Acts 6

Acts 6:8-7

Subdivision 7. (Acts 6:8-15; Acts 7:1-60.)Completion of the Testimony to the Nation. In fact, the whole system of Judaism is tottering to its fall; and the nation is ready to give its last, emphatic answer to the grace that has visited it. The number to which the converts had increased could only arouse hostility proportionately more, as the leaders felt their authority compromised, themselves personally attacked, and all ranks being swept away into an opposition continually gathering strength, with its arguments which could be met only by force, and its signs and wonders which could neither be denied nor imitated. Only the fear of the people had hitherto restrained, as we have seen, the outbreak of fury on the part of the council twice before. And now it is increasingly being felt that a struggle cannot be averted; it is in fact a death-struggle. The occasion of its coming on is now shown us by the inspired historian; and with this the offer to the nation as such ends. Stephen, “full of grace and power,” becomes, on that very account, the object of special enmity to the enraged people, and as the first martyr, receives the “crown” of which his name speaks.* He becomes the messenger sent after the Lord, to say, “We will not have this Man to reign over us.” The glory of Christ shines upon the face of His witness, and makes it radiant with the light of heaven, where the Son of man stands at the right hand of God.

Earth has cast out the Light; but to earth’s outcasts heaven is opening, as it never opened yet. We have an intimation, indeed, of Paul’s “gospel of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ;” although not yet is Paul come to proclaim it. He is there! yes; keeping the garments of those that stone that glory from the face of Stephen! \

1. We do not read hitherto of any miracles wrought by other hands than those of the apostles; but now the “power” that is in Stephen manifests itself in great wonders and signs among the people. There is commencing, apparently, a wider bestowal of gifts of this kind, such as was, at any rate, found afterwards. The “faith,” of which we have been told that he was full, doubtless coveted, as the apostle exhorts at a later time, the best gifts, and these, although not so valuable in themselves as that of prophecy, were of great importance for the crisis then approaching. The saints had prayed, on the first return of the apostles from the council, that God would glorify the name of Jesus by stretching out His hand to heal; and Stephen’s endowment is found in connection with most earnest testimony. Hellenist himself, the men of the Hellenistic synagogues to whom he had been probably formerly well known, undertake disputation with him, but are unable to resist the wisdom and spirit by which he speaks.

This rouses all their malice against him; and as with his Lord, to whom through this closing scene he is in growing likeness, they suborn men to bear false witness against him. They could easily pervert his words, no doubt, into blasphemies against Moses; and those against God could be, with not much more difficulty, reasoned from the other.

And now we find what is deeply significant for the issue with regard to the nation; the people, who had hitherto been favorable to the disciples, now join the outcry against them. Henceforth, save as the direct action of the Spirit still produces faith in a remnant of them, rulers and people are one. Persecution can now therefore begin in earnest, and the door of repentance as yet held open to them begins to close. This gives character to the last testimony of Stephen, as we shall see directly: it is a full summing up of the case against them, and adds to their crime in the death of the Lord Jesus, the witness that they always resist the Holy Spirit. The last hope is gone when this can be said. They come upon him, and seize him, and bring him before the council, -at last with their wolfish ferocity unbridled. And here the false witnesses can amplify their assertions “He does not cease,” they affirm, “to say things against the holy place, and the law: for we have heard him say that this Jesus the Nazarene will destroy this place, and change the customs which Moses delivered unto us.” Matter enough indeed to stir the dullest of those who have no greater boast than to be Moses’ disciples! They look intently upon the man so accused, to see how he will bear himself, or what he will answer to such an accusation, and lo, as if he were himself Moses, his face brightens with an angelic glory! As if not seeing the lowering gloom around him, he is in the light, under the smile of God! 2. Stephen is not upon his defence. He is not answering for himself, nor pleading at all. He is the judge giving sentence. He is the still, small voice of the national conscience roused by the power of the Spirit of God. He is the memory of the people, edged and sharpened, as when called into the Presence of God.

The long roll of the centuries obeys his summons, and comes forth; its record of the simplest, but with a strange new utterance; a voice of challenge and conviction, impossible to resist. If, even now, they had but hearkened to it! But man is capable of turning from known, incontestable realities, and of saying in the pride of his heart that things are as he will have them to be. Thus Israel once more turns her back upon God, and abides, still under the doom which it has brought upon her. (1) Stephen goes back to Abraham, to the father in whom they boasted, but in whom God had set before their eyes the principles which He would have them ever remember, -principles which,while the world continues what sin has made it, must ever abide as principles owned of Him and necessary for a path according to His mind. Back of law they must go to find the one in whom they had the promises, -a man justified by faith, and thus a perfect example of the grace which they so steadily refused. “The God of glory,” begins Stephen, “appeared unto our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran.” Thus all for him was found in One who by this marvelous vision drew him to Himself. We know that he and his were serving other gods in that land beyond the flood, (that is, Euphrates, Joshua 24:2). They were involved in the idolatry in which, even then, the whole land was immersed; and there and thus grace met him. He was not the heir of privilege; and for him the glory dwelt not in any place made with hands, but apart from the world, in which he became by the revelation henceforth a pilgrim. From the land of his birth God called him out, and from his kindred; and the land to which He called him was one unknown. Faith every way was a necessity to him; slow as he might be, and was, to sever the ties of nature, which were but hindrance to him. After his father was dead, God removed him to the land which was to be his own. Yet here also the discipline continued, and by faith alone was the land ever enjoyed by him. Promised it was, but no foot of it made good to him; and the seed which was to inherit it came late and slowly on. Of grace, then, and of faith in the unseen, was Abraham’s life a constant witness to them; and this was the life so approved of God, so honored by themselves, who yet knew so little of it! A long sorrow also was made known to him in relation to his seed. They were again to leave the land which was theirs by promise, and to dwell in another, ill-treated, and in bondage, until 400 years had run their length. Then God would judge their oppressors, and they should come out, and serve Him in the inheritance destined for them. But for so long a time still discipline and the need of faith! They grew to a nation in that stern Egyptian school. But why the furnace covenanted to them thus? Why this need of the Refiner’s fire? It all hangs perfectly together: man under this patient but strong hand of God, ever to be watched, never to be reckoned upon. On the other hand, faith in God always therefore the one necessity, always sure amid all changes. With this, as the apostle shows, witnesses that covenant of circumcision of which Stephen thereupon speaks. Abraham is near a hundred years old," his body now dead," nothing more to be expected from it. Just there it is that God, as the “Almighty” God, comes in to renew His assurance of what He will do, when Abraham can do nothing. Circumcision is “the putting off the body of the flesh” (Colossians 2:11); and thus it was to him “the seal of the righteousness of faith which he had, being yet uncircumcised” (Romans 4:11).

Where then is the law, and all the work of man in which Israel so trusted, in the covenant given to a man with a “body now dead”? And this sign is now to be put upon all the seed of Abraham: “And so he begat Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day; and Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob the twelve patriarchs” or tribe-fathers. Here are the principles which would have carried Israel through to blessing. Had they sat patiently at the feet of Moses even, they would have learned them from the other side. God never left Himself without witness of the characteristic marks of all that comes from Him: “Had ye believed Moses,” said the Lord to them, “ye would have believed Me.” And this was as true of His indirect, as of His direct testimony. (2) Stephen goes on to another part of well-known history, in which not only the fundamental untrustworthiness of man displayed itself, but in a way which was but too significant of their later rejection of their God-sent deliverers. Indeed, their latest and worst was in so many ways pictured in it that the least sensitive conscience should have been aroused by it. And this took place in the history of the first fathers of the nation, who yet wrought out in it unwittingly the purposes of God. Who could forget the envy of Joseph’s brethren! which yet helped to fulfil the very premonitions of his greatness which had caused their envy. They sold him into Egypt, but God was with him, spite of those afflictions in the meantime, out of which God so signally delivered him, and made him governor over all the land. Then came the famine which compelled his guilty brethren to have recourse to him whom they had rejected and cast out.

And this again led to the fulfillment of the prophecy to Abraham. Man, working freely and, alas, away from God, nevertheless wrought out His purposes as if designedly seeking their accomplishment.*
(3) And now the speaker proceeds to Moses himself, -Moses whose disciples they all claimed to be, as indeed God had made him their deliverer and lawgiver; but had he in fact fared much better at their hands? Through Moses also they had received the “living oracles,” and the house of God (which they had brought into his indictment) had received its initial form through him. What was the testimony of history again as to all this? He brings forward no reasoning of his own; nothing that they could for a moment deny: the facts are a sufficient argument. But he goes more leisurely through these, as if he would have them marshal their cumulative evidence well, and compel the attention of his unwilling listeners. It is as if, not he, but Moses himself had turned to be their accuser; as the Lord had before declared to them that he was; and that they were going on with such an adversary to the judgment. The judgment now was really come, and the Judge was about to deliver them to the officer, that they might be cast into prison: -a prison from which (although the doors are about to open) they have never come forth yet. The birth of Moses was in one of the disastrous times of Israel’s history. The destruction of their male children threatened their very existence as a nation; and as one of these doomed ones, he was only saved by the signal interposition of God, who shelters him in the bosom of the persecutor. As the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter he is taught all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and becomes mighty in words and deeds. Scripture says nothing elsewhere of this education of his, but much of the divine discipline by which he became the fit ruler of the people of God. Stephen mentions, perhaps, his greatness, to exhibit the more the power of that love which made him renounce it all to identify himself with a rabble of serfs, and set himself in opposition to all the wealth and power and civilization of the foremost nation of the day. Perfectly he knew all that his choice implied; but he saw Him who was invisible, who was lost to the Egyptians amid their bestial deities; and “it came into his heart to look upon his brethren, the sons of Israel.” God was looking upon them, as he was; and the spirit of the deliverer awoke within him.

Seeing one of them suffer wrong, he defended him, and avenged him that was being oppressed, and smote the Egyptian. He thought that his brethren would understand that by him God was giving deliverance to Israel; but they understood not. The love that had brought him to renounce for their sakes the place in which he had been so wonderfully put by God, was not appreciated; and when he would have united and set them at one, he was in their mind only assuming without warrant the place of a ruler and judge over them. He had to flee with his work unaccomplished, and become a sojourner in the land of Midian, where he found other attachments, and became the father of children. No doubt there was that in Moses that needed the discipline; and at the backside of the desert he got training that he needed for the work which after all he was to do. God is over all, and through all, and in all. Thus all can be accepted as of Him, and one can see His hand in that which is nevertheless the sin of man, and done in opposition to Him. In the people there was no preparedness of heart, no generous response to the devotedness that would have served them, no perception of the mind of God at all. Their appointed deliverer they drove out among strangers, as Israel were doing now with One who had come down from a more wonderful height, with attestation from God beyond all that ever had been given before, and to accomplish a much mightier deliverance. But the warning was plain that that Moses in whom now they boasted had been for forty years an outcast from the people who had yet to own that God indeed had raised him up to be their ruler and their judge. Stephen pursues the story of how to that rejected man there came the commission from God, sealed with the broad seal of wonders and signs which accredited in that day to another generation what now no miraculous signs, with how much that went far beyond them, could accredit. In the flame of fire in a bush unburnt, Jehovah had manifested Himself to him, tremble though he might as he stood barefoot in His presence, to send him back, His messenger, into Egypt. How unlike indeed to the glory that had so lately been displayed among them, where He who was sent was One with Him who sent Him, -the glory of the Father’s Son! Yet Moses accomplished His work; as Egypt and the Red Sea and the desert witnessed. They believed in Moses now! Was it not he who said," A prophet will God raise up unto you from among your brethren, like unto me"? From him came the living oracles, -the voice of Him who had been speaking to them ever since. He whom they rashly accused of blasphemy against Moses, clears himself from any possible imputation of irreverence as to what had spoken to his own soul as that. But for Israel, alas! how had Israel, encompassed with all those daily manifestations of divine power and grace of which their history bore witness, -how had Israel treated Moses? How had they treated that Greater Presence that went with them then? It was all written in those records of theirs, so well-known by them, so little fruitful in them. Were they subject?

Let their molten god bear witness! Let Jehovah’s neglected altars, all those forty years, while those of Moloch and Remphan steamed with profane offerings! And there, as Amos declares in the name of the Lord, their captivity had already been decided.* How this shows the unity of the nation morally all through their history! for their heartfelt turning to God at any time would have brought about the rescinding of that judgment which the prophet thus declares had been continually impending over them.
The tent of testimony began also in the wilderness the history of that dwelling-place of God among them, which furnished another count in the indictment of the fearless disciple. Moses had received the pattern, and made it as directed; and it had come into the land with Joshua, when God cast out the nations from before His people. Of how much might the mere mention of its tarrying time remind them, until David prepared for, and Solomon built the House which with its chequered history, and so long now in its tenantless condition, they clung to yet. But whatever it might be, did they think it, then, so adequate a dwelling for the Creator of all? Solomon himself had asked with wonder, whether He whom the heaven of heavens could not contain could be indeed contained in the house that he had builded. And God Himself had asked by the prophet a similar question. How poor and unworthy was in fact that reverence for the house by those who had cast out and slain the Son of the Father, -Him whose glory Isaiah had seen filling it! At the thought of that, the light upon that radiant face seems to kindle into an awful glow of fire. The love of God poured out upon the people of His choice, met but by the enmity of apostate hearts, which had tasted only to harden themselves against it, stirs to passionate outbreak a heart that has with its whole energy responded to it. He rebukes them as not the Israel of God, but stubborn and uncircumcised Gentiles in heart and ears. They had always, -and now how fatally, -resisted the gracious strivings of the Holy Spirit, in one unbroken succession of ungodly men. Had he spoken to them by prophets? which of these had not been the victims of their malicious rage? They had slain the messengers who had but announced the coming of the Righteous One; and He having come, they had now gone on to be His betrayers and His murderers!

Law! -they might talk of law! They had received it, indeed, at the hands of angels; but they had never kept it. 3. Was it not true? There was nothing in it all, but the simplest facts of history, the unimpeached, unimpeachable testimony of writers held by themselves for inspired men. Not even a comment had been given, not an application made, until the full tale to which they had listened was complete. Then at last the verdict had been pronounced, none other than which could possibly have been given. Their consciences bore witness in the lightning flash of conviction which cut them to the heart. Yes, it was true, that was the maddening, if not the overwhelming reality: and stubborn with Satanic pride, they were not overwhelmed, but maddened: “They gnashed upon him with their teeth.” It was like a defiant hell; though hell will not be defiant. On the other side, heaven opens upon its martyr -surely martyr now! Filled with the Spirit, he looks up with eager intentness, out of the fast darkening earth to the place whence the light of God, breaking through the mists, had lighted up his face with radiance. But now, as he looks, there is no mist at all, but a way opened through to the uttermost glory; and there He of whom he had testified is revealed to him, standing at the right hand of God. There are no receptive hearts to which to utter it; but he cannot keep back the closing testimony vouchsafed him. Hear it or not, the testimony must be given. Eager, impassioned, triumphant, “Behold,” he says, “I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God.” They will have no more! As out of the mouth of the pit, comes the shriek of frenzied opposition: “they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and rushed upon him with one accord, and cast him out of the city and stoned him.” Israel has given her answer to the appeal of God, and in the light of the open heavens, they slay His witness. The trial of the nation with this is ended. Yet out of the darkness there is permitted to us here one reminder of transcendent grace: “the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul.” There is nothing to be said of him yet; we are turned from him to him who has now fought the good fight, and has finished his course, for whom his crown of victory is reserved: “They stoned Stephen invoking and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” Witness he is to the last; and most so when wholly unconscious of it he has beheld the glory of his Lord with open face, and is changed by it into the same image, from glory to glory: -undying glory in a dying face! “And kneeling down, he cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge! And having said this, he fell asleep.” How plainly through all this is the fore-gleam of what is just at hand! Only in the language of Saul, the present persecutor, -of Paul, the apostle as he is soon to he, -do we find adequate expression for the spiritual interpretation of the last moments of the dying Stephen. He was to see for himself, through the wondrous grace of God, what Stephen had seen and testified. But in Stephen himself he had seen that transforming power of the glory of Christ, of which he speaks in the words that have been quoted from him. Was he not looking back in them to such a scene as we know never passed from his remembrance? True, he had raged against it then.

All the deeper would be his remembrance of it now. Paul is in many ways Stephen revived; and thus what the imprint of Stephen’s death would make him. Certainly there was here the anticipation of that “gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4), which was, in a special sense, his gospel. Fitting it was that the awful cloud which closed in darkness Israel’s day of grace, should be banded with the brightness of the day that was to follow. The fulness of God’s grace, and His manifold wisdom were to be told out now in the Church in its new and heavenly relationships, -mysteries that had been hid from ages and generations, but are now made manifest to the saints (Colossians 1:26). In Stephen’s vision we have not as yet, of course, the Church, but the Son of man in heaven, which He has opened by His presence there; Heaven fixing the gaze and beckoning the feet of the saints by the Object revealed there.

Judaism is thus ended for us; the law with its unrent veil is set aside; and the way is opened for Jew and Gentile to be brought together as heirs of a better inheritance than the law could speak of. But even now this will only gradually be realized; and the riches of grace will only by degrees pass into the actual possession of those to whom they are destined.