It is the epitome of an irrational mind to suppose that men face such things for known fiction. It is the epitome of irrational to think that Stephen said, I saw Jesus rise from the dead, or risen from the dead, and He is the Messiah, and then die for it if it weren't true.
Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Satan's Blunder is the title of Pastor Rick's message today. He'll be teaching in Acts chapter 7. He continues bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly, and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly. We're in the afterward state. He's not finished yet, Peter does.
He continues on. He says, and delivered righteous Lot who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked. Righteous Lot, if your lot made so many blunders, if he could understand that there is a such thing as consequence to iniquity, then we are also. I don't know, maybe you say, yeah, right on, I see it too. Maybe you don't.
Maybe you don't see that our teens, particularly our teens and our young adults, are trying to find something that is salvageable about the other side, the sexually perverted culture, this broke, woke generation. They have nothing to offer you but hell. And you've got to be able to identify that. Put your uniform in front of them. Wear it in front of them.
As for me and my house, we don't believe this stuff. You say, but they might turn on me. Well, then you'll be in Stephen's company, will you not? Christ will stand to receive you as he stood to receive Stephen. He says to them, you always resist the Holy Spirit.
May it not be us. Three ways in which the Holy Spirit can be opposed that are outstanding in our New Testament. Well, he can be resisted as is here. Sinners resist the Holy Spirit.
They stiff arm him, get back, get away, keep your spiritual distance from me. He can be grieved, as we're told in Ephesians 4.30. That one is for believers, not so much for unbelievers. Grieve is a love word. You grieve over someone that you love, someone that stands in a special and close relationship to you. The Holy Spirit has that relationship with believers, and he can be grieved. And I think he is grieved when we take the word of God and we hide it because we want to fit in.
We don't want to be offensive. The Christian message is offensive to sinners. Well, I was a sinner apart from Christ. I heard the Christian message. I was given a choice by Christ to submit to him or to resist him.
Well, I submitted. So I don't buy that argument that, oh, it's too harsh of a message. It is an ultimatum. The Christian message is an ultimatum. Take it or leave it. But this is the gospel.
This is the consequence of not receiving it. The Holy Spirit can be quenched. This, again, belongs to believers, especially an assembly, as we're told in 1 Thessalonians. A church can quench the Holy Spirit.
I love the background noise. This is the kind of sermon you preach during a thunderstorm. I didn't choose that. I didn't go on the weather.
What's the weather going to be Sunday? I'll preach on this. Thank you, Lord.
All right, so now that we have your attention, coming back to this. A church can quench the Holy Spirit by allowing men to usurp the authority of the Holy Spirit. How does the church usurp his authority? By refusing to be led, by refusing to submit, by refusing to remember that he is God, the Holy Spirit, and he is not co-equal with us, just because he chooses to be with us. Permitting false doctrine or moral evil to go unaddressed. This is how we quench the Spirit. And a church can continue to say it's a church when it has very little interest in what the Holy Spirit is doing, and it just seems to want to tell people all the positive things about what's going to happen to them. Well, that wouldn't have worked if you gave Stephen that kind of sermon the day before he stood before this crowd. Oh, it's going to be okay, Stephen.
They're going to love what you have to say. Just preach nice things, okay? Well, he didn't preach nice things from hell's standpoint. Verse 52, Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the just one, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers.
Ooh, he's just loose on them, atomic. Well, if you think I'm being harsh, you wait to see what happens in hell, that's number one. And number two, fine, if you don't like my comments about this, read the section on your own. You tell me if you can downsize what he is saying. What part of when Stephen says, Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And then he says, You killed Christ. 1 Thessalonians chapter 2, Paul writing to new Christians. For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God, which are in Judea in Christ Jesus. For you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, just as they did from the Judeans, who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and have persecuted us, and they do not please God, and are contrary to all men. Paul wrote that.
Paul is standing in this crowd, listening to Stephen, and guards the garments of those who are hurling stones at Stephen, and yet, and yet, he becomes a preacher of the things Stephen preached. What a blunder on hell's part. Thinking that they shut Christianity down by shutting down this atomic preacher. It backfired. God saw the religious habitually killing the righteous.
He sees, he saw this happened all through his history. The Spanish Inquisition also was, there have been many others, that just one of religious people killing righteous people. The world has no idea how much it owes righteous people.
It has no idea. There'd be no Red Cross if it weren't for Christians, just for an example. Salvation Army. I mean, when these institutions came up, they were, they were dynamos.
Eventually the leaven gets in, and then it becomes another thing. But their fathers killed the ones who prophesied. Amen. That was amen.
And they killed the Messiah. That's not a, I mean, how was the sermon today? Lightning, man. It was just like, thunderous.
It was, man. Verse 53. And if you have not received Christ and you're here, I think you've got some incentive to reconsider.
And notice the punctuation to certain points. Anyway, verse 53, who have not received the law by the direction of angels and have not kept it. Well, in other words, Christianity is a spiritual feature that belongs to all of what we have, going all the way back to the days of Adam and Eve and to the end. And that's where the angels come in. God employed them. He doesn't give us details, but suffice it to say it's echoed throughout the New Testament and Old Testament alike. Stephen pulled their religious arrogance into the light. He is their messenger.
Oh, Stephen, you're so negative, said the man. That was kind of a joke. I would appreciate a little lightning and thunder on my jokes, too, just to balance it out, make me feel good about myself because, you know, anyway, we are not to make people feel comfortable in church so long as they are comfortable with sin. And I think a lot of Christians think that we're supposed to do that. The apostles did for a while with Christ. Lord, you're offending them.
Well, that's what I'm trying to do because that's what has to happen. If they're going to be saved, they've got to feel the sting of guilt before God because they won't turn to you. Do you know anyone who does wrong and will not listen to any?
You can't reach them. You say, you know, how come you don't have any friends? Well, because they're all nuts. Well, maybe, maybe, maybe it's you. I don't want to hear that. And then nothing changes.
So it could be that way with us. I have to, you know, listen to myself because I don't want to listen to anybody else. But, no, I mean, sometimes I've said this before. God speaks to me through people from time to time in the flock, usually not when they think they're trying to tell me, you know, pastor, you should do this and that. I don't get that too much anymore. But sometimes someone will say something and it will be God.
And they don't even know that they did it. I do remember one. One person said, when you read the scripture verses, can you slow down a little bit? I said, no, I'm from New York, I can't. But he was right. And that's the only thing he was right on. I asked God, could I dislike him for that? And, anyway, back to this.
What do you think the answer would be? So I'm a little bit all over the place here with this, but let's get back to verse 54 and see if we get some more punctuation on the points. When they heard these things, they were cut to heart, and they gnashed at him with their teeth. Well, truth stripped them bare.
That's what truth does. They could not hide. They had no argument. He had already beaten them in the synagogues. He had already refuted their arguments there.
So they brought him to court to try to shut him up. And it's not working. Blindness. This is man-made religion. Man-led religion. Prohibits people from thinking. One thing about the cults is that they want to take away your ability to think. True Christianity says, bring the word with you.
Think along with us. Reason together. Not looking to nitpick or trying to fight or trying to pick a fight, but to think through what is being said from God's standpoint. But reason was trampled by religious rage on this day, and they gnashed at him with their teeth, because he outed the lawbreakers. They were hypocrites, and he's calling them that.
He turned the tables on them with fact, and they could not counter the charges with reason. They were left with one of three choices. They could repent. They could admit it. Say, that's right. The scriptures do support everything you're saying, and we're siding with you.
That's conversion. They could continue as exposed hypocrites. They could say, yeah, well, we're not listening to you.
We're going to keep living the way we are living. Or they can continue as exposed hypocrites and then kill him. Intensify their resistance.
These things, to this day, this is the case. You go into the workplace. You share the gospel with somebody. They can't refute it, and they don't convert. Well, then you just sort of live and let live.
Or you present the gospel. They can't refute it. They turn on you, and they look to do you harm in some way.
They become an enemy. He was right. They hated him for it, verse 55. But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, full of faith. This is what we're told about this man, Stephen. Full of the Holy Spirit, and even here, in the midst of this interaction. And it is an interaction. He's doing the speaking.
They're doing the hating. He will do the dying. They will do the killing. We're told that Stephen was a man of wisdom, of grace, of power. He did signs and wonders and mercy. Where do we get the mercy?
Well, why is that killing them? He's saying, Lord, please forgive them. I want to hurry up and get to that point, because it's very meaningful to us. Gaze into heaven and saw the glory of God, here in verse 55. Well, he began this sermon in verse 2 by saying God appeared to their ancestors. Now he's ending his sermon with God appearing to him. Matthew 5-8, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. You can see God with... You don't have to use your eyes to see God. Faith can see God. And Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
This is as they're turning on him. Well, he recognized the Lord. Probably he may have seen the Lord before the ascension. We're not told.
It doesn't matter. God is able to reveal, make himself known. Typically, or every other time, we see Christ in heaven when he says, you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Father.
He's sitting. This is the only time. This is the one time Christ is standing in heaven, shown to us, revealed to us. And it is to receive his martyr, his witness. It is to receive the man that preached this sermon and died for it. Verse 56, Stephen still speaking.
And look, I see the heavens open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. It was at this word that Jesus is equal with God the Father that they ended their tolerance. That's what Stephen meant.
To say that someone was standing at the right hand of God is to put him on the platform with God. And they understood it that way. The cults don't understand the scripture.
They only understand the parts they can twist. Well, their intolerance is ignited at this point. And though the scripture is sided with Stephen, they brush that aside. Not only did Stephen look toward heaven, he looked into heaven. And I think that's a profound thought, that God can be seen from earth by faith, by his people. God can make himself visible to us without materializing in front of us. In this case, he is materialized in the eyes of Stephen. Stephen sees him.
Evidently others don't. Paul's conversion will involve some of that. Those with Paul, they won't share what Paul got to see and hear. As Paul did, everyone gets to see Jesus on his throne at some point. Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess.
Daniel 12, too. Some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt. Don't downside that word everlasting. Hell is not, there's no purgatory. Purgatory is not a teaching from the Bible.
And if it's not a teaching from the Bible about the things of God, it is called heresy. 2 Corinthians 5, 10. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. And that puts Christ on an equal platform with God the Father.
Because he is. That's how it has been ordained. There is no veil between Christ and Stephen. There's nothing blocking the sight of Christ. Stephen does not have to run down and get a lamb or a sheep to offer so that he can have this audience with God.
It's the blood of Christ that is on him. And these things are for us, too. Not in this, necessarily in this exact format, but in a daily format. We can approach God. It does not have to be this dramatic. Verse 57. Then they cried out with a loud voice, stopped their ears and ran at him with one accord. Well, this enraged mob never answered any of Stephen's charges because they could not.
When he made these, when he says, Your stiff neck, which of the prophets have you not killed? They couldn't say, Oh yeah, I'll tell you one. Because they were lined up with those ancestors that were guilty of those things. Having Bibles. Where did they go wrong? You would think they had the scripture.
Where did they go wrong? The same place that Christians, that Christians can go wrong. Titus 1 16, they profess to God, but in works they deny him. Or as we read earlier from Peter writing to the Christians, saying to them that they didn't obey what they read. They cherry picked.
They kept the things they liked and they dismissed the things they did not care for. That's how you can have the Bible be religious, be zealous, be fanatical, and be wrong at the same time. Verse 58, and they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. Well death by stoning was how, was the legal method of dealing with a blasphemy which they were charging Stephen with. And I, you know, again, did they have little boxes like in case of blasphemy, break glass, grab a rock and stone, I mean there's always these rocks around.
And it's a city. It's not like you're out in, you know, gravel roads. You know, I wish, I'll look at the video when I get to heaven to find out. That's a joke.
There will be no videos. It is the epitome of an irrational mind to suppose that men face such things for known fiction. It is the epitome of irrational to think that Stephen said, I saw Jesus rise from the dead or risen from the dead, and he is the Messiah, and then die for it if it weren't true. This is something you cannot argue away with these apostles. Had Jesus not risen from the dead, none of them would have died claiming they saw him rise from the dead. They would have been insulted.
People don't do that. People die for a lie if they think it's true, but if it's a known lie, it's very unlikely they're going to die for it. And this is just more testimony to the veracity of the scripture and the history that belongs to Christianity. And the witnesses lay down their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. Paul evidently told Luke this.
Luke is the one who has put together this book of Acts. He wrote years later, Paul did, almost 30 years later, although I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man, but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant with faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. So the things he was charging Stephen with was actually what he was guilty of doing, blaspheming. He is saying, I was the blasphemer. I stood there that day when Stephen was executed on the charge of blasphemy, but it was me.
We should have been stoned. They had their garments taken off because they don't want to be hindered as they throw the stones, incidentally. Their robes were in the way. Stephen, he had refuted those who were even from Cilicia, the men of the synagogue of freed men. It's itemized for us in Acts chapter 6.
Paul was from Cilicia. He admits that in chapter 21. And so he knew what was being preached. He was being picked apart with everybody else, verse 59.
And they stoned Stephen as he was calling on God and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Well, there is such a thing as zeal without knowledge, and those who are killing him are doing just that. Paul would later write, I bear them witness, that is, his own people, the Jewish people, the unconverted ones, that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. God's word is a hammer, and it can be. Jeremiah chapter 23, verse 29, God says, is not my word like fire, says Yahweh, and like a hammer that breaks the rock, the rock's in pieces. Well, that's what's going on here in this section of scripture right now. Stephen is using that word of God as a hammer against the rock. Jesus had said, they will put you out of the synagogues, yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God's service, and these things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor me.
So you can have religion without knowing God. Again, Jeremiah chapter 9, Jeremiah says, look, if you're going to boast about something, boast that you know God, that you're understanding God, and the people in Jeremiah's day were devoutly religious, and they persecuted him, and they sure tried to kill him. This is the third murder in relation to the Messiah. They permitted John the Baptist to be killed by Herod. That was a sin against the Father because the Father sent John. They had asked for Jesus to be killed, that was sin against God the Son, and they killed Stephen, a sin against the Holy Spirit, because we had read that he was full of the Spirit, doing signs and wonders in the Spirit, and this is something that is part of our preaching to this day, to tell people who reject the scripture, to point these things out. Why did they kill John the Baptist? What crime did he commit? What crime did Jesus commit? What crime did Stephen commit?
Because everything he said was true. Just read Isaiah 53. Why did they not make the connection to Isaiah 53? It says here in verse 59, saying, Lord, Jesus received my spirit. So here we see Jesus praying directly to Christ. Paul prayed to Jesus also in 2 Corinthians 12.
This vision that he is getting here is granted, I believe, to those in the hour of death by persecution. You've been listening to Cross-Reference Radio, the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. As we mentioned at the beginning of today's broadcast, today's teaching is available free of charge at our website. Simply visit crossreferenceradio.com. That's crossreferenceradio.com. We'd also like to encourage you to subscribe to the Cross-Reference Radio podcast. Subscribing ensures that you stay current with all the latest teachings from Pastor Rick. You can subscribe at crossreferenceradio.com or simply search for Cross-Reference Radio in your favorite podcast app. Tune in next time as Pastor Rick continues teaching through the book of Acts, right here on Cross-Reference Radio.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-03-17 01:39:07 / 2023-03-17 01:48:41 / 10