Acts 7 — The Righteous One Rejected

Today’s Passage: Acts 7

The high priest asks whether the charges are true, and Stephen answers by telling Israel’s own story back to the men who are judging him. He walks through it patiently: Abraham called out of a far country, Joseph rejected by his brothers and then lifted up to save them, Moses rejected by his own people and then sent to redeem them. He tells of the golden calf and the idols that followed, of the tabernacle in the wilderness and the temple that came after, and then he lets Isaiah thunder that the Most High does not live in houses that human hands have built. Only then does the blade come out. These men, he says, are stiff-necked, always resisting the Holy Spirit, betrayers and murderers of the Righteous One. They stone him for it. Yet as the stones fall, Stephen looks up and sees Jesus standing to receive him, and he dies praying for the very men who are killing him, while a young man named Saul stands by and keeps the coats. This is not three separate sermons stacked together. It is one long pattern of rejection that comes to its climax in Jesus, and even so, heaven opens.

As you read, hold this: They rejected the Righteous One. Heaven opened anyway.

Acts 7:1–8 (BSB)

¹ Then the high priest asked Stephen, “Are these charges true?” ² And Stephen declared: “Brothers and fathers, listen to me! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, ³ and told him, ‘Leave your country and your kindred and go to the land I will show you.’ ⁴ So Abraham left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After his father died, God brought him out of that place and into this land where you are now living. ⁵ He gave him no inheritance here, not even a foot of ground. But God promised to give possession of the land to Abraham and his descendants, even though he did not yet have a child. ⁶ God told him that his descendants would be foreigners in a strange land, and that they would be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. ⁷ ‘But I will punish the nation that enslaves them,’ God said, ‘and afterward they will come forth and worship Me in this place.’ ⁸ Then God gave Abraham the covenant of circumcision, and 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. Stephen opens with respect, “Brothers and fathers,” and then plants his first quiet claim. The God of glory appears to Abraham outside the land, back in Mesopotamia, long before there is any Canaan to call holy. And the promise comes first: God swears to give the land before Abraham owns so much as a foot of it, and before he even has a child. Stephen begins on common ground his judges will not dispute, and only later will the same story turn and search their own hearts.

Acts 7:9–16 (BSB)

⁹ Because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him ¹⁰ and rescued him from all his troubles. He granted Joseph favor and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh king of Egypt, who appointed him ruler over Egypt and all his household. ¹¹ Then famine and great suffering swept across Egypt and Canaan, and our fathers could not find food. ¹² When Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, he sent our fathers on their first visit. ¹³ On their second visit, Joseph revealed his identity to his brothers, and his family became known to Pharaoh. ¹⁴ Then Joseph sent for his father Jacob and all his relatives, seventy-five in all. ¹⁵ So Jacob went down to Egypt, where he and our fathers died. ¹⁶ Their bones were carried back to Shechem and placed in the tomb that Abraham had bought from the sons of Hamor at Shechem for a price he paid in silver. Here is the pattern for the first time. The patriarchs grow jealous and reject the very brother God is with, selling Joseph off into Egypt, and God answers by lifting that rejected brother up to the place where he can save them all. It is hard to miss whom this foreshadows: Joseph, rejected and then exalted, is a picture drawn long in advance of the rejected and exalted Christ. And notice where God’s favor rests. It flourishes in Egypt, in a foreign land, and not only in the land of promise.

Acts 7:17–29 (BSB)

¹⁷ As the time drew near for God to fulfill His promise to Abraham, our people in Egypt increased greatly in number. ¹⁸ Then another king, who knew nothing of Joseph, arose over Egypt. ¹⁹ He exploited our people and oppressed our fathers, forcing them to abandon their infants so they would die. ²⁰ At that time Moses was born, and he was beautiful in the sight of God. For three months he was nurtured in his father’s house. ²¹ When he was set outside, Pharaoh’s daughter took him and brought him up as her own son. ²² So Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action. ²³ When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his brothers, the children of Israel. ²⁴ And when he saw one of them being mistreated, Moses went to his defense and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian who was oppressing him. ²⁵ He assumed his brothers would understand that God was using him to deliver them, but they did not. ²⁶ The next day he came upon two Israelites who were fighting, and he tried to reconcile them, saying, ‘Men, you are brothers. Why are you mistreating each other?’ ²⁷ But the man who was abusing his neighbor pushed Moses aside and said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? ²⁸ Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ ²⁹ At this remark, Moses fled to the land of Midian, where he lived as a foreigner and had two sons. Now the pattern comes a second time. Moses, beautiful in the sight of God and raised in Pharaoh’s own house, tries to help his people and is thrown off with a sneer, “Who made you ruler and judge over us?” It is a bitter question, and it will come back around, for the very man they refuse is the one God will indeed make their ruler and redeemer (7:35). His own people turn him away, and God sends him anyway.

Acts 7:30–38 (BSB)

³⁰ After forty years had passed, an angel appeared to Moses in the flames of a burning bush in the desert near Mount Sinai. ³¹ When Moses saw it, he marveled at the sight. As he approached to look more closely, the voice of the Lord came to him: ³² ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ Moses trembled with fear and did not dare to look. ³³ Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. ³⁴ I have indeed seen the oppression of My people in Egypt. I have heard their groaning and have come down to deliver them. Now come, I will send you back to Egypt.’ ³⁵ This Moses, whom they had rejected with the words, ‘Who made you ruler and judge?’ is the one whom God sent to be their ruler and redeemer through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. ³⁶ He led them out and performed wonders and signs in the land of Egypt, at the Red Sea, and for forty years in the wilderness. ³⁷ This is the same Moses who told the Israelites, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers.’ ³⁸ He was in the assembly in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai, and with our fathers. And he received living words to pass on to us. Watch where the holy ground turns out to be. It is a patch of desert near Sinai, where God tells Moses to take off his sandals, and not the council’s own chamber that these men guard so jealously. The Moses they had rejected becomes the redeemer God sends, and this same Moses promises that God will one day raise up a prophet like himself, a promise that points straight to Christ. He received living words to hand down to his people. The only question left hanging is whether the men now judging Stephen have kept them.

Acts 7:39–50 (BSB)

³⁹ But our fathers refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt. ⁴⁰ They said to Aaron, ‘Make us gods who will go before us! As for this Moses who led us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.’ ⁴¹ At that time they made a calf and offered a sacrifice to the idol, rejoicing in the works of their hands. ⁴² But God turned away from them and gave them over to the worship of the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: ‘Did you bring Me sacrifices and offerings forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? ⁴³ You have taken along the tabernacle of Molech and the star of your god Rephan, the idols you made to worship. Therefore I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.’ ⁴⁴ Our fathers had the tabernacle of the Testimony with them in the wilderness. It was constructed exactly as God had directed Moses, according to the pattern he had seen. ⁴⁵ And our fathers who received it brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations God drove out before them. It remained until the time of David, ⁴⁶ who found favor in the sight of God and asked to provide a dwelling place for the God of Jacob. ⁴⁷ But it was Solomon who built the house for Him. ⁴⁸ However, the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human 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 where will My place of repose be? ⁵⁰ Has not My hand made all these things?’ Now the story darkens. The people turn from Moses to a golden calf, rejoicing in the works of their own hands, and God gives them over to their idols until at last comes exile beyond Babylon. Stephen carries the account through the tabernacle in the wilderness and on to the temple that Solomon finally built, and then he lets Isaiah’s words fall like thunder: the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands. He is not attacking the temple itself so much as the idolatry of it, the notion that God can be boxed in, kept, and managed by anyone who owns the building. The Maker of heaven and earth will not be handled like a household god of stone.

Acts 7:51–53 (BSB)

⁵¹ You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit, just as your fathers did. ⁵² Which of the prophets did your fathers fail to persecute? They even killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One. And now you are His betrayers and murderers— ⁵³ you who received the law ordained by angels, yet have not kept it.”

Circumcision of the flesh means nothing, Stephen says, where the heart and the ears stay closed. Their fathers hunted down the prophets; they themselves have betrayed and murdered the Righteous One (δίκαιος) dikaios, pronounced DIH-kai-os. Strong's G1342, righteous, just, upright. This is a title weighted with messianic promise, reaching back to the suffering servant of Isaiah who would justify many (Isaiah 53:11) and forward to Peter’s own charge earlier in Acts (Acts 3:14). The men who received the law and boast in it are the very men who murdered the Righteous One it pointed to. In Stephen’s hands the whole history becomes a mirror, and every charge they have leveled against him turns and settles back upon the court itself. those prophets foretold; and the law they so proudly received is the law they have not kept.

Acts 7:54–60 (BSB)

⁵⁴ On hearing this, the members of the Sanhedrin were enraged, and they gnashed their teeth at him. ⁵⁵ But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked intently into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ⁵⁶ “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” ⁵⁷ At this they covered their ears, cried out in a loud voice, and rushed together at him. ⁵⁸ They dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile the witnesses laid their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. ⁵⁹ While they were stoning him, Stephen appealed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” ⁶⁰ Falling on his knees, he cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep. Their rage shuts their ears, and they cover them so as not to hear another word, but Stephen’s faith opens heaven to him. He looks up and sees the glory of God, and the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand to receive His servant. The stones fly, and Saul keeps the coats, and Stephen prays exactly as his Master had prayed: he entrusts his spirit to the Lord Jesus and asks forgiveness for the men who are killing him, and then he falls asleep. The first Christian to die for the name dies under an open sky, and he is not abandoned. Heaven is standing to welcome him home.