Truth and Consequences

       Robert Dick Wilson was one of the great professors at Princeton Seminary back in the 1920s.  He made major contributions in showing the reliability of the Bible.  Wilson eventually learned 45 languages.         

       A former student was invited back to preach in Miller Chapel.  Dr. Wilson came in and sat down near the front.  At the close of the service, he came up to his former student, extended his hand, and said, “If you come back again, I will not come to hear you preach. I only come once.  I am glad that you are a big-Godder.  When my boys come back, I come to see if they are big-Godders or little-Godders, and then I know what their ministry will be.” 

       His former student asked him to explain, and he replied.  “Well, some people have a little God, and they are always in trouble with Him.  He can’t do any miracles.  He can’t take care of the inspiration and transmission of the Scripture to us.  He doesn’t intervene on behalf of His people.  They have a little God and I call them little-Godders.  Then there are those who have a great God. He speaks and it is done. He commands and it stands fast.  He knows how to show himself strong on behalf of them that fear him.  You have a great God, and He will bless your ministry.”  He paused a moment, smiled, and said, “God bless you,” and turned and walked out.

       How big is your God?  Is He big or is He small.

       In the Book of Acts we are looking at the story of the spread of the faith.  Acts is the story of a big-God who acts in a big way for big results.  He acts through people who become big themselves in the process of speaking for a big God.

       In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the disciples that they are to be His witnesses not only in Jerusalem , but also in Judea and Samaria , and even beyond that.  But by Acts 7, the witness has only made it to Jerusalem .  Almost a fourth of the Book of Acts has been written and the witnesses are only a mile or two from where they started.  There is not the slightest indication that the leaders of  the church have any intention of moving beyond Jerusalem .  But God wants them to move out.  And God has mysterious ways of accomplishing His purposes. 

      God sometimes achieves great progress by what might look to us like defeat. 

      Now defeats just feel like defeats when you’re living in them.   Sorrows just feel like sorrows.  Still it is always wonderful to look back over the hard places and to see how God has actually been doing His work in what seemed so hard to us.  You’ve seen that in your life and I’ve seen it in mine.

        In Acts 6-11 Luke explains how two remarkable people, Stephen the martyr and Philip the evangelist, lay the foundations of the expansion of the church including the mission to us Gentiles.  This is followed by two remarkable conversions, Saul the Pharisee and Cornelius the Roman centurion.  These four people make indispensable contributions to the global expansion of the church.

       Stephen the martyr is first.  Although Stephen is stoned to death, his martyrdom has a huge impact on Saul of Tarsus.  It also leads to the crucial scattering of the disciples throughout Judea and Samaria .

       Stephen was perhaps one of those 3,000 who believed at Pentecost.  Now I’m sure he carried the usual baggage from his past.  But he then learned forgiveness.  His experience of God’s grace has him free from his own past and has made him forgiving of others.  We are told that Stephen was “full of grace and power.”

       Faith had gotten him started, grace has kept him growing, and power is the result.  Stephen is able to communicate the gospel with intellectual force. He has the contagious joy that attracts people into a relationship with the Savior.  He has the power to produce healing and hope in physically and mentally depleted people.  With these great gifts, he is naturally one of those named by the church to direct the distribution of food in chapter 6.  But the deacon position to which the Church ordains Stephen only serves as God’s launching pad for Stephen’s ministry of teaching and preaching. 

       In a later sermon we will explore how it came about that Stephen is brought before the Sanhedrin and charged with speaking against the law and the temple.  Today we pick up with the trial itself. 

       Verse 15 tells us that as the trial opens, all who are sitting in the Sanhedrin look intently at Stephen, and they see that his face is like the face of an angel.

       When Carol and I were at the Vatican museum this summer, we saw lots of Italian Renaissance painting of very cherubic, very sweet but ineffective looking angels.  I doubt if Luke means that Stephen developed puffy cheeks and dimples.  For whenever angels speak to people in the Gospels the first thing they always say is “Don’t be afraid.”   I don’t know if Stephen displays a serene face, a beautiful face or a frightening face.  Something can be so beautiful that it’s frightening.  I suspect that Stephen’s “face like an angel” has to do with a certain glow.

       This is the same thing that happened to Moses’ face when he came down from Mount Sinai with the law.  God gives the same radiant face to Stephen who is accused of opposing the law as He had given to Moses when he received the law. God shows that both Moses’ ministry of the law and Stephen’s interpretation of it have His approval.  God’s blessing on Stephen is plain.  The grace and power of his ministry, his irresistible wisdom and his shining face are all signs that the favor of God rests upon him.

       Caiaphas the High Priest asks Stephen – “Is it true what the witnesses are saying?”

       This launches the longest recorded sermon in the Book of Acts.

       At first glance, it looks like Stephen takes a huge amount of time retelling the story of Israel and about personalities of the Old Testament.  It has even been suggested that Stephen was not stoned to death for blasphemy but for being long-winded and boring.  I mean the Sadducees and Pharisees have heard this thousands of times since they were old enough to understand.  They’ve seen it on flannel-graphs and filmstrips.  They’ve been raised on this stuff.  But have they understood?  Do they have any idea of the deeper meaning, the purpose, the fulfillment, and culmination in the Messiah?  Stephen carefully selects the events he retells to lead to the one point he wants to make.  Stephen reinterprets the meaning of the history of Israel for these leaders of Israel . 

       Stephen starts with the truth that the people who play a really great part in the history of Israel are the people who hear God’s command to “get out,” and are not afraid to obey it.  Stephen implicitly contrasts the spirit of the Jewish leaders of his own day with that adventurous spirit.  The Sanhedrin’s great desire is to maintain the status quo.  They want to keep things as they are.  They regard Jesus and His followers as dangerous innovators. 

       So Stephen begins with Abraham.  That’s where Jewish history begins.  In Abraham, Stephen sees three things.

       First, Abraham is a man who answers God’s call.  As the writer to the Hebrews put it, Abraham leaves home without knowing where he is to go.  For Stephen the person of God must obey God’s command even when he or she has no idea what the consequences might be.

       Second, Abraham is a man of faith.  He does not know where he was going but he believes that, under God’s guidance, the best is yet to be.  Even when he has no children and when, humanly speaking, it seems impossible that he ever should have any; he believes that some day his descendants will inherit the land God has promised to them.

       Third, Abraham is a man of hope.  To the end of his life he never sees the promise fully fulfilled.  But he never doubts that it will be.

       Stephen presents the Jews with the picture of an adventurous life, ever ready to answer God’s summons.  Stephen then turns to the temple.  He is charged with speaking against the temple so what about the Temple ?

       He shows that faithful people had worshipped God long before there ever was a Temple . 

       To the Jews the Temple is the most sacred of all places.  It was not because of its architectural magnificence that the Jews prize the temple, but because God had promised to ‘put His Name’ there and meet his people there.  Several psalms bear witness to Israel ’s  love for the temple.  For example, “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in His temple.’ This was right.  But many drew a false conclusion.  They conceived of God as so completely identified with the Temple that its existence guaranteed His protection, while its destruction will mean God has abandoned them.  The prophets preached against this idea.  But long before the prophets, as Stephen points out, the great figures of the Old Testament never imagined that God was imprisoned in a building.

       God revealed Himself to Abraham long before Abraham settled in the Holy Land; He gave His law to the people of Israel through Moses when they were wanderers in a wilderness. 

      So far, so good. These are not yet hanging words.  But then Stephen adds another layer that seals his doom.  He turns the history of Israel ’s faithfulness to God – the popular version celebrated by the Sanhedrin – into the history of apostate Israel that stands in opposition to God and the leaders God has chosen.

       In this speech – in his approach – Stephen reminds me of Bill Murray in the movie Stripes -- not that Murray ever looks angelic.  At one point Murray is trying to motivate his dispirited troops.  He tells them “We’re Americans.  Do you know what that means?  It means that our ancestors were kicked out of every decent country on earth.” 

       That’s a radical reinterpretation of our national story – one that we find pretty humorous.  Stephen is just as radical in reinterpreting the story of Israel – but no one is laughing.

       Back in Chapter 4, Peter calls the Sanhedrin the sons of the prophets.  That’s nice.  Peter is working through his anger issues.  He knows that you catch more flies with honey and vinegar.  The sons of the prophets.  That was how the Sanhedrin wants to define itself.  But Stephen says it differently.  He says, “You are the sons of the murderers of the prophets.”

       He starts with Joseph and how his brothers – the founders of the twelve tribes – had been jealous of him and had sold him to slavery.  But Joseph is rescued and honored by God.  He moves to Moses – disowned and rejected by the people but made ruler and deliverer by God.  Do you see thee theme?  He moves to Zechariah.  He quotes Amos. Then he comes to the present.

       Stephen says that when the Jews – the Jews actually sitting right there in front of him -- crucified Jesus they were only setting the stone on a policy they had always followed. All through the ages they had persecuted the prophets and abandoned the leaders whom God had raised up. 

       They have had the most amazing privileges.  They have had the succession of the prophets; the Tabernacle, the Temple and the Law.

       Stephen lays these two things side-by-side – continuous disobedience and continuous privilege.  The more privileges a person has the greater his condemnation if he takes the wrong way.  We are responsible for our level of opportunity.  That’s the same thing as Jesus says in Luke 10 – “Woe to you, Capernaum , for if the miracles done in you had been done in Sodom , they would have repented.”

       Stephen insists that the condemnation of the Jewish nation is complete because in spite of the fact that they had every chance to know better they continually  rebelled against God.

       He says that they consistently persecuted the prophets; and now the crowning charge – that they have now murdered the Son of God.  Stephen does not excuse them on the pleas of ignorance as Peter did.  It is not ignorance but rebellious disobedience that made them commit that crime.

       This isn’t anti-Semitism.  This isn’t Mel Gibson under the influence.  This is a Jew talking to his fellow Jews about the Jewish Messiah and the Jewish hope.

       “You criticize me for not honoring the law but look at what you have done!  You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears!  You are just like your fathers; you always resist the Holy Spirit!  Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute?  They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One  -- you who have received the law that was put into effect through angels but have not obeyed it.”

       Stephen boldly calls the Sanhedrin stiff-necked -- meaning stubborn, an epithet, which both Moses and the prophets had applied to Israel .  And though they insisted on bodily circumcision, he described them as having uncircumcised hearts and ears, another expression which was common to Moses and the prophets.  This means that they were heathens at heart and deaf to the truth’.   You always resist the Holy Spirit.  Your fathers did it and now you are doing it.

       There are three ways in which the Holy Spirit can be opposed.  He can be grieved, He can be quenched, and He can be resisted.  Only a Spirit-indwelt believer can grieve the Holy Spirit.  The word grieve is a love-word.  We can grieve only someone who loves us and stands in a special relationship to us.  A church can quench the Holy Spirit by allowing people to usurp His authority, by refusing to follow His leading, or by permitting false doctrine or moral evil to take root. 

      But those outside the faith resist the Holy Spirit.  It is the Holy Spirit who leads us to faith.  And when we refuse the faith, we refuse the Spirit.

      Pressing home his indictment in greater detail, Stephen declares them guilty of sinning against the Holy Spirit, the Messiah and the law.  You always resist the Holy Spirit by rejecting His appeals.  Their fathers had persecuted every prophet, and even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous Once.  But they have done worse, for they had betrayed and murdered Him whom the prophets predicted.

       Many in the court that day had been present perhaps just a year before when the Lord Himself, put under oath by the same high priest Caiaphas, had proclaimed His absolute deity.  Asked if He was the Son of God, Jesus had said He was indeed.  Then He added, “And you shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power” (Mark 14:62).

       Now Stephen declares, “I see Him! He is indeed at the right hand of God.  I see Him standing there.  I see Him, the Son of Man, in heaven.” 

       Stephen voices what the Sanhedrin considered the ultimate blasphemy.  Not only is he upholding the claim of the Lord Jesus to be co-equal with God, but he is putting Him on the throne of the universe.  Jesus is no mere Jewish messiah.  He is God, over all.  All the institutions of the past are obsolete.  Access to the immediate presence of God is available to all through the Lord Jesus Christ and only through the Lord Jesus Christ. 

       A speech like this to this audience can only have one end. But Stephen does not see the faces distorted with rage.  He doesn’t see the stones. His gaze has gone beyond time and he sees Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

       We think of the sacrifices of those early Christians; but what struck them was the immensity of their inheritance in Christ.  "We are the heirs of God."  That is what they felt about it, that not God Himself could have a fuller life than theirs, and that even He would share all that He had with them.

       That is why Jesus is standing.  He is waiting to bring Stephen home. 

       I don't want to go through what Stephen went through for Jesus. But what if I have to? Can I do it? Am I ready? Could I be as loving and forgiving as Stephen? Can I even compare to that other side of Stephen, the man who took on the tasks that others might have considered to be beneath them? I don't know.
        But I know one thing. I'm glad I serve a Savior who sits at the right hand of God the Father. And I'm even more glad that I serve a Savior who, when I need Him the most, when things are going as wrong as they can possibly go, and then get worse, won't be content to sit idly and wait, but will stand, and cheer me on. He'll stand for me, and stand with me and bring me home.