Transcription
The reading for tonight is a little long, but I'm afraid I've got to take it all as one reading because it's one story: Acts chapter 7. The scene is the courtroom in the middle of Jerusalem. There's a man in the dock with the face of an angel, a man called Stephen, and he's been charged with blaspheming against the two most important things in the Jewish religion: the temple and the law. All their faith was built on these two things, and Stephen is on a charge of blaspheming against them. The high priest said, "Is this so?" And Stephen said, "Brethren and fathers, hear me: The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him, 'Depart from your land and from your kindred and go into the land which I will show you.' Then he departed from the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran. After his father died, God removed him from there into this land in which you are now living. Yet he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot's length, but promised to give it to him in possession and to his posterity after him, though he had no child.
And God spoke to this effect, that his posterity would be aliens in a land belonging to others who would enslave them and ill-treat them 400 years. But I will judge the nation they serve, said God, and after that, they shall come out and worship me in this place. And he gave him the covenant of circumcision, and so Abraham became the father of Isaac and circumcised him on the eighth day. Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob of the twelve patriarchs. The patriarchs, jealous of Joseph, sold him into Egypt, but God was with him and rescued him out of all his afflictions and gave him favor and wisdom before Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and over all his household.
Now there came a famine throughout all Egypt and Canaan and great affliction, and our fathers could find no food. But when Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, he sent forth our fathers the first time. At the second visit, Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and Joseph's family became known to Pharaoh. Joseph sent and called to him Jacob, his father, and all his kindred, seventy-five souls. Jacob went down into Egypt, and he died himself and our fathers, 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.
That is the time of the promise drew near, which God had granted to Abraham. The people grew and multiplied in Egypt till there arose over Egypt another king who had not known Joseph. He dealt craftily with our race and forced our fathers to expose their infants that they might not be kept alive. At this time, Moses was born and was beautiful before God, and he was brought up for three months in his father's house. When he was exposed, Pharaoh's daughter adopted him and brought him up as her own son. Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds.
When he was 40 years old, it came into his heart to visit his brethren, the sons of Israel. Seeing one of them being wronged, he defended the oppressed man and avenged him by striking the Egyptian. He supposed that his brethren understood that God was giving them deliverance by his hand, but they did not understand. On the following day, he appeared to them as they were quarreling and would have reconciled them, saying, "Men, you are brethren; why do you wrong each other?" But the man who was wronging his neighbor thrust him aside, saying, "Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?" At this retort, Moses fled and became an exile in the land of Midian, where he became the father of two sons.
Now when 40 years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai in a flame of fire in a bush. When Moses saw it, he wondered at the sight, and as he drew near to look, the voice of the Lord came, "I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob." Moses trembled and did not dare to look. The Lord said to him, "Take off the shoes from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have surely seen the ill treatment of my people that are in Egypt and heard their groaning, and I have come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send you to Egypt."
This Moses whom they refused, saying, "Who made you a ruler and a judge?" God sent as both ruler and deliverer by the hand of the angel that appeared to him in the bush. He led them out, having performed wonders and signs in Egypt, under the Red Sea, and in the wilderness for 40 years. This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, "God will raise up for you a prophet from your brethren as he raised me." This is he who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai and with our fathers, and he received living oracles to give to us. Our fathers refused to obey him but thrust him aside, and in their hearts, they turned to Egypt, saying to Aaron, "Make for us gods to 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."
They made a calf in those days and offered a sacrifice to the idol and rejoiced in the works of their hands. But God turned and gave them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: "Did you offer to me slain beasts and sacrifices 40 years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? And you took up the tent of Moloch and the star of the god Rephan, the figures which you made to worship, and I will remove you beyond Babylon."
Our fathers had the tent of witness in the wilderness, even as he who spoke to Moses directed him to make it according to the pattern that he had seen. Our fathers in turn brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations which God thrust out before our fathers. So it was until the days of David, who found favor in the sight of God and asked leave to find a habitation for the God of Jacob. But it was Solomon who built a house for him. Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made with hands, as the prophet says: "Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool. What house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?"
You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit, as your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the laws delivered by angels and did not keep it.
Now when they heard these things, they were enraged, and they ground their teeth against 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. 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 upon him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him, and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. As they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." He knelt down and cried with a loud voice, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." When he had said this, he fell asleep.
Saul was consenting to his death, and on that day a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him, but Saul laid waste the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.
We'll study that passage later. There is one moment I'll never forget as long as I live. It was in West Berlin, quite near the dreadful wall which separates relatives from relatives. I was invited to shake hands with the man I knew to be a murderer, and I remember taking his right hand in mine and thinking that was the hand that murdered some young men who tried to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ into a place where it had never been heard of. For the man I was shaking hands with was an Alka Indian, and he was the man who killed the pilots who went into that jungle area in Ecuador seeking to reach those men with the gospel, who in 1952 paid for that venture with their lives.
Now I shook the hands of this man, and I remembered, as I looked into the face which was now like the face of an angel, that there has not been a period of 10 years since Jesus died when there have not been Christian martyrs, from the records that we have, to say nothing of the hundreds of whom we've never heard. There is a continual line from the year nothing right to the year 1969 of men and women who've died for Jesus Christ. Only two days ago, I was not far from here, looking at a memorial tablet on which were written the names of some 25, I suppose, missionaries and their wives and children who were slaughtered in the Congo within just a year or so.
And we now study tonight the story of the very first martyr, the man who first paid for his faith with his own blood. I don't know if you've ever wondered what you would be like if suddenly in England we woke up one morning to find that being a Christian was a criminal offense and was punished with capital punishment. I've often wondered, would I have grace to be a martyr, or would I run? And I'll never forget discussing this with a dear Christian man, and he said something to me which I thought was very wise. He said, "David, you can only be faithful in such circumstances if you have been faithful in the lesser trials that you've had already."
In other words, if in the little irritations and the social embarrassments and the lesser persecutions—which we do have in this country; a man can lose his job for being a Christian in this country—I know that in these lesser things, if we have trusted Christ for grace to be firm and straight and true to Christ, then when the big push came, when the big crisis came, the same Lord who gave us the grace in the lesser crisis would give us the greater grace. That was a very wise word because it stopped me thinking, "Could I be a martyr?" and started me thinking, "Could he help me to be one?"
Now, if in my lifetime I will ever have to face such a decision, but if I do, I think I'll go straight back to the story of Stephen, a young man knowing that if he said what he ought to say at this moment, he would sign his own death warrant. At last, the authorities had a Christian on definite charges, and the charges were blasphemy against the temple and the law, and these were the two pillars of the Jewish religion. The high priest, who was also the main judge, said, "Stephen, is this so? Are you attacking the two main pillars of our religion?"
Now the next bit is a bit surprising. It seems almost like a lecture from an Old Testament tutor. It seems irrelevant to the question. Stephen asked for a hearing and then began on a kind of balloon trip through Old Testament history, and it seems a bit boring. It seems a bit dull, and it certainly seems an extraordinary speech to make when you're on trial for your life. Why did he go back to the earliest days of the Jewish faith and give them a resume of the vital chunk of their history from Abraham to Solomon? At first sight, it looks as if he's playing for time. At first sight, it looks as if he's just saying things they know already.
But when you begin to read this chapter again and again and again—and you've got to do that with every chapter if you're going to understand it—you begin to see what he's getting at. You begin to see that this was the most brilliant speech ever made. You begin to see that what was said of Stephen in chapter 6, that he spoke with such wisdom that nobody could withstand it, you begin to see that the same thing happened here, and he managed to speak for about 20 minutes, perhaps, before they shut their ears and refused to listen to any more. They must have wondered what he was getting at, and then as they listened, the message began to get through.
He was accusing them and putting them in the dark, just as Peter had done a few months before. He didn't try to defend himself; he didn't try to defend Christianity. He said, "I attack your understanding of your religion. I said, 'I'm a Jew. I know the Bible. I know your religion, and I accuse you of twisting it.'" I accuse you of doing two things, and the first thing I accuse you of doing is restricting God's dwelling. You've got God locked up in your nice little temple. You've got God just where you want him in that lovely building, but God's bigger than that.
He made two points, and the first point he was making was this: almost every time God spoke to one of our Jewish forefathers, he spoke outside the Holy Land, never mind the temple. You think you've got God in this stone box here. Where did he speak to Abraham? Mesopotamia, Ur of the Chaldeans. Where did he speak to all the others? He spoke to them in Egypt. He spoke to Moses in Sinai, in Midian. He spoke to the Jews in the wilderness, and you think you've got God locked up here. You've got God in his little dwelling place, and you say, "This is where God lives." I tell you that God is bigger than your ideas. You're restricting God's dwelling.
God spoke in many countries before this ever became the Holy Land. Indeed, Stephen goes on: everywhere God speaks is holy ground. "Put off your shoes, Moses," in the Sinai Peninsula. "It's holy ground." You see, you can't limit God. The little girl who said her prayers the night before going on holiday and said, "Well, goodbye, Lord, we're off to Blackpool tomorrow morning," was making the fundamental mistake that so many people make, that God is just locked up here, that God just lives here. Never call a building like this the house of God; you'll get mistaken ideas if you do.
A lady said to me, "I can't pray unless I can get inside a church." Oh, I wonder if she was praying when she did get inside, if it was as dependent on that as on a place. But God is bigger. You can't lock God in a building and call it the house of God; that's where he lives. We've got him all nicely parceled up. God is everywhere, and when we begin to realize that, it affects our daily life. If you keep God in the temple, you can do all sorts of things outside the temple, and he doesn't notice.
There's a little boy I know—he's not here, but his parents may be; they'll forgive me for repeating this—but a little boy this week pulled a nettle up and stung one of his friends with it and told his mother proudly that when he did it, Jesus wasn't looking. You see, he'd got this idea as well, and Stephen is saying to the Jews, "You've got this idea. You've got God inside that temple of yours. Of course, I attack your temple if that's what you think about it. God is everywhere. God was in Mesopotamia with Abraham. God was in Egypt with Joseph. God was in Sinai with Moses. Everywhere is holy ground. It's God's world, and God's bigger than the world. Get big ideas," he's saying. "You've got far too small an idea."
Now that's the first accusation he made about them. He said all the formative ideas that you hold, all the heart of your religion, was given to men outside this Holy Land and certainly before ever you had a temple. The second thing he says to make this point is this: that God preferred to live in a tent than in a temple. Why? Because he was a God who was on the move, because he was a God who was a mobile God, a God who got up and walked in front of the people. "Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land," the Jews might have sung that in the wilderness if someone had written it for them.
Then they certainly believed it. God was on the move, and God's symbol, the symbol of the meeting place between God and man—not the house of God, but the meeting place—was a tent, tabernacle in Bible language, a pre-fabricated portable building that could be taken down and moved on because God moved on, and the building had to catch up with him. God was on the move, and so Stephen says they had a tent for God, a tabernacle. God didn't ask for the temple; he wanted a tent. David sought a habitation for him, but Solomon built a house. Notice the "but" Stephen uses; every word he uses carefully.
"But Solomon built him a house." Got him nicely settled down in the suburbs of Jerusalem. We'd now got a God in a bungalow. He was God down to earth, where you could manage him. But Solomon built him a house, and the prophet had to come to Solomon, and Stephen quotes him. The prophet had to say, "Heaven is my throne and earth my footstool. What house will you build for me? I made all these things. You can't lock me up."
Another child's story which illustrates it: a little child in the school said to a teacher, "Is God everywhere?" "Yes," said the teacher. "Is he in that inkwell?" said the boy. And the teacher said, "Yes, I suppose he is." "Got him!" said the little boy. But you know, that may sound childish to you, but whenever man constructs his own religion and puts up his own holy buildings, he's trying to say, "I've got him. I've got God where I want him."
Where is really the secret of true religion? It is to get to the point where you say, "God has got me where he wants me." You'll never imprison God in a building. You'll never be able to put up a house of God and say, "Now that's where he is." God is too big for this. You can explore space in your rockets; you can go out thousands of miles. You've hardly begun to explore God. Those three lunar knots are in the hand of God; they'll never get beyond it because the whole universe God made and beholds it in his hands.
I know it's difficult to imagine that; it's just as difficult to imagine some of the things they're talking about for space travel in 1980. But we can stretch our imagination for God as well as for men, and we can magnify the Lord. Well, now this is the first charge that Stephen makes in such a subtle and clever way that they didn't realize what he was saying until he got towards the end. He's saying, "You're restricting God's dwelling, you and your temple. You think you've got God there; you've nothing of the sort. He's much bigger than that, much bigger."
Now the second thing he accuses them of is, he says, "You think you've got the law of Moses. May I tell you that you don't keep it? May I tell you that from the very first day that Moses gave the law, you and your fathers have refused to obey him?" From the very beginning, they wanted a golden calf. They wanted something they could see in their worship. They wanted an image and idol, and they got sick of Moses staying up the mountain with God and said to Aaron, "Build us a golden calf." They brought their earrings and their rings and all the gold they could to make this golden calf. That's what they did, said Stephen.
And you know what they were doing in the wilderness, said Stephen? They were worshiping the stars. People still do that. They rush to the back of the newspaper to look up their horoscope, and they say, "The stars, the stars, they will guide my life. They will tell me what it's all about. They will tell me what to expect this week." There's hardly a popular newspaper or magazine in Britain that would dare to publish without a horoscope. In 20th-century scientific Britain, we worship the stars.
Was it Shakespeare who put into the words of one of his characters, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars; it is in ourselves"? You can't blame the stars for what you did last week. And as men explore the stars, there is a temptation to start thinking more about the planets than about God. Isn't it interesting that we are calling our spaceships and our rockets after all the pagan gods of old? "Set an Apollo." Why do we have to go back to Greek mythology and pagan religion for the names for Christian civilization's progress? It seems a strange contradiction.
And so Stephen says they worship the stars, and when the prophets came to tell them the right way, to call them back to the law, they stoned the prophets; they killed them. Now you can see where all this is heading. Stephen says, "You claim to have the law; you claim to be true Jews. Then why is it that you betrayed and murdered the greatest prophet of them all, predicted by Moses, the holy and righteous one, even Jesus? You always resist the Holy Spirit." That's the most serious thing a man can ever do.
Jesus said men will be forgiven for what they've said about me, and I've heard men even during this week swearing and cursing and using the name of my dearest friend, Jesus Christ, as a swear word. Jesus said men can be forgiven for what they say against me, but the man who blasphemes against the Holy Ghost cannot be forgiven. Why? Because there's no one left to help him. If he resists and blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, and Stephen said, "That's what you're doing. You're going to kill me because you killed him. You're resisting the truth. You're against me because you, like all your forefathers, may have had the law of Moses; they didn't keep it. They may have had prophets from God; they killed them. They may have had the temple, but they locked God up in it, and God is too big for that."
And that was about as far as Stephen got. He accused them of persistent willfulness against the will of God and of pagan worship all through their history, and they were so angry they didn't even bother this time to go and get Pontius Pilate's signature. After all, he'd gone back to Caesarea, and he might never hear about it if they got on with it quickly. No appeal, no trial. There is an extraordinary parallel between Stephen's trial and the trial of Jesus. There was no counsel for the defense. The judges were probably led by Caiaphas, the same high priest who condemned Jesus. The false charge was blasphemy against the temple, the same charge as Jesus.
The counter charge they had rejected, the prophets, came from Jesus and Stephen, and Stephen said something almost identical with Jesus at this point. They were so angry that the contrast between their contorted faces and their blazing eyes and the face of an angel in the dock looking up to heaven, and he said, "I can see something." Wait, he said, "I can see," and beyond all the angry faces of the judges, he could see Jesus. He said, "I can see the Son of Man at the right hand of God in glory." Jesus at his trial had said, "You will see the Son of Man coming in clouds of glory," and now Stephen echoes his words and says, "I can see."
And they were now so angry that they closed their ears; they wouldn't listen to another word, and they rushed on him. What a scene this was! A lynching. It wasn't an execution; it was a lynching. How utterly foolish men are to think that they can kill the truth by killing those who hold it. How foolish men are who think they can blot out an idea by obliterating those who believe it. And they rushed on this man, and they lynched him. I don't think you'd like to see a stoning. They would take a man to a hillside; they would throw him down, and then they would drop boulders on him until he died a horrible death, a very painful one.
They threw him over, and they started dropping the boulders, but he wasn't finished yet. He prayed. Do you remember when Jesus was dying? He prayed, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." Stephen, like his Lord, said, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." They're going to kill my body; they can do what they like with my body, but my spirit is safe. "Lord Jesus, catch hold of my spirit; receive my spirit." It's a moving moment, and it would have been a fitting climax to this young man's saintly life, but it wasn't the climax. There was something even more wonderful that showed how Christ-like he was. He prayed, "Lord Jesus, do not hold this sin against them."
I remember visiting Kenya and going into the Kikuyu territory and going to visit some of the Kikuyu Christians, and I was told about a prayer meeting in an African church one day when a few faithful Kikuyu Christians were meeting in the chapel and praying in a little mud-walled chapel in Kenya. The doors burst open, and in came the Mau Mau terrorists, brandishing their pangas and shouting, "Stop praying or we'll kill you!" The African pastor at the front went on praying, and one of the terrorists came up and, with a terrible blow, severed one of his arms. The man sank, dying to the ground, but as he sank dying, he prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
And you know, within minutes, those Mau Mau terrorists were on their knees begging for mercy—not from the pastor; he was dead—not from the Christians, but from Christ because they'd met Christ in that simple African pastor. I met some of those Mau Mau terrorists with the scars of their fighting still on their face, but they had the faces of angels, and they were preachers and Sunday school teachers. Now Stephen, as he died, said, "Lord, don't write this in the book against them. I wouldn't like in the great day of judgment to feel that they were being condemned because of what they did to me." It's an amazing prayer.
So he died, and though it was absolutely forbidden to bury a man who was stoned, devout Jews came, just like Joseph of Arimathea, came and begged for the body and buried him with great lamentation, and the funeral was held. Now there was a young man watching everything that went on, a young theological student, a student of Gamaliel. Where was Gamaliel in all this, that tolerant man? We don't hear a word from him now, but this young man called Saul, he was holding the jackets of those who said, "Here, hold my jacket; I want to drop a stone on this blasphemer."
And this young man had a pile of jackets on his arm, and he was watching Stephen die. Saul knew in his heart that they both could not be right. Saul had built his religion on the temple and the law. Saul had devoted his whole life to being a Pharisee, a Hebrew of the Hebrews. Saul had banked on all this to get him to heaven, and Saul looked down and saw Stephen and saw something in Stephen's face that shook him to the depths of his being. He began to kick; he began to kick against the pricks. He began to say, "Stephen's wrong; he must be wrong," because he didn't want to say, "I am wrong."
And that day, Saul vowed that he would wipe out every Christian, and that young man went into homes, and he dragged men and women and children, and he dragged them out, and he threw them into prison, and the Christians had to flee for their lives from that young man. They fled to an alien country, a country they would never have gone to if they had not been persecuted. Isn't it interesting that this is how often God works? People would never have gone to a certain place unless they'd been in trouble and persecuted, and the gospel is spread.
Well, I must take no more of your time tonight. Oh, I just love to go on and on and on with this story because that young man became the greatest Christian missionary there has ever been because he fought against the pricks. And we owe Saul to the prayer of Stephen. You can't blot out the truth. You may kill every Christian there is; the truth is still true. And what Christian church history has proved again and again is this: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
Let us pray. Oh God, our heavenly Father, it's so easy for us to be a Christian in a land where we're not persecuted, where we don't have to die for our faith, where we don't lose our job, where we're not separated from our loved ones. But we know that there are many parts of the world where this is true, perhaps the greater part of the world. We think of our brethren and sisters in lands where it is difficult to be a Christian. We pray for them. In a sense, we envy them; we envy them their courage, their closeness to the Lord, the purity of the church.
But Lord, we pray that we may take advantage of the freedom we enjoy to share with as many others as we can the glory of the truths that we learn week by week. We thank you that you are not a God we can lock up inside a building; you are a great God. Those men out in space tonight could pray to you just as easily as we do because you are no further from them and no nearer to them than to us, and you are nearer to us than hands or feet or breathing.
So Lord, thank you for speaking to us, and when we face the little trials and the petty persecutions, when we're left out, when we're ostracized socially, when we feel that we're misfits among others, Lord, help us to remember Stephen. Help us to remember the noble army of martyrs, and then we shall see just how little it costs us. We ask it for Jesus' sake. Amen.