Acts 7:1-53--Stephen's Speech

Acts 7:1-53
English Standard Version

Stephen's Speech
7 And the high priest said, “Are these things so?” 2 And Stephen said:

“Brothers and fathers, hear me. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, 3 and said to him, ‘Go out from your land and from your kindred and go into the land that I will show you.’ 4 Then he went out from the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran. And after his father died, God removed him from there into this land in which you are now living. 5 Yet he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot's length, but promised to give it to him as a possession and to his offspring after him, though he had no child. 6 And God spoke to this effect—that his offspring would be sojourners in a land belonging to others, who would enslave them and afflict them four hundred years. 7 ‘But I will judge the nation that they serve,’ said God, ‘and after that they shall come out and worship me in this place.’ 8 And he gave him the covenant of circumcision. And so Abraham became the father of Isaac, and circumcised him on the eighth day, and Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob of the twelve patriarchs.

9 “And the patriarchs, jealous of Joseph, sold him into Egypt; but God was with him 10 and rescued him out of all his afflictions and gave him favor and wisdom before Pharaoh, king of Egypt, who made him ruler over Egypt and over all his household. 11 Now there came a famine throughout all Egypt and Canaan, and great affliction, and our fathers could find no food. 12 But when Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, he sent out our fathers on their first visit. 13 And on the second visit Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and Joseph's family became known to Pharaoh. 14 And Joseph sent and summoned Jacob his father and all his kindred, seventy-five persons in all. 15 And Jacob went down into Egypt, and he died, he and our fathers, 16 and they were carried back to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham had bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.

17 “But as the time of the promise drew near, which God had granted to Abraham, the people increased and multiplied in Egypt 18 until there arose over Egypt another king who did not know Joseph. 19 He dealt shrewdly with our race and forced our fathers to expose their infants, so that they would not be kept alive. 20 At this time Moses was born; and he was beautiful in God's sight. And he was brought up for three months in his father's house, 21 and when he was exposed, Pharaoh's daughter adopted him and brought him up as her own son. 22 And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds.

23 “When he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brothers, the children of Israel. 24 And seeing one of them being wronged, he defended the oppressed man and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian. 25 He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand, but they did not understand. 26 And on the following day he appeared to them as they were quarreling and tried to reconcile them, saying, ‘Men, you are brothers. Why do you wrong each other?’ 27 But the man who was wronging his neighbor thrust him aside, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? 28 Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ 29 At this retort Moses fled and became an exile in the land of Midian, where he became the father of two sons.

30 “Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush. 31 When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight, and as he drew near to look, there came the voice of the Lord: 32 ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.’ And Moses trembled and did not dare to look. 33 Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. 34 I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their groaning, and I have come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send you to Egypt.’

35 “This Moses, whom they rejected, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’—this man God sent as both ruler and redeemer by the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush. 36 This man led them out, performing wonders and signs in Egypt and at the Red Sea and in the wilderness for forty years. 37 This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers.’ 38 This is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our fathers. He received living oracles to give to us. 39 Our fathers refused to obey him, but thrust him aside, and in their hearts they turned to Egypt, 40 saying to Aaron, ‘Make for us gods who will go before us. As for this Moses who led us out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ 41 And they made a calf in those days, and offered a sacrifice to the idol and were rejoicing in the works of their hands. 42 But God turned away and gave them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets:

“‘Did you bring to me slain beasts and sacrifices,
    during the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?
43 You took up the tent of Moloch
    and the star of your god Rephan,
    the images that you made to worship;
and I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.’

44 “Our fathers had the tent of witness in the wilderness, just as he who spoke to Moses directed him to make it, according to the pattern that he had seen. 45 Our fathers in turn brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations that God drove out before our fathers. So it was until the days of David, 46 who found favor in the sight of God and asked to find a dwelling place for the God of Jacob. 47 But it was Solomon who built a house for him. 48 Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands, as the prophet says,

49 “‘Heaven is my throne,
    and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord,
    or what is the place of my rest?
50 Did not my hand make all these things?’

​51 “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. 52 Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, 53 you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.”

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This is long passage, but it's one of the great summaries of the history of the gospel from Abraham (in the book of Genesis) to Jesus in the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).  If you are not familiar with the Old Testament history that Stephen will be citing here, there are resources that are available to you in our Discord community.  Joining is free and the resources are made available at no cost to you by the generosity of others. 

First Stephen starts with when Abram was called and given the promise of a land and a people while he lived in Mesopotamia (first in Ur of the Chaldeans and then the land of Haran).  After Abram's father died, he left for the land that God had promised to him, the land in which the Jews currently lived, but not in his entire life did Abraham actually receive any of the land as an inheritance.  He only bought a small cave from the locals to use for a burial site for his wife (and that would later be used to bury him and others from his family).

The promise of a child was a bit more complicated as he tried to make the promise come true on his own, but the child, Ishmael, that he had through relations with Hagar, his wife Sarah's servant, was not the Child of Promise.  No, God would miraculously provide Isaac to Abraham and Sarah when Abraham was 100 years old and Sarah was 90 years old.  Yet God promised that Abraham would be the father of so many people that they would uncountable like the grains of sand, the stars in the heavens, or the dust of the earth.  They would be sojourners in the land, living in tents just like he was doing, for a while, but then one day they would go out of land for four-hundred years and would be taken into captivity by another nation, but all of this would be according to God's plan that He wanted to isolate His people from the wickedness of the Canaanites and when the wrath that was being stored up against the Canaanites was full, God would use His people to execute judgment on the who had been cursed since shortly after the Flood because of their wickedness and rebellion.

At this time that the promise was given to Abraham, circumcision was given as the sign of the covenant, that is the Abrahamic Covenant.  Circumcision came before Moses and the Law, and it was a sign that God was going to be faithful to keep the covenant with His people (people that believed by faith. like Abraham did).  It was something that was to remind all those who belonged to Abraham's lineage that they belonged to the LORD and they were supposed to live differently than the rest of the world because of this covenant they had received.  Abraham becomes the father of Isaac who becomes the father of Jacob, who becomes the father of twelve sons who are the head of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

At this point the Jews that have made a charge against Stephen for speaking against God and the Law are looking like fools because the Spirit is enabling Stephen to tell this history as well or better than any of the men gathered there probably could.  They like what they have heard so far about Abraham and the promise of blessing that they assume belongs to them because they are Abraham's physical descendants and the promise of the Land which they currently live in and the sign of the Abrahamic covenant that is circumcision which they usually attribute to Moses as being part of the Law, but most Jews would understand that circumcision came to them by God through Abraham first and that when the Jews say that they are "children of Abraham" they mean to say that they are claiming to inherit these things promised to Abraham and his offspring because they are saying they are one of those offspring, so those promises belong to them too.

This next part probably won't ruffle and feathers either as Stephen is going to talk about their time of sojourning and slavery in Egypt  However, Stephen and the Holy Spirit have a point of starting this part of the story saying that Joseph's brothers were jealous of him and desired to kill him and take his blessing and inheritance for themselves because that's basically what the Jews had done to Jesus (Jesus even says as much in His parable of the wicked vineyard tenants).  Yet God took what these brothers meant for evil and used it for good, not just for the good of Israel, but for the good of the whole world (this is foreshadowing that the gospel was meant to bless the whole world and they would have also known the Abrahamic covenant that said, "through you, all the nations of the world will be blessed.").  Stephen is setting up the argument that sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with the Gentiles and bringing them into a common faith with Abraham was not contrary to God's plan, but has been His plan from the very beginning.  The whole story of Joseph is very interesting and can be found in the last thirteen chapters of Genesis (from chapter 37 through chapter 50).  All of it gets summed up in just a few short verses here to say that despite his brothers trying to kill him, God used Joseph in Egypt to provide food for them during the famine and then he invited them to come down to Egypt so that he could take care of them for a time.  They lived in the land of Goshen, a land that was fertile and good for them and and their animals in the Nile River Delta. They would start off as just a family of seventy-five persons but when they would leave Egypt (the next part of the story that Stephen will tell), they were numbered in the millions.  Even in the midst of the slavery and persecution that they faced while in Egypt, God preserved His promise to Abraham and His descendants to make them into a great nation.  It is in fact because of the size this family of sojourners that Egypt's new Pharaoh feared them once Joseph and the Pharaoh that he had served died.  A time came when no one knew of Joseph any longer and that is when God's people were seen as a threat that needed to be dealt with by turning them into a slave-laborers.  Pharaoh also wanted to handle this "threat" by executing all the male babies that were being born to the Jews (for Satan had figured out at this point that the one promised in Genesis 3 that would crush his head, "the seed of the woman," would have to be a male child that was a descendant of one of the Twelve Tribes, though it does not appear that Satan yet had any idea which of the Twelve Tribes the Messiah would come from, so he is trying to eliminate all of them).  In the midst of all this, God preserved one male baby, Moses by his mother placing him in an ark made of reeds and waterproofed with pitch and floating him down the Nile where Pharaoh's daughter took Moses out of the water and adopted him as her own.  Stephen doesn't really tell how Moses gets from this river as an infant to the desert of Midian when he was forty years old, but that can be found in Exodus 1-3, if you are interested.

The next mile marker on Stephen's story is when The LORD appeared to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, that is the land of Midian, when he was forty years old, revealing His covenant name to Moses and His people that they had long forgotten--I AM (we also translate this as "The LORD" in many places in the Old Testament).  God told Moses, "I AM the God of your fathers.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."  Jesus would point to this statement to say that this meant that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were still alive (in Paradise) and that God is the God of the living, not the God of the dead.  He would send Moses back to Egypt to give Pharaoh the message, "Let My people go!"  God said that He was sending Moses to give this message to Pharaoh and His people because He had heard their cries and had seen their agony, and He was going to do something about it.  It has been nearly four-hundred years now--the amount of time that The LORD told Abraham that his descendants would live outside the Land before He brought them back, and now God is going to make good on His word (as he always does).

He sends Moses and his brother Aaron with great power and authority accompanied by signs and wonders and even plagues that validated their message both to the Jews and to the Gentiles.  God was in control and the gods of the Egyptians were not.  The Egyptian empire which was the dominant world force at that time was nothing compared to the power of God and even though Pharaoh imagined himself to be God's equal, in the end, it was all the firstborn male children of Egypt and all their men of fighting age from their army who were killed first in the tenth plague and then in the Red Sea.  The same events that brought judgment to Egypt brought deliverance and redemption to Israel.  So far, so good probably with Stephen's account of the story, but we'll see their demeanors change really quickly here as Stephen retells the history of their wanderings in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan and how they refused to go into the Land and wanted to go back to Egypt and God refused to let that wicked and rebellious generation enter the Land.  Instead they all died off wandering in the wilderness for forty years so that only Joshua and Caleb survived (the two that believed that The LORD could and would provide the victory even in the face of "impossible" odds, because He was going to do everything that He had promised).

Stephen tells of of Moses receiving the Law, the people breaking the Law by immediately making an idol to worship and engaging in all kinds of "play" associated with pagan idolatry, and doing all this while saying they were worshiping The LORD.  The LORD was angry and many died that day.  That is when the Levites, the family that Moses belonged to, stepped up to protect the holiness of God and to cut off from the people and the Land all those who were living in open rebellion to The LORD.  The Levites will be a holy priesthood, but they will also be warriors for the LORD, much like we are told to be.  And the LORD gave them over to their worship of idolatry--it was something they would struggle with throughout the entire Old Testament and while the Pharisees imagined that they had kept the people from engaging in this anymore, they were still making a false version of God that they worshiped and saying they were worshiping the LORD when they were instead worshiping themselves and their customs.  Their sin today was the same as the sin of their forefathers.  It is becoming more and more obvious to the listeners that this story is not going where they want it to and that Stephen is likely going to compare this current generation to that generation that was so wicked and rebellious that the LORD said of them, "They shall never enter my rest."

Stephen then quickly moved form the Tabernacle to David and then to Solomon building the Temple in Jerusalem (remember that this is another charge that was brought against Stephen as they claimed he said that the Temple was going to be destroyed and then rebuilt in three days).  Stephen reminds them that everything used in the Tabernacle and the Temple that are holy are so because they reflections of a heavenly Temple that they are copied after.  The copy is pointing to something greater that is the original.  The Most High God is not like the pagan gods that they claimed lived in temples built by the hands of men.  No, not even the whole universe could contain the glory of God for the heavens are His throne and the Earth is His footstool.  God's presence fills all of His creation, and nothing they built would be large enough to contain Him.  Yet, He chose to dwell among His people and to let His presence rest in the Tabernacle and the Temple for a time, but in these most recent days, God's presence dwelt among men in the person of Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with Us, and now He dwells among His people through the Holy Spirit indwelling them.  No longer is circumcision the sign of the covenant, but the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and believer's baptism are the signs of the New Covenant.  We now celebrate a different kind of Passover where where have been freed not from slavery to the land of Egypt, but freed from slavery to sin, flesh, and the devil.   We have been born again and made  a chosen people of the LORD--His treasured possession.  A holy priesthood who will show and tell His gospel message to the whole world.  But Stephen is not done.

What should have been the height of rejoicing in this story, the culmination of all that we have waited for, the coming of the Messiah, is what angers these Jews the most.  For it is at this time that Stephen identifies Jesus as their Messiah, Savior, and Redeemer, and the one that they killed out of jealousy.  They are still the stubborn, stiff-necked, rebellious people like their forefathers, and unless they repent and are born again, they will never enter into God's rest (that is the new heavens and the new earth that we read about in the end of the book of Revelation--a place which many of us call heaven).  Stephen says that they killed Jesus just like they did all the patriarchs and prophets before Him and that they have always opposed the Holy Spirit and the gospel message that He has been trying to bring to His people and to the whole world.  They murdered the Righteous One, the very Son of God, and they instead put their hope in the Law that they never did keep and never could keep.

Nothing Stephen said here is wrong, but they are upset that they are now the ones put on trial when they thought that they were bringing Stephen to trial.  They are going to get angry and begin the process of stoning Stephen, but Stephen will still have some time to pray for them before he dies and it is his murder and this prayer that he prays for his enemies that we'll talk about next time.