the Talmud and apparently is a quote from just about that time. "The golden calf was Israel's first, ultimate, and most heinous sin." Now some rabbis tried to shift the blame for the Golden Calf incident to the mixed multitude. And said, "It was all those Gentiles that we brought with us. And they're the problem. If they had not been there, why Israel never would have fallen into the Golden Calf problem." Well, that is just so much hogwash. Other rabbis, believe it or not, blame God for the Golden Calf incident because He gave them the gold. That is no kidding. Seems that is the way we reason humanly. We twist it in our mind in order to escape blame, having to bear the blame for something.
There are three interesting aspects. They are not real heavy things, but I think that they are just interesting to look at. And that is two of them are the difference between the way that Peter looked at the Jews and the way Stephen looked at the Jews. Now, Stephen looks at the Jews as the sons of those who rejected Moses and killed the prophets. You see, he says that. He does not say that all right in this sentence. But cumulatively they are the sons of those who killed the prophets, rejected Moses, and killed the prophets. Peter, on the other hand, when he approached apparently the same audience, or at least the same general audience, Peter sees them as the sons of the prophets who should hear the new Moses. When you begin to see this, you can see why Stephen was killed and Peter was not. Stephen's approach is much, much more accusative.
The third aspect is—this is something that is not directly stated here but it is something that comes from Rabbinical literature, but also I think that it is enforced by what we see in the Bible too. And that is that the rabbis, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and so forth, did not see the Golden Calf incident as a rejection of Moses at all. But it was. Because he was the one through whom God revealed Himself to Israel. And God shows very plainly that to reject His messenger is to reject God. And Moses was rejected. They rejected the teaching of Moses. See, "We don't know what has become of him." That was a rejection of Moses. And so they felt free to go right on into the Golden Calf.
Do you understand what they did with the Golden Calf or what any making of any idol does? It is a determining or an establishing or a setting of the nature of God by a man. A determining of the nature of God by a man. You cannot do that. I mean, a person can do it, but it is not going to help him spiritually at all because no matter what they come up with, it is going to be a lie.
Now Stephen at this point is laying all of his emphasis on the rejection of the deliverer. That is important to his argument because he is leading to the rejection of Christ by those people in that day.
Acts 7:41-43 "And they made a calf in those days, offered sacrifices to the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their own hands. Then God turned and gave them up to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the Prophets: 'Did you offer Me slaughtered animals and sacrifices during forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? Yes, you took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, images which you made to worship; and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.'
The scene here continues to turn toward idolatry and Temple worship. That is what he is alluding to, that they are actually worshiping the Temple rather than the God who gave directions for the Temple.
Now this is developed by a very quick historical survey that carries all the way from the wilderness, the children of Israel in the wilderness, all the way up to Solomon. I do not know why, but for some reason, making a bull was a constant temptation for Israel. We have a hard time relating to that, but they wanted to make a bull all the time. I do not know why. But the implication is that whatever could be made by men was every bit as good as the Creator. That is stunning to think about.
If you want to read it in Isaiah 44, beginning in verse 9, there is a description there by God that is just dripping with sarcasm, about a man or any man making an idol. And how we how he makes it out of wood and he spends all this time fashioning it, working at it so hard, making it look like, as he says, the form of a man. And then he picks up all the wood chips and all of the refuse that comes from the making of the idol, and he lights it, makes a fire, and cooks his food over it. This great god that the man had made, the refuse from it goes up in smoke, and God says, "What's the difference between the wood that was in the fire and the wood that's in the idol?" Really strange.
You know, in principle, we do the same things today in failing to really believe that God is with us; to really believe that God is alive, that He sees what we are doing. Somehow or another we think that we can get away with lying, stealing, fornication, and somehow or another God does not see what is going on. That is no different from the stupidity of these people in thinking somehow that they could make an idol that would be equal to God out of a piece of wood. These are just our modern forms of idolatry, that is all. We are putting limits on God, just as they put limits on God. We carry around these ideas that somehow or another we can get away with those things. No, we cannot. He says in the Old Testament that they did these things in the dark corners of their houses and so forth, saying, "God will not see." We are so limited.
Anyway, God's reaction, Stephen said, was to do the same thing as the Israelites did. He turned away and He left them to their own devices. And the result was they had the taste, the bitterness of their idolatry in Babylon where they were no longer free, where they could not do the things that they formerly did. There is a parallel to this in Romans the first chapter, verses 24, 26, and 28, where God shows that He just gave them over to their own mind.
Romans 1:24 Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their heart, to dishonor their bodies among themselves.
Romans 1:26 For this reason, God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.
Romans 1:28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting.
And that is what He did with Israel. He let them go and they ended up in captivity where they could reflect on their idolatry. Now it did have some effect, some good effect on them. I mean, going into captivity where they could reflect on what got them there. They came back with a lot more feeling for the keeping of the Sabbath, with a lot more determination that that would never happen again.
But then they went in the other ditch, from being so liberal to being so super conservative that it said that they built a fence around the law in order to protect people from breaking it, and they made a straitjacket out of the law.
Back to Acts the 7th chapter. The sun, the moon, the stars were regarded as either deities or the dwelling place of deities. Moloch, who is mentioned here, was the god that required burnt sacrifice of children. How anybody could think that something like that would be pleasing to God, I do not know, but it was something that was done a very great deal by many families of people. Remphan is just another word for Saturn, one of the ancient gods. And what Stephen is saying here is that even as the Israelites' former idolatry and rejection of the law of God and the deliverers took them into captivity, so also will the rejection of Jesus Christ result in God's judgment. He did not say they would go into captivity, but he certainly was very strongly implying God's judgment in order to put some fear into them.
Acts 7:44-48 "Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, as He appointed, instructing Moses to make it according to the pattern that he had seen, which our fathers, having received it in turn, also brought with Joshua into the land possessed by the Gentiles, whom God drove out before the face of our fathers until the days of David, who found favor before God and asked to find a dwelling for the God of Jacob. But Solomon built Him a house. However, the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands, as the prophet says."
He goes back chronologically to Moses once again. He focuses on the Tabernacle as central to Israelite worship at the time, but it is still not the ideal. And the Tabernacle then continued until David. It is interesting that it says that David, "Asked to find a dwelling for God." Stephen is quoting here from Psalm 132, where the psalm states that David was trying to find a place for God to dwell. Now David thought that the Tabernacle was not good enough for God. Well, God very quickly straightened David out, and He did it through Nathan. He sent Nathan to David and said, "You're not going to build a house for Me. I don't need a house." And but He then made a concession and said, "I'll let Solomon build a house for Me." And that is really what it amounted to was a concession on God's part to allow them to have something that would represent God, that is, the Temple, something that would indicate a fixed location.
Now it is obvious I think that Stephen has a greater feeling of empathy or whatever for the Tabernacle than he does for the Temple, because the Tabernacle at least indicated that they were moving, that there was a pilgrimage. It was temporary and that they were not in a fixed location. Now the Temple, on the other hand, was set in one place and there it stayed. And once it was there, then the religion became fixed like the Temple did and it was not growing in the way that God would have it to. And at any rate, the briefness of his explanation of the Temple pretty much shows his attitude toward it. He did not like it because of what it was doing to the peoples' ideas about God. It was not the Temple itself, it was the attitude that showed up in the people that was causing them to reject his Savior.
Acts 7:49-50 [He quotes Isaiah 66] 'Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool. What house will you build for Me? says the Lord, or what is the place of My rest? Has My hand not made all these things?'
God cannot be limited to a building like an idol, and neither the Tabernacle nor the Temple was ever intended by God to be a permanent feature of God's purpose, not yet. God's Kingdom is not on earth yet. And it is good for us that we do not have anything like that because it would indicate to us a state of permanence, and if we had that state of permanence, I think that we would begin to find ourselves drifting back to the world, spiritually, very quickly.
I think there was a great deal of wisdom in Mr. Armstrong's decision not to allow us to have church buildings to meet in. We are always on the move. And we have to have that thought in mind. We are pilgrims, we are not of this world, and we do not want or need anything that is going to cause us additional reason to go back to the world.
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Sermon Topics
The Gospel
