Telling the Story: Part 1
Telling the Story: Part 1
Acts 7:1-16
by William Klock
Last Sunday, in Acts 6, we saw Stephen confronted as he preached in the synagogue. We don’t know exactly what he was preaching, but from the accusations that were made against him, he was—of course—preaching that Jesus is the Messiah, but must also have been talking about the way in which Jesus and the Spirit fulfil God’s promises to Israel, the law and the prophets, the torah and the temple. We can surmise that, because what they accuse him of is saying blasphemous things against God in general and specifically against Moses. They accuse him of saying that Jesus will destroy the temple and change the customs that Moses had handed down to them. We can surmise this, too, because this is what we’ve been hearing Peter preach in the earlier parts of Acts. Never in the early church do we see the apostles or anyone else just launching into a sermon about Jesus. They always and consistently preach Jesus as part of the story of the God of Israel and his people. That’s important. In fact, it’s critical; it’s essential. Leave out the story that leads to Jesus and you just may lose Jesus himself. That’s what happened with Marcion of Sinope back in the Second Century. His was one of the very first heresies the church had to confront. He threw away the Old Testament. He believed the God of the Old Testament was an evil, sadistic god and not the same God we see in the New. So he just unhitched the Old Testament and left it behind. And that heresy has been cropping up throughout church history in one form or another ever since. A few years ago, ex-evangelical pastor, Andy Stanley, caused a big stir when he preached that the church has to unhitch itself from the Old Testament. Even if we don’t cut out the Old Testament from our Bibles, even if we cherish the Old Testament, if we lose the story it contains, we’re going to get ourselves into trouble. Men like Tertullian and Justin Martyr addressed Marcion and he was eventually excommunicated. The church would always hold tenaciously to the Old Testament. But it wasn’t even a hundred and fifty year later that we started to undermine its story-telling. As the church became increasingly dominated by gentiles, we started to read the Old Testament (and the New), not as the story of the God of Isreal and his people, but as a book of moral allegories and of types that pointed to Jesus. We flattened it out and made it abstract. We “spiritualised” it. We knew the story of the God of Isreal and his people was there, but we denigrated it. That was the simplest, the least important, the least “spiritual” way to read the Bible. And by the grace of God we didn’t lose the gospel, but gradually we started putting the em-PHA-sis in the wrong places.
What we see in the Bible, in the Gospels, in the teaching of Jesus, and in the teaching of the apostles in their epistles, and in the examples we see through Acts, is that the good news about Jesus is deeply rooted in the Old Testament and in Israel’s story. You cannot separate the old and the new. The story tells us the problem of human sin and rebellion and of the corruption of Gods’ good creation. The story shows us how God has stepped into the world to set it to rights. The story shows—long before we ever get to Jesus—the goodness and faithfulness of God. The story shows why the Israelites could and should trust the God who spoke through Moses and the Prophets—and eventually through Jesus and the apostles. The story prepared them—and it prepares us—for Jesus, for his death and his resurrection and his ascension and his kingdom and it prepares us to know the Spirit and to be the temple, purified by the blood of Jesus and made a dwelling place for God, to be a the truly heaven-on-earth people God had promised to make Israel; to be the beginnings, the firstfruits of his new creation, his new age, his kingdom.
That’s what Stephen was getting at when he reminded his fellow Jews about the day when Jesus had said that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. It wasn’t about the end of Moses or torah or temple; it was about fulfilling them. They were signposts point into God’s future—a future in which God would live with his people, not in a building, but actually in them, and a future in which the law would no longer be carved on stone tablets, but written on human hearts. But they refused to hear. They drummed up false witnesses and they dragged Stephen before the Sanhedrin, the governing body of the Jews. Look at Acts 7. [Page 1086 in the pew Bibles.] Having been dragged before the Sanhedrin, “The high priest addressed Stephen. ‘Are these things true?’ he said. ‘Brothers and fathers, hear me,’ replied Stephen. ‘The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he moved to live in Haran.’”
Let me pause there. Notice how Stephen is going all the way back to the beginning. He speaks first of the God of glory, which might not seem very important to us, but it’s noteworthy that “God of glory” is not a common way to speak of God in the Old Testament. In fact, Psalm 29:3 is the only place this title is used. On the one hand, I suspect Stephen uses it to make the point that he has no interest in denigrating or blaspheming the God of Irael. Stephen is invested in proclaiming the glory of God, and that’s exactly what he’s about to do by reminding them of their own story—and, most importantly, how it ends with Jesus and the Spirit. But Stephen is also invoking Psalm 29 as it ascribes glory to the God of creation, the God who is enthroned, sovereign over the seas and over the forests, sovereign over the nations, the God who blesses his people as they cry out in his temple, “Glory!”. This is the God of creation. And then to mention Abraham in the next breath is to set the opening scene. God created the heavens and earth. God created human beings to serve as his stewards and his priests in this creation. And we rebelled. We broke it. We corrupted it. We introduced darkness where there was supposed to be light. We drove a great wedge between heaven and earth, between God and man as we claimed his creation for ourselves, to do with as we pleased, to try to rule it as if we are gods ourselves. To write our own stories instead of living in the one he’s given us.
And it was into that darkness, into that void in which men and women had lost all knowledge of their creator and had turned to idols, God spoke. And he called to Abraham. That call was the beginning of a new story—a story to set creation and to set humanity to rights. A story that would, one day, culminate in God returning to dwell with his people. It’s the story that everyone in Israel new, inside-out, backwards and forwards, top to bottom. And yet something had gone wrong in the telling. Because when God returned, Israel had rejected him. Because when Stephen proclaimed Jesus and the Spirit, the people accused him of blasphemy.
Because as faithful as they were to the story, they hadn’t got it quite right. Remember last week I talked about how you might take a trip to the other side of the country. You drive your car to Nanaimo, then you leave it there and take a ferry to Horseshoe Bay, then you get off the ferry and take a bus downtown, and then you get off the bus to get on Skytrain to the airport, and then fly in airplane to your final destination. That journey might break down at any number of points. We might really, really like to drive our car and we can’t bear to think of leaving it parked at the ferry terminal and taking a ferry instead. And so we refuse to stop driving. When our friend tells us you can’t drive on water, we get angry. We accuse him of being a car-hater. We accuse him of saying that cars are bad and evil and no good. And we wait for the ferry to leave and then we drive full-speed down the ramp and crash into the water and drown. Not because cars are bad, but because cars were simply never designed to drive across water. That’s what’s going on with Stephen’s accusers. Stephen never said that torah or temple were bad things. They were good things. They were wonderful, spectacular, glorious gifts of God’s great grace. They were signposts leading Israel to Jesus. It’s just that in this new age, God’s given something even better. There’s a new law and a new temple. Those things were the promise, but now the fulfilment of the promise is here. But they don’t want to hear that.
But let’s image you managed to transition from car to ferry to bus to Skytrain and you get to the airport, but instead of looking at the departures board to find your gate, you just walked down the concourse. And you looked for the gate you liked best. You stopped at one and you looked out the window and on the horizon, across the Strait, you could see Vancouver Island. And it was comforting and you decided this was the right gate. You could sit and wait for your plane to Montreal and never lose sight of the Island. And you waited and waited, but no plane came. And eventually you asked a gate agent, and she said, “Oh, you’re at the wrong gate. Your flight’s leaving from such-and-such gate.” But you didn’t listen. You liked this gate with the view of home. And a while later they announced your flight—and the gate—but you ignored it. Eventually you even heard them page you: “Passenger So-and-so, this is your last call for boarding at gate such-and-such.” But you just sat there. This gate was nice. Everyone else was wrong. Eventually the plane will come. And that’s what most of Isreal did. The Messiah came to fulfil the law and the prophets, but people already had their ideas of who and what the Messiah was be and to do. Because they’d got the story wrong. Not all wrong. They’d got to the airport after all, but wrong enough that they were convinced it was this gate, not that one.
So Stephen’s going to do what Jesus had done and what he’d heard Peter do. He’s going back to the very beginning of the story and he’s going to tell it again. He’s going to tell it so they can understand that leaving the car and getting on the ferry doesn’t mean you hate cars or think they’re evil—and that the same goes for Moses and the Prophets and torah and temple. And he’s going to tell it so that when they do get to the airport, they be willing to trust the departure board and the gate agents and the pages about the right gate—so that they’ll see how the story was, all along, leading them to Jesus. The real key here is to pay attention to the bits of the story that Stephen—inspired by the Holy Spirit—decides to emphasise. There are a thousand parts to this story, but—Stephen is saying—look at it this way and you can’t help but recognise that in Jesus, the Messiah has come.
So, again, picking up at verse 2: “The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he moved to live in Haran. ‘Leave your land and your family,’ he said to him, ‘and go to the land which I will show you.’ So he left the land of the Chaldeans and went to live in Haran. Then, from there, after his father’s death, God moved him on to this land in which you now live. God didn’t give him an inheritance here, not even a place to stand up in. Instead, he promised (when Abraham still had no child) that he would give it as a possession to his seed after him. This is what God said to him: that his seed would be strangers in a foreign land, that they would serve there as slaves, and that they would be afflicted for four hundred years. But God said that he would judge the nation that had enslaved them, and that they would then come out and worship him ‘on this mountain’. And he gave them the covenant of circumcision. So Abraham became the father of Isaac, and he circumcised him on the eighth day. Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of the twelve patriarchs.”
You can’t understand Judaism or Christianity without understanding Abraham. This is where the story of God’s rescue begins. With this call, God’s plan to set the world to rights begins to unfold. Israel wasn’t just some random nation in history. God’s calling Abraham out of the darkness of ignorance and sin and idolatry is what sets the story on its trajectory to Jesus, it’s what establishes that this is the story of how God will rescue human beings and fix his creation that we broke. It’s like Stephen is answering the charge of blasphemy by affirming that, no, he is actually affirming the story they knew; he’s affirming God’s call; he’s affirming the special status of Israel. Just because we also had to take a ferry, doesn’t mean the car was a bad thing or that it didn’t have a good and useful purpose.
And Stephen makes a point of zeroing in on Genesis 15. That’s the part of Genesis where Abraham has been faithful to God and followed him to the holy land, and God responds by establishing his covenant with him. We see this, too, over and over in the New Testament, especially with Paul in Galatians 3 and Romans 4. This is a vitally important part of the story that leads us to Jesus. And so Stephen stresses: God promised the land to Abraham’s descendants. The most Abraham would ever have it was a burial plot that he had purchase. But after his descendants had been strangers in a foreign land for four hundred years—he’s talking about Israel living as slaves in Egypt—he would judge that land and its people, and he would bring Abraham’s children out of Egypt to worship him “on this mountain”. Why was that important? Because it shows how God works. He makes promises and he keeps them, but he does so in his own good time. If Abraham hadn’t know better, he might have thought God had failed. Moses might have said, “I don’t think this is what was promised.” But instead, Abraham trusted. Instead, Moses believed and followed God as he did a new thing. And I think that’s why Stephen phrases this bit about “on this mountain”—that was originally God’s promise to Moses that he would bring the Israelites back to the place where God had met him in the burning bush and they would worship there, but Stephen connects that with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Already—long before Jesus—God was fulfilling his promises in ways that were unexpected. Mount Sinai points to Mount Zion.
For Jews in the First Century, the temple had become a symbol of the land of Israel and of God’s promise to Abraham. That’s why they were so angry at Stephen when they thought he was blaspheming the temple and saying it was no good or that it would be destroyed. You might as well say—in their thinking—that God was going to abandon his promise to Abraham. So Stephen connects this all together. He affirms the promise; he affirms the covenant; he affirms God’s promise of the land; and most of all he affirms the temple. Most importantly, what he’s doing is affirming that God has called this people and given them a purpose. Through them he’s going to save the world. They knew that, but they’d muddled the story just enough that they’d got the “how” part of it wrong.
Stephen’s on his way to Moses now. We’ll look at that part of what he says next week. There’s too much to his speech to cover it all in one sermon. But on the way to Moses, Stephen pauses. He needs to remind them of the part of the story about Joseph. Look at verses 9-16: “Now the patriarchs became angry with Joseph, and were jealous of him. They sold him into Egypt. But God was with him, and rescued him from all his troubles an gave him grace and wisdom before Pharaoh, king of Egypt, making him ruler over Egypt and over all his household. But then there was a famine over the whole of Egypt and Canaan, which resulted in great hardship. Our ancestors couldn’t find food to eat. Jacob, however, heard that there was grain in Egypt, and sent our ancestors there on an initial visit. On their second trip, Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and revealed to Pharaoh what family he was from. So Joseph sent and summoned Jacob his father and all his family, seventy-five people in all. Jacob came to Egypt and he and our ancestors died there. They were brought back to Shechem and buried in the tomb which Abraham had bought with silver, at a named price, from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.”
Before Stephen gets to Moses, there’s Joseph and Joseph’s story. Abraham (and Moses as we’ll see next week) point to Jesus through their calling and the promises God made to them. Joseph points to Jesus another way and he’s particularly relevant to the current situation. Joseph was rejected by his brothers, but it was precisely in that rejection that God was work. It was through his rejection and through Joseph’s unjust suffering that God raised him to govern the whole land of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh. When famine came to Canaan and Egypt, it was Joseph whom his brothers came to for food—the man they’d been jealous of, the man they’d abused, the man they nearly murdered, the man they sold into slavery. And yet, what happened when they came to Joseph. Instead of being angry, instead of retaliating, instead of getting revenge, Joseph was gracious. He wept for joy to see his brothers again and invited them to come and live with him in a land of plenty.
I hope that sounds familiar. I hope you can hear echoes of Jesus there. I can’t help but think of the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son and the rejoicing that Jesus says happens in heaven when sinners repent. I hope you can see in Joseph’s story, particularly as Stephen tells it, how God was preparing his people for his son. This is how God works: through humility, through rejection, through letting sin and evil and human rebellion do their worst, and then rising triumphant. This is how God works, Stephen declares: He is loving and gracious and merciful toward those he has created. One day, when he finally finishes the work of setting creation to rights, it’ll mean wiping from its face all those who persist in their rebellion, who persist in sin and evil. God does not rejoice in the destruction of those he loves. And so he rejoices—just as Joseph did—to welcome the repentant, to welcome those who want to be part of God’s new world, to welcome those who come to be washed clean in the blood of Jesus and to be filled with his Spirit, to become new creations themselves, to become part of his new temple. Stephen’s pointing back to Joseph to tell the Sanhedrin: There is grace, there is forgiveness for you too—even for those who cried out “Crucify him!”
I suspect there were some men there in that meeting of the Sanhedrin that day who saw where Stephen was going with this. Like I said, this is as far as we’ll go with Chapter 7 today. It’s too much for one sermon. But the real takeaway from these first sixteen verses is, I think, simply to understand what Stephen, inspired by the Spirit and steeped in the scriptures, is doing here. This is—or it should be, because it sadly usually isn’t—this is the great art of Christian apologetic and Christian preaching and the proclamation of the good news about Jesus. It’s to tell the story of God and his people, to have the wisdom to know which of the thousand and one details is relevant to the immediately situation or immediate audience, and then to tell that story as the story that leads to Jesus as its fulfilment and its climax on the one hand, but that also proclaims God’s glory by showing his goodness and faithfulness in the story that brings us to Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, the Old Testament is not just a collection of useful stories for teaching morals nor is it a collection of allegories that foreshadow Jesus. It is, first and foremost, the story of how God has been at work to save us and to save his creation from sin and death. And we need to learn it. We need to learn it well. So that we can tell the story in a way that doesn’t leave us behind as the ferry sails away or that leads people stranded at the wrong gate at the airport. We need to tell the story in way that honours the old covenant, torah and temple, but we also need to tell it in a way that reveals Jesus as the fulfilment of them, a story that faithfully follows the signposts as they lead us to Jesus and to the Spirit, to the cross and to the empty tomb, to the ascension and to the creation of this new temple, not made of stones, but made of people washed clean by Jesus and filled with God’s own Spirit. We need to learn to tell the story so it gives glory to God for his goodness and faithfulness, for his grace and mercy, not just when we get to the part about Jesus, but at every step of the way: from Abraham to Joseph to Moses to David to Jesus—and then to you and to me, and to those who are lost and whom God so longs to rejoice over.
Let’s pray: Father, in the Collect we acknowledged your goodness and your promises that exceed all we can desire. Remind us always that we know your goodness, because we know your story. Capture our hearts and minds, we pray, by the glory of that story, that we might immerse ourselves in it, that we might meditate on it, that we might in habit it, and that we might tell it over and over and over until the whole world knows your glory. Through Jesus our Lord, through the one who embodies your glory in all its fullness, we pray. Amen.