Acts 7
MorActs 7:1-60
The Acts of the Apostles Chapter 7:1-60 Acts 7:2-60 We now turn to consider the testimony borne by Stephen as a witness of Jesus, in his apology, and by his dying. This word apology is one of the discrowned words in our language. We constantly misuse it in our daily speech. We say we apologize, when we confess that we are wrong. An apology is really an argument that we are right.
This address of Stephen was an apology, not for himself, but for his Master. His testimony in life and in death was Christo-centric; therefore it shared the clearness, authority, and influence of the testimony of Jesus. Just as we have seen in the previous study the wonderful unity between Stephen and his Lord; so here we shall see the same unity between the testimony of Stephen and the testimony of Jesus. Stephen’s outlook was that of Christ. Stephen could have said as accurately as did Paul, “To me to live is Christ.” We shall confine ourselves to the witness of his trial and death, recognizing that, being the outcome of his former testimony, it harmonized therewith.
Let us remind ourselves of the circumstances of this great apology. Stephen was arraigned before the Council, that is before the Sanhedrim; and the charge preferred against him was a strange mixture of truth and error. This is what they said of him, “We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God.” That was their interpretation of what he had said. They suborned false witnesses who said: “This man ceaseth not to speak words against this holy place, and the law.” These were their impressions of the results of his teaching.
But the definite, specific charge for a charge had to be formulated for the Sanhedrim was this, “We have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered unto us.” That last statement was true undoubtedly; he had said that very thing. He had said that the mission of Jesus must culminate in the destruction of the temple, and the changing of the customs; but when they interpreted that to mean that he blasphemed Moses and God; that this man had set himself against all that was Divine in the origin of the Hebrew economy, they were wrong. He was arraigned upon a charge partially true and partially false. There is never any more serious situation than that:
“A lie which is all a lie may be met with and fought outright; But a lie that is partly truth is a harder matter to fight.” Mark the answer of Stephen first, in general terms. It was not a defence. There was not in this whole speech of Stephen a single reply as to whether he had said the things they charged him with saying. The personal element is wholly absent. He was not careful for a single moment to defend himself even against misinterpretation. He did not attempt to show the difference between the formal charge and their interpretation of it.
He was so utterly lost in the sense of God, and the spaciousness of his outlook in Jesus Christ, that he did not seem to think it worth while to reply to the actual words of the charge made against him. On the other hand, he did most definitely reply thereto, and defend the declaration that the temple must be destroyed, and would be destroyed without loss; and declared with new emphasis the necessity for the change of the customs established by Moses. From beginning to end however he made it perfectly patent that the last thing in his mind was any intention of speaking against God or against Moses. Rather he argued that all that happened in the coming of Jesus was in fulfillment of the great central prophecy of their own lawgiver, Moses.
The apology of Stephen is therefore not in the nature of a defence, but of an arraignment. Looking back over the centuries at the great scene, we see Stephen, not so much as a prisoner at the bar, but as the vicegerent of God, the judge of the nation.
This was a great crisis in the national history. There had come such a crisis during the ministry of Jesus when He had said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.” In the ministry of Jesus He first spoke of the temple as “My Father’s house,” but at the end He spoke of it as “your house . . . left unto you desolate.” Now the second crisis had come in the history of the people. They had been given a Pentecostal opportunity. They had received a new spiritual presentation of the Evangel in the early mission of the apostles.
All those first things which we have been considering constituted the witness of Christ by the Spirit in Jerusalem. Presently the mangled body of Stephen was Jerusalem’s answer to this new opportunity. Ere he went out to death he stood, not as a prisoner at the bar, but as the judge of the people, declaring in the very terms of Christ, the doom of the city that had rejected Him.
His address was peculiarly Eastern. It is very difficult for the Western mind to follow the movement, and catch the cumulative force of its arraignment of the nation. At the close he said, “Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcized in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Spirit.” We of the West live lonely lives; we speak of our fathers and our inheritance, but we hardly begin to feel the force of the relationship. The Easterner lives in the past as well as the present. Mr. Johnston Ross has said that no Westerner can ever understand the words: “Fill ye up the measure of your fathers.” In that sense the whole method of this address, and the sweep of its argument, is Eastern.
Stephen would not consent to deal with the immediate, save in relation to all that which had preceded it. He saw in events that were happening around him, not incidents, but movements in the rhythmic march of God, and revelations of the perpetual sin of his own people.
It was a great historic declaration, because it was the declaration of a man who looked out over history, and saw it in its highest values. There were few dates, and few names; and some of the names were mistakes, as will be gathered when the story is carefully considered; for instance, he said Babylon, where he ought to have said Damascus, when he quoted from the ancient prophets. Of course the mistakes may be due to copyists of the manuscripts.
The argument itself was an interpretation of history from the heights. Dr. Pierson said at the Ecumenical Conference of Foreign Missions in New York that “History is His story, if man can climb high enough to read it.” Stephen had climbed the heights, and looking back over the history of his people he interpreted it in the light of the Divine method, and the Divine overruling. Beginning with Abraham, nay, beginning with the God of glory, and then in human history with Abraham, passing in review all the centuries after Abraham, he ended with Jesus. Their charges against him were, “We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God”; “We have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered unto us.” In answer, he gave them a general view of the whole history of that nation of which they were a part, and in which they made their boast. Beginning with Abraham he ended with Jesus.
Abraham was first mentioned as the man of faith. Joseph was mentioned, but only in connection with the attitude toward him of the patriarchs. The patriarchs sold Joseph. Moses they understood not, and refused. The test of testimony-mark the fine satire of it was in the wilderness; and the forty years of their rebellion are in his mind. “Solomon built Him a house. Howbeit the Most High dwelleth not in houses made with hands.” The prophets, their fathers persecuted them. Of the Righteous One they had become the betrayers and murderers. Through all the movement he emphasized the continuity of their failure.
Mark also how he pointed out to them through all the address the persistent purpose of God. “The God of glory” was the first phrase, and the glory of God was the perpetual theme. As we read this apology we see clearly that which Russell Lowell described, in the words,
“… standeth God within the shadow Keeping watch above His own.” The apology may be read from beginning to end, losing sight of the nation, and watching only the goings of God through individuals; Abraham, a lonely man; Joseph, a lonely man; Moses, a lonely man; the prophets, one after another standing out in supreme and awful isolation; and at last the Righteous One, quite alone. Yet every individual is seen creating a new social opportunity and requirement, and marking perpetual progress in the Divine movement. As I read this defence, and watch the goings of God, I am impressed with the truth of Lloyd Garrison’s word, “One with God is a majority.” Therefore I learn also that one man can excommunicate a Church, one man can shut out a nation from national greatness; one man can set up an altar to which the Church returning, may be redeemed; and one man can lift a standard around which the nation gathering, it can be remade. This man, standing arraigned before the Sanhedrim, led them back over their whole history, and the supreme note and glory of his apology was its revelation of the goings of God.
He was also impressing upon them the perpetual rebellion of man, man’s hindrance to God’s progress. It is one long story of man’s utter inability to cooperate with God.
Yet again, not only is it the story of God’s method, and of man’s hindrance, it is the story from beginning to end of God’s victory. God is revealed as forevermore moving a little further forward, from Abraham to whom He gave the promise of a seed; never resting in His march until the promise was fulfilled in the Person of the Righteous One.
He left them to make their own deduction. It was a self-evident one. He charged them with having rejected the last movement in the Divine progress. The argument from history was that they rejecting, were rejected; and that the rejected One was crowned. He admitted the partial truth of the charge they brought against him, by revealing to them the fact that the temple must be destroyed; but also insisting upon it that it might be destroyed without loss, because the throne of God remains, and the government of God is utterly unchanged; and explaining to them what he really meant by the testimony he had borne, and the truth he had declared. Stephen, standing before the Sanhedrim, interpreted the goings of God to a people who professed to know Him, and yet were perpetually hindering Him. In succession to his Lord he uttered again the things that Jesus had said, claiming that God had never been defeated, but that man had perpetually failed, as he had failed to understand and follow the Divine guidance.
The testimony that Stephen bore in his dying was that of witness to the supremacy of the spiritual, to the reality of the unseen, and therefore, to the fact that the glory of God is essentially demonstrated by, and active in the grace of God.
First, it was a witness to the supremacy of the spiritual. Jesus had said: “Fear not them which kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.” “After that!” What can there be after that? The ultimate fear in the human heart that has lost its vision of God, and the sense of the spiritual, is the fear of death. A man may profess to believe that death does not end all, and yet in his underlying consciousness, his very fear of death is demonstration that he has no certainty of that which lies beyond, does not believe in the supremacy of the spiritual after death. The one great conflict of human life unilluminated by fellowship with God, is conflict with death, effort to postpone it, to evade it, to fight it off, so to live as not to hasten it. The materialist is forevermore saying, “Let us eat, and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Therefore let to-morrow be postponed, for it is the final dread, the ultimate agony.
Jesus said, “Fear not them which kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do,” and in that word there flashed forth the light of His conception of essential personality; the body killed, but the man continuing. With softened footfall, and reverent demeanour, we come to the Cross. What does the Cross say? Among other things, profounder and mightier, it yet surely says, “Fear not them which kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.” I watch Christ Himself fastened to the Cross, and to my own heart there is profound and overwhelming significance in the word He uttered, “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.” They had killed the body it-was then ceasing to be, the life-blood was ebbing away, the vision was becoming dim, and as men looked on they said, He is dying; but He said, “I commend My spirit.” “I lay down My life, that I may take it again. No one taketh it away from Me, but I lay it down of Myself.” That was the ultimate argument for the supremacy of the spiritual.
Stephen was a witness, a martyr of Jesus, an argument for the truth of the thing that he preached, taught, and lived; an evidence of Christianity, a credential. He went outside Jerusalem, and the stones fell thickly upon him. In the attitude of dying he was a witness to the supremacy of the spiritual. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” It is that conception and conviction of the supremacy of the spiritual which alone is equal to enabling a man to “fear not them which kill the body.” The awakened sense of the reality of the spiritual makes cowards of us all. The courage that will face all opposition, and bear all bruising, and die, is courage born of the conviction of the reality of the spiritual. That day the Sadducean mob that largely composed the Sanhedrim (for the Pharisees were in the minority), as they watched this man die, saw how their theories were laughed out of court by a man who could bow in quietness and meekness to death, in the strength of his conviction of the supremacy of the spiritual.
How far do we know that conviction, and live in that power? It is a little difficult to answer this to-day, because no stones are waiting for us in the city. We may never be called upon, in this land at least, so to die as Stephen died. But there are subtler things than stones. Have I the courage that will make me true in the place of criticism and opposition, of supercilious disdain for the name of Christ? I have not, if Christ is to me but the name of a Teacher, high and noble though He may have been.
But if I know the spiritual, if my life is circumferenced around the centre that is homed in eternity, then I shall have courage; courage enough to die for Christ perchance; but also that which is much more difficult, courage enough to live for Christ in places of subtle and insidious difficulty. The only courage that dares, is the courage born of the conviction of the supremacy of the spiritual. That was Stephen’s dying witness.
Because it was that, it was also witness to the reality of the unseen. “I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.” None other saw the vision in the crowd of people round about him. His murderers had no such vision. Saul of Tarsus did not see it; but I think Stephen’s testimony haunted him, and constituted the very goads against which he tried to kick. This man saw the unseen; and by that dying word, and the triumph of his speech, and the light upon his face from the glory of a great vision, he testified in the Sadducean, rationalistic age in which he lived and died, to the reality of unseen things.
Finally, the most overwhelming testimony of his death was its witness to the glory of God as being grace. In that prayer of his, full of tenderness, there was an echo of the prayer of his Lord. Stephen died with a prayer upon his lips for the very men who were murdering him; and by that they knew that he believed, and lived in the power of the belief, that the glory of God, to which he had referred at the commencement of his argument, was the very grace of God. The prayer did not only reveal his desire for his enemies, but also his confidence in the pardon of God. He prayed to a God ready to pardon. There he lay, dying under the brutal stones, with the great consciousness of the failure of his own people in their past history filling his soul. He saw the outstanding places of their failure in their long rejection of the messengers of God, and he watched God’s movement ever onward; and now when they had cast out the Righteous One, and were stoning him to death he prayed for their pardon.
The story ends with the mangled body of Stephen. No, it does not so end! It ends with the brief word written after, to stimulate interest, and suggest something still to come, “And Saul was consenting unto his death.” The witness is dead; the truth lives; and in his very dying he has sown the seed of a mighty harvest in the heart of the hardest man in the crowd. So the first martyr sealing his testimony with his blood, reveals to us how true the thing is that has been said, and proven through all the centuries, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”