You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?
Is there anything here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.
Welcome to More Than Ink. So the religious leaders today are going to react to Stephen's presentation about his false accusations, and their reaction is going to be pure rage. What in the world did Stephen say to cause that reaction?
He just told them their own Jewish national history. And that got him killed. And how? We'll find out today on More Than Ink. Well, good morning and welcome back.
This is More Than Ink, and I'm Dorothy. And I'm Jim. And we are jumping right into the tail end of Stephen's speech to the religious leaders after they had hauled him in to give a defense against the things that they charged him of. They charged him of blasphemy against Moses and God, and against disrespecting the holy place and the law. And he has done a masterful job of pulling all of Jewish history up to the present. He's talked about Egypt.
He's talked about Joseph. He's talked at length about Moses, and made some amazing parallels between Moses and Jesus, right? God sent them. They both did signs and wonders. Moses received the living oracles of God. Jesus was the living oracle of God.
And both encountered rejection at the hands of their own people. And so without using the name of Jesus, Stephen has kind of put all that out there and kind of circled around now. He's ready to actually turn and point the finger back at the religious leaders.
It's pretty in your face. This is not just a history lesson anymore. And just prior to what we're going to read this morning, he had said, back in verse 48 of chapter 7, yet the most high does not dwell in houses made by hands, as the prophet says. And then he quotes Isaiah 66, saying, Heaven is my throne. The earth is my footstool. What kind of a house will you build for me, says the Lord?
Or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all of these? Right, right, right. And that's in response to the fact that they set up false witnesses against him. And I'll quote exactly what they said. The false witnesses said, in Acts 6 13, this man never ceases to speak words against the holy place. That's the temple. Against the holy place and the law. For we've heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place, destroy the temple, and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us. So it's the law for Moses.
It's the temple building itself. Their accusations, their false accusations, is that he speaks against these things. But he speaks about them in his history. And now he brings it all to bear on them. Isn't it interesting that he makes no reference to the destruction of the temple when the Babylonians came in in 586 B.C., which, again, the shock to the nation of Israel was that they didn't believe that God would ever tear his own temple down. Right, right. And so they just continued in their idolatry, assuming that God would protect his own house, which he allowed it to be taken down stone by stone.
And he was going to again in 70 A.D. So it's just an interesting place in the speech here. When Stephen now turns his attention to them right in their face, you can almost see him raising his hands to emphasize this. And, in fact, I wonder if the leaders are listening to him, and the expression on their faces are like, well, so what? What are you talking about?
So what's your point? Today in chapter 7, verse 51, we get to the point of bringing all this together in this history. Well, here it comes.
He's leveling both barrels. Well, and he uses a really well-recognized accusation from the Old Testament to start it out. Yes.
Repeatedly in the Old Testament we hear Israel described this way. So let's start reading in verse 51. Are you ready? Okay. You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit.
As your fathers did, so do you. Ooh, should we just stop there for a minute? That's pretty in your face. So this idea of Israel being stiff-necked is an old, old idea. I think the first time we run across it is in Exodus, but it shows up in Deuteronomy.
It shows up in a couple of other places. Stiff-necked, what is that? Like resistant and uncompliant.
And uncircumcised in heart. Well I was going to say the stiff-necked is actually an animal reference. When you put a big bridle in an animal and you pull its head left or right to steer it, if it resists you, it makes a stiff-neck. So what he's saying when you're stiff-necked is you're not steerable by God. No, you're not steerable.
Yeah, you're not influenced by me. And then uncircumcised in heart, right? Your heart is covered over and hardened. It is not made bare before God. It's not soft towards God. Probably the most famous example of that is in Deuteronomy 10.16 where Moses says exactly that. But it shows up also in Jeremiah.
It shows up in a bunch of places. Uncircumcised in heart, right? Not cut open toward God.
And ears, right? Their ears are covered up, too. Yeah, so in a real sense he's saying that their ears and their heart are unholy. They're not open to God's leading. They're not soft towards God. Well, and then he says you always resist the Holy Spirit.
And there's the obstinate part right there. Okay, well Isaiah had said that, that they were resistant to the Spirit. And as your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? You know what, Jesus said the same thing. He said the same thing, yeah, yeah. And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the righteous one whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it. Whoa.
Wow. Okay, so he is in their face. Well, you know, in the end there he says, you know, you're accusing me of disregarding the law, but you talk about it being given through angels and yet you don't keep it. But you don't keep it, yeah. Which is, they thought he was against the law and the false accusations, but he's telling them, the people who are supposedly pro the law, that they're not keeping it.
They're not keeping it. Not only that, from a deeper perspective as he starts off he says, you know, your hearts and your ears are uncircumcised. And, you know, that can be applied toward not only the law itself, like you're not hearing the whole thing. Jesus, I mean, Jesus himself said that. You know, you do the tiny things in the law quite well.
I mean, really well. But you've missed the big things. You've missed things like justice and faithfulness.
So he makes that point right here. You think you're keeping the law and that's, you know, that's the, what do you want to call it? It's kind of the deception of legalism.
You think you're on top of things. And Paul himself, Paul himself, you know, when he talked about himself in Philippians 3, he talked about his previous life as he was doing this, what they were doing. He called himself, I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. So they saw themselves as doing the law right. And what Stephen is saying here is that no, you're not doing the law. In fact, you've missed, you've missed the big thing about, you've missed the biggest thing about the law so much so that when the righteous one, God in the flesh incarnate, when the righteous one comes in your midst, you murdered him. That's how far off the mark you guys have come in all of this. And in fact, I'm in deep Ouija right now, he's saying, and I'm in the same shoes as the prophets in the past because your fathers, your fathers in the past in Israel, didn't they persecute the prophets just like you're persecuting me?
That's the point he's making. So if you see yourself as persecuting me and I'm bringing you truth, it's because your hearts and your ears are not circumcised, they're not circumcised, and so much so that you even missed a guest appearance of God himself in the flesh in Jesus. Well, you know, that set me in mind of the conversation Jesus had with the religious leaders in John 8.
Oh yeah. When famously he says in verse 31, if you abide in my word, then you're truly disciples of mine and you shall know the truth and the two shall make you free. But they were arguing with him and rejecting him. And he says to them, there's an interesting sequence here, he says in verse 37 of John 8, you seek to kill me because my word has no place in you. And then a few sentences later he says, you don't understand what I'm saying because you can't hear my word. And then down in verse 47, he who is of God hears the words of God. So I say to you, you can't hear them because you are not of God. So they don't have ears, they can't hear because the word doesn't take any residence in them. They don't understand what he's saying because they can't hear it, it doesn't penetrate the hardness of their ears. And essentially he says, you're not of God, you don't even have ears.
You just cannot hear. That's the uncircumcised ear, that's the obstinate, stiff necked, unmovable position that they're in in respect to God. Stephen is not saying anything Jesus had not already said to them and quite pointedly.
That's exactly right. And Jesus had also tied back the persecution about the prophets too. He's doing it right here as well. And clearly Stephen is being persecuted by these guys. And he draws it, as your fathers did, so do you. And you could even tie that back to our previous session where we talked about Moses. So you're acting exactly like everyone in your past that you do not respect and you're just replaying them all over again.
Even though they speak the very word of God to you. Yeah, right. You receive the law. You receive the law as delivered by angels. You got it.
You guys got it. And it's written down and you look at it, but you're not doing it. It's interesting, and I know that this Jewish thought of the law as delivered by angels was a well-established idea by this time. But wouldn't you rather have him say you received the law, the word of God, right? But it wasn't essentially the word of God, it was the thing to do. The presence of God had kind of drained out of it. It was just about what they could do.
Yeah, yeah. And you know, even when you step back, the bigger issues about sacrifice for sin bringing in the oxes and the goats and stuff like that, these ceremonies were meant to pick a bigger spiritual picture for you, for you to understand that your sin brings about the wrath of God and the wrath of God should bring about death, but something will die in your place. And they're missing that. They just said, you know, all I got to do is just sacrifice the goat this week and we'll be fine.
Oh, if you want, and listeners, if you want a little more insight on that, you just go read Isaiah 1 where God actually just takes them down, says, who commanded you all this trampling of my courts, bringing all your bloody sacrifices? I'm sick of it. I'm sick of it because your heart is not present. And that's what he's saying. The sacrifices without the heart are just a waste of time.
Just a waste of time. And that's where they are right here. That's where they are right here. Do they value the presence of God? No, they value the presence of the temple because they value being able to do sacrifices there and check off the list. Check off the boxes.
Yeah, check off the list. And so they don't value the presence of God at all. And so when God comes, they miss him.
They don't value his presence at all. So it's interesting here that Stephen, when he says, you know, which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute, they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and murdered. So he draws just this straight line from the prophets, the prophecies of the coming of the righteous one, to he came and you betrayed him and murdered him. Yeah, yeah.
And it's fascinating, too. He doesn't say that you persecuted the prophets who told you God's law or what God said. He says you persecuted the prophets who talked about the coming of the righteous one, Jesus. And so even in the telling of it, centuries through the prophets before Jesus shows up, that made them angry enough to kill the prophets. And now that he's come, you're angry enough and you killed him. I mean, you're just following in your father's footsteps just all over again.
And that is exactly what is going on here. You are reacting to God's righteous one in the same way that your father's persecuted the prophets who spoke of him then so long ago. You know, that's essentially the same thing Peter had said in his sermon back in chapter 2 and 3.
He says it a couple of times, right? He came by the predetermined will of God, but you killed him. But you killed him. Yeah. Yeah.
You have now betrayed and murdered him. There is just no mincing of words here. No, this is his in-your-face moment.
All of this is. And I think in all of this, they can tie back to that extended history of Israel he talked about. They can see the persecution of Moses. They can see Moses as a redeemer and a savior. They can see Joseph as the predetermined plan of God from the beginning of the universe to save the nation of Israel. But he's persecuted and he's done dirt to by his brothers. By his own family.
By the progenitors of the nation of Israel. Yeah, you know, John says that in the beginning of his gospel, doesn't he? He came to his own, but his own did not receive him.
His own did not receive him. Yeah. So the connections are really, really, I mean they are really clear. And the other thing that I wish Stephen had made more of a connection of was the fact that Jesus talks about the fact that the temple and Jesus' body, that's the temple. And we is now the new incarnated body, the distributed body. That's God's living place. So they made much too much of a big deal of the limestone building of the temple. God asked for it and he had it built. But it was meant to symbolize something much more important which is about where does God dwell. And Paul finally figured this out and put in his letters. He says God dwells in us. You are the living temple. You are the temple.
Yeah. So God's desire to live in our presence and in an intimate presence they had completely missed. They had just completely missed it. And on top of that they had the law and they never kept it.
It's amazing. They kept some minutia of it. They kept a surface of it. Without the heart. But they didn't have a heart.
They didn't have a heart to understand it. Yeah, I mean even in the sacrifices when you come around to Passover for instance, what an emotional event it must have been for the families at Passover. When they selected this young little lamb in their flock, perfect lamb, you inspected it. And the kids in your family fall in love with these little lambs and stuff like that. And then so brutally kill it.
And then use its blood to mark your house. I mean that had to have a profound impact on them. Not just because of the fact that they lost an animal in their flock, but because it seemed to be such a personal salvation that that lamb bought for you. I mean how can you not go to bed that night after Passover and say, you know, we have escaped the wrath of God because something else died on our behalf.
Something else took that wrath in our place. And that's the connection they are supposed to make if their hearts were soft, if their hearts were circumcised. They should continue to come back to that eternal truth. Right, continue to make a connection to the heart. Rather than just saying, oh wait kids, so we killed the lamb and everything's fine, and we can go on and just go back to life tomorrow.
No, you should be profoundly impacted by what that means. And they've missed all that. The hearts are just so hard they've missed all that. Well, you know, that makes me think about Isaiah, not Isaiah, about Micah 6.8 where he says, what does the Lord require of you, O Israel, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? Well, those are the things that the religious leaders of the time of Jesus were exactly not doing. Those were the heart of the law, to do what's right, to love chesed is the actual word, the loving kindness, the devotion of God, to love the way God loves, and to walk humbly with God.
But that had just given way completely to the arrogance of keeping the law. Right, right. And so these verses ending in 53 is where the Holy Spirit finally, you know, hooks his finger in their chest and says, you're the ones who failed. You're the ones and you're just like your fathers, the prophets, who killed the prophets. You know, one of the things we're told repeatedly about Stephen since he's first introduced is that he was full of the Holy Spirit.
Yes, yeah, yeah. So you know, when we pick up reading now, after he takes a breath, verse 54. And I want to say, I mean, it just dawned on me that he's standing in front of them and they think the issue is all about him. Whereas the Holy Spirit is going to say right here, no, the issue is you.
You are the issue, not Stephen. Now this verse 54, when they heard these things, they were enraged, you think, and ground their teeth at him. But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together at him.
Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. Should we stop there for a second? Yeah. Yeah.
They stopped their uncircumcised ears. Yeah. Isn't that funny?
We don't want to hear this. La, la, la, la, la, la, la. That's right. Yeah, yeah. They heard they were enraged just backing into that cut to the heart. I mean, you take a sword and you go deep with it. That's how enraged they are.
And then they ground their teeth at him. You know that that phrase is only used in the context of hell in the New Testament usages? Ooh, I didn't look that up. Yeah.
In fact, Jesus uses it seven times. Oh, the gnashing of teeth. The gnashing of teeth, yeah.
Yeah. So they've instantly entered one of the prime characteristics of hell. Oh, so angry and so frustrated. But they are so angry and rebellious against God and the Holy Spirit bringing profound conviction to them. And instead of agreeing with God and confessing their sin and doing what you're supposed to do when you find conviction, instead they resist it and now suddenly they find themselves in a violent, angry position of those who are in hell.
Wow, wow. But then he says, full of the Holy Spirit. He gazes into heaven, sees the glory of God. We don't know what that means, but basically the glory is the full revealing of who God is. Well, we've talked about Stephen's face shining earlier with the reflected glory of God like Moses.
So that was two or three weeks ago we talked about that. So perhaps that's it. He sees the glory of God and they see the glory reflected on his face. And Jesus standing at the right hand of God, oh, what do you make of that? And look at Stephen's words. I see it. I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.
Well that's more than they can tolerate. That sounds exactly like Daniel. It does, yeah. It really does. And there's a subtle distinction here because every time the Son of Man is on the right hand of God, he's sitting, he's not standing. And so this is really a posture of respect. So as Stephen is on the brink of dying, in a way Jesus stands up from that throne and respects what Stephen's doing. It's just, it's a marvelous picture.
It's a marvelous picture. And then they rush together at him. That's the same word that's used of the pigs that the demons are allowed to go into.
When they rush down, it's just a violent rushing out. And then they stone him. And then he goes on and he says in the stoning process, the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.
Oh really? Saul who would be renamed Paul in several chapters from here, but Saul. Saul is there. And you know it turns out that Saul's just not a passive participant here because later on he recounts this entire scene. And I looked it up in Acts, in Acts 26, and he says, I not only locked up many of the saints in prison after receiving authority from the chief priests, but, but when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them and I punished them often in the synagogues and I tried to make them blaspheme and in a raging fury against them, I persecuted them even to foreign cities. Well, we know he was chasing them to a foreign city when he was encountered by Jesus.
That's a foreign city. I'm going to leave town and find him someplace else. So there's Saul, prefigured for us. But he was a man in the prime of his life. That young doesn't mean he's a child.
It means he's a young, incapable participant in this. And he voted for all this to happen. He was part of it.
He was part of it. And as they stoned Stephen, as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And then falling to his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against him.
And when he had said this, he fell asleep. You know what, that's just like Jesus. Just like Jesus. He says, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.
Well, the Lord Jesus said, Father, I give you my spirit. Yeah. And he also said, forgive him for they don't know what they're doing. They don't know the magnitude of what's going on here.
So you almost wonder if eyeball to eyeball with Jesus, Stephen is looking into heaven and seeing the face of Jesus. He has nothing else he can say. Right. Right. I'm just Lord Jesus. Here I come.
And don't hold this against them. Yep. Yep.
So it's amazing. Well, let's read this introduction to chapter eight, and then we'll call it quick. Okay. What do you say? Okay.
Let me I'll read it for us. So chapter eight, verse one, and there rose on that day, the stoning of Stephen, a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. And they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles, and devout men buried Stephen made great lamentation over him. But Saul, Saul was ravaging the church and entering house after house. He dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. But this is the fulfillment of what Jesus said in Acts 1.8. You're going to be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea and in Samaria. So you see this as an integral part of God sort of breaking up the cluster of Jews that became followers of Jesus who were stuck in Jerusalem and said, you need to go in outer regions and here they are going to Judea and Samaria.
And he does it by means of persecution. And the death of Stephen. The death of Stephen. Could the death of Stephen have a purpose?
Well, here's one of them. Well, it absolutely did. Yeah, it absolutely did.
And it was it was instrumental in God's hands in terms of getting the word out about who Jesus is, and why people would actually die for him. Yeah. Yeah.
Isn't it interesting too that it says in verse two that devout men buried Stephen, just like the rich men, rich believers buried Jesus. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. And I might add too that when it says they were scattered through the region, there's actually there's two verbs in Greek about scattering. One means like to make it go away, like you scatter ashes and you make them go away. But there's another scatter that's used to scatter seeds.
And so they that's the latter one that's used here. They're scattered like seeds into a larger area. Like God was sowing them.
Yeah. And I'm sure part of their story as they told the gospel, they told about Jesus, who's the promised Messiah, this this one who's going to be a prophet like Moses, as they told that story, they could also tell the story and they could talk about Stephen himself, who they just saw stone and they said, in fact, Stephen, like us is one who believes so strongly, he even lays down his life in order to make this gospel go out. So, so that was a seed that was very fertile throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria. And later on through this, this evil guy, Saul, he will actually be scattered across the world as he tells the same story. And he too can tell the story of Stephen because he saw it happen. But he was on the wrong side of it.
Yeah. Well, next time we're going to switch gears a little bit here after we just barely tickled the idea of Saul. We're not going to follow him immediately.
We're going to follow another guy for the short term. And this other guy is not an apostle. His name is Philip. There is an apostle Philip, but Philip does an amazing thing expressly through the region of Samaria, which he talks about Judea and Samaria. And we're going to follow Philip as he goes through that area through the region that they had despised because the Samaritans were kind of half breed Jews, half breed foreigners, people who even at the separation of the kingdom after David didn't use the temple. I mean, they were, they were despised. But the Samaritans were already somewhat prepared from the ministry of Jesus.
Yeah, exactly. The woman at the well and all of those believers who had come because of our testimony. And that groundwork has been laid. And next time when we follow Philip, we'll see it come to fruitfulness. So I'm Jim and I'm Dorothy, and we hope you join us next time as we continue to watch the gospel and the scattering of seeds go to the most unlikely place, Samaria, here on More Than Ink. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, morethanink.org. And while you're there, take a moment to drop us a note. Remember, the Bible is God's love letter to you. Pick it up and read it for yourself, and you will discover that the words printed there are indeed more than ink. Okay, I know exactly what I'm going to say, so go ahead and start. This has been a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City.
