Telling the Story: Part 3
Telling the Story: Part 3
Acts 7:35-53
by William Klock
“Made by hand.” When we see that, it usually means something good, doesn’t it? Someone careful hand crafted this thing. Carefully stitched it together. Put care into baking it. You can probably trust it, because it was well made. And, of course, it was made with love.
But if we went all the way back to ancient Israel, “Made by hand” had a very different meaning and connotation. For us it (usually) signals something good; for them it signalled idolatry. “Made by hand” said that this thing was not made by God or that God had not commanded it to be made, but wicked humans made it anyway. And when it came to things involved in worship, it meant idolatry.
This idea has come into our language too. You’ll sometimes hear Christians—usually on the Puritan end of the spectrum—talk about this or that thing in worship or this or that doctrine being “man-made”. The Puritans called it the “Regulative Principle” and the idea was that everything Christians do in worship should either be something God explicitly commanded (like reading the Bible or singing or preaching) or something that good and necessary consequence demands.
We Anglicans follow what’s called the “Normative Principle”, which means that we have freedom in our worship, as long as what we do is not forbidden by scripture or goes against biblical principles. But you’ll often hear folks who follow the Regulative Principle say things like, “Your liturgy or your hymns are ‘man-made’” or “Your traditions of using musical instruments or observing Easter, Christmas, and other holy days are ‘man-made’” and by that they mean that they’re unbiblical and wrong. Some would go so far as to call these things “idolatry”.
The “RP” isn’t our tradition, I think more than anything else in Protestantism it has led to sinful, ungodly, and unwarranted schisms, but I do respect the fact that it grew out of a commitment to take worship very seriously. People who follow it understand that how we worship God is serious business, not something frivolous. I think most Christians today err in taking zero care in how they worship God. But you can’t read the New Testament and you certainly can’t read the Old Testament without realising that how we worship is serious business. God takes it seriously and so should we. I’ll come back to this, but keep it in the back of your mind as we work through the end of Stephen’s speech.
I want to pick up where we left off in Acts 7. We’ve been making our way through Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin—the body of Jewish elders. He’s been accused of blasphemy and of speaking against torah and the temple and Moses. And instead of defending himself, what he’s done is to tell the story of Israel and Israel’s God. He’s telling it in a such way that they should—hopefully—see that he’s not speaking against any of those things that defined them as Jews. He’s telling the story in such a way that they’ll see—hopefully—that the gospel is not a departure from Israel’s story, but rather the very culmination of it—the very thing that torah and temple and Moses were pointing toward all along. And so he began with Abraham and the call of Israel, and then Joseph, and then Moses. And as he’s telling not just the story, but their story, he’s highlighting its themes of forgiveness and grace and also that when God acts, when God does new things, it’s almost never what anyone expected—but afterward you can always see that, in fact, the signposts had always been pointing to that new thing. Like I said last week, the figure of Moses towers over the story of Israel and Stephen knew that. But he also knew, as Moses towered over the story, he did so like a signpost, with his arm outstretched, pointing the people straight to Jesus. He knew, you can’t use Moses to argue against the gospel.
So let’s pick up at Acts 7:35 where we left off. [Page 1087 in the pew Bibles, way down in the very bottom right corner of the page.] “So,” Stephen continued, “this same Moses—the one they rejected, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler or judge?’—this is the man God sent as ruler and redeemer, by the hand of the angel who had appeared to him in the bush. He did signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and led them out, through the Red Sea and for forty years in the wilderness. This is the Moses who said to the sons of Israel, ‘God will raise up a prophet like me from among your brothers.’ And this is the one who was in the assembly in the desert with the angel who had spoken to him on Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living words to give to us.”
Stephen’s continuing the story of Moses he began in last week’s text. Moses was rejected by his own people—at least at first. And there was nothing controversial in telling this part of the story. And there’s nothing controversial in his reminding the Sanhedrin that despite that early rejection, Moses was indeed the ruler and redeemer the Lord had sent to his people. Moses did signs and wonders in both Egypt and in the wilderness. He’s the one who parted the Red Sea. He’s the one who met God on the mountain and came down with God’s living words, with the torah and with the instructions for the tabernacle. And—Stephen makes a really important point here—Moses was also the one who told the Israelites that he was not the end-all-be-all of rulers, redeemers, or messiahs, because one day the Lord would raise up a “prophet” from amongst them—a prophet in comparison to whom Moses would pale.
The Sanhedrin knew he was talking about Jesus. The people had already suspect that Jesus was this greater prophet whom Moses had prophesied. More than once he was asked, “Are you the prophet who is to come?” So Stephen’s making it clear, just as Moses had been rejected by the Israelites of his day, so Jesus was rejected by the Israelites of his. We’ve touched on this last week.
But now Stephen takes it a step further. Look at verse 39. It’s not just that Moses was rejected by his people in the days before he was actually called by God. The more embarrassing thing for Israel was that they’d rejected Moses after he’d been called, after they’d been through the Red Sea, after they’d seen the signs and wonders and had the torah and the tabernacle. Stephen goes on:
“This is the one whom our fathers had not wanted to obey, but instead rejected him and turned back in their hearts to Egypt, by saying to Aaron, ‘Make us gods who will go before us; for this Moses, who brought us out of the land of Egypt—we don’t know what has become of him!’ They made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice to an idol. They celebrated things their own hands had made.”
Remember what happened in Exodus? Moses went up the mountain to meet God. And he was up there for forty days and nights receiving the law. And the people became afraid. They thought that Moses surely must have died on the mountain, so they gave Aaron their gold and implored him to make a golden calf, an idol, so that they could have a god who would protect them. It was a shameful moment for Israel. They’d just received the Ten Commandments. They’d just been told by God: You shall have no other gods. You shall not make a carved image. And Moses had asked them, “Will you do all these things? Will you give yourself to the worship and service of the God of your fathers, the God who has saved you from Egypt? The God who has decalared, ‘I will be your God and you will be my people?” And the people had enthusiastically declared, “We will! All this we will do!” And just days later, they didn’t.
As eating the forbidden fruit was the primal sin of the human race, idolatry was the primal sin of Israel: worshipping something as if it were God when it wasn’t. Aaron had tried to explain to Moses that he’d merely thrown the gold into the fire and that the calf had formed and jumped out of its own accord, but everyone knew that’s not how it works. Idols are made by human hands and the prophets drove that point home over and over down through Israel’s history. To worship an idol was absurd. The pagans were fools for doing so. First, you create a god with your own hands and then you worship it. “How stupid is that?” the prophets asked. And yet the golden calf wasn’t the last time Israel would worship an idol. That primal sin came back over and over and over. When Jeroboam rebelled and led ten of the tribes of Israel to form their own nation, he set up two golden calves, one at Bethel and one at Dan to discourage his people from going to the temple in Jerusalem. No matter how devoutly Israel worshipped the Lord, idolatry was never far off. Look at verse 42:
“Then God turned and handed them over to worship the host of heaven, as it stands written in the book of the prophets: ‘Did you bring sacrifices and offerings to me in those forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? You took up the tent of Moloch, and the star of your god Rhephan, the carved images you made to worship! I will remove you beyond Babylon!’”
Stephen quotes Amos 5. Even during Israel’s honeymoon period with the Lord, Amos condemned them. Even then, while they brought their sacrifices to the Lord, they were worshiping pagan gods like Moloch and Rhephan and all the “host of heaven”.
So the Jewish priests and rulers have charged Stephen with blasphemy and now he turns the tables. He never actually defends himself. Instead, he retells the story of Israel from the beginning and shows how it leads straight to Jesus and now, again, he turns the tables on them. He accuses them of the very thing they’ve charged him with. Just as Israel had rejected Moses, so Israel’s priests and rulers have rejected Jesus. And—since their most significant charge seems to have been that he was speaking against the temple—and that was precisely the same charge on which Jesus was arrested and crucified—Stephen makes his second point or his second charge against them. Verse 44:
“Our ancestors had the ‘tent of meeting’ in the desert. [That’s another name for the tabernacle.] God had commanded Moses to make it according to the pattern which he had seen. Our ancestors in their turn brought it in when, with Joshua, [meaning they brought it with them into Canaan, the promised land] they dispossessed the nations whom God drove out before our ancestors, and it was there until the time of David. David found favour with God, and requested permission to establish a Tabernacle for the house of Jacob. But it was Solomon who built him a house. [Stephen is referring to the permanent temple in Jerusalem.] Now his key point:
“The Most High, however, does not live in shrines made by human hands. The prophet put it like this: ‘Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool! What sort of house will you build me, says the Lord,
Or what place will you give me to rest in? My own hand made all these, did it not?’
Yes, David planned the temple. Solomon built it with the Lord’s blessing. But Stephen quotes Isaiah 66. The Prophet Isaiah had rebuked the people using the very words that Solomon had prayed at the dedication of the temple. It is God who has made all things. The idea that human beings can make anything—even the temple—that can contain God, well, that’s the real blasphemy. Solomon knew that with this glorious temple on the mountain top, that with God’s presence manifest in a cloud of glory, that Israel—always prone to idolatry—would start to think that they had God in a box—to put as we might put it. Solomon warned them. Isaiah warned them. And now Stephen is pointing his finger at the Sanhedrin and is saying, “When Jesus said he’d tear this building down and rebuild it in three days, he wasn’t blaspheming it. When I said that this is precisely what Jesus has done and when I say that Jesus has, indeed, built a new temple by purifying a new people and filling them with God’s own Spirit, I’m not the one blaspheming the temple. No! You’re the one’s blaspheming God! You think you’ve got God in a box. You’re thinking like the pagans. You’ve gone back to our people’s primal sin! Heaven is God’s throne and earth his footstool. The entire cosmos he’s made cannot contain him. What fools you are to think your puny temple can contain him! The temple was the signpost pointing the way to what God’s done in Jesus and the Spirit. It was the signpost telling us all along that God’s plan was one day to enter this world as one of us, as the Righteous One, so that he could rescue us—from sin, from death, from the idolatry that has plagued us from the beginning—by filling us with his Spirit and turning our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. By filling his people, not so we can guard it a box of stone, but so we can carry his presence to the ends of the earth. But just like our ancestors, you refused God’s redeemer because you couldn’t let go of your building, your box made by hands.”
You can almost imagine Stephen standing there in front of the Sanhedrin and with him stand Moses and Isaiah and Amos and all the other prophets nodding at his words. He closes his speech in verses 51-53:
“You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are uncircumcised! You always resist the holy spirit, just as your ancestors did before you! Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? And you killed those who announced in advance the coming of the Righteous One—and now you have betrayed him and murdered him. You received the law at the command of angels, but you didn’t keep it!”
They were the people God had chosen to steward his glory. They were the keepers of the great story of God and his redemptive plan. They, of all people, should have known better, but when the story came to its climax, they refused to listen. They’d stried to slam the book shut. It’s not just that they rejected the Messiah and handed him over to the pagan Romans to be crucified. Stephen’s point is that they were doing what idolatrous Isreal had always done. Even though the kind of obvious idolatry that had got them exiled to Babylon had been rooted out since their return to Judaea, they were still at heart idolators. As Stephen recounts the story of Israel, what we find is that it’s not just a story of redemption. It’s also a story of rebellion that reminds us how desperately humanity needs God’s redemption. Even the people with the law and the temple, even the people with Moses and the Prophets suffered from the same rebellious attitude that infects the human race. As Calvin once put it, the rebellious human heart is a factory of idols. We can take even the good things of God and turn them into idols as the Jews had done.
Stephen takes the high ground. He stands with Abraham and Moses, with Solomon and David, with Isaiah and Amos. The Sanhedrin, for all their moral posturing and charges of blasphemy, Stephen opens the book they’d slammed shut and shows that in reality they stand with Joseph’s wicked brothers, with the Israelites who rejected Moses, with the Israelites who had given their gold to Aaron to cast a golden calf, with Jeroboam and all the others who had set up idols throughout the land. The temple was good, but it was made with hands. God had promised through the Prophets that one day he would make another, a better temple—and it would be better precisely because it wasn’t made by human hands.
Brothers and Sisters, that’s us. And as I was thinking and meditating on this over the last few weeks, I was wondering what this means for us. I think the biggest takeaway from Stephen’s speech—at least this part of it—is simply to hear him proclaim the glory of the God who has become present with us in Jesus, the Righteous One. Jesus has, like a greater Moses, delivered us from our bondage to sin and death. I don’t think it’s likely that we’re going to end up like the Sanhedrin, rejecting Jesus and the Spirit in favour of the temple and the torah.
But, I do think there’s a warning here, even if it’s a little oblique. Brothers and Sisters, it can be very easy for us to make idols out of otherwise good—and even essential—things. In an age of apostasy—and especially for those of us who came out of the battles for orthodoxy within Anglicanism, it can be very easy to make an idol of our theology and of our orthodoxy. We can make idols of the traditional Prayer Book, of the old hymnals, of our classical Protestant worship. Good things. Orthodoxy—right doctrine, right theology, right understanding of God and of ourselves—is absolutely essential. But Brothers and Sisters, none of these things stand in place of Jesus; none of them stands in the place of the Spirit; none of them stands in place of the Triune God. None of them ought to undermine the unity that Jesus and the Spirit have given us with other believers. Bp. Cummins understood this and it’s why the Reformed Episcopal Church exists: because Bp. Cummins knew that Christian unity is rooted not in bishops or in sacraments, but in Jesus the Messiah. It’s good to be right in our doctrine and practise. We should take theology and worship seriously, but we should also be humble about them. We should acknowledge that despite our best efforts, none of us will ever—at least not this side of eternity—have a perfect theology or perfect worship. And we ought always to guard against pride, because being proud in our imperfect theologies and imperfect worship inevitably causes us to treat them as idols. We lose our focus on Jesus. And no matter how right we may be, we lose our witness and cease to give glory to God.
So let Stephen be a reminder to us to keep Jesus at the centre of our being and of our life together, at the centre of our church. Let our good doctrine and our good worship be the things that keep him there. But let him always be our God, let him always be the one we worship and glorify. And, I think, if are faithful in that, we will be faithful in giving glory, not to ourselves, not to our theology, not to our Prayer Book, not to anything made with hands, but to the God of glory.
Let’s pray: God of glory, as we hear your word, as we learn the story of redemption, teach us to see and to keep Jesus, the Righteous One, always at its centre. Give us the grace and wisdom necessary for sound doctrine and worship, not that we be “right”, but that we might always keep Jesus at the centre of our life together, that we might worship you and faithfully make your glory known to the ends of the earth. Amen.