Acts 6:8-15

Stephen Seized
8 Now Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power, performed great wonders and signs among the people. 9 Opposition arose, however, from members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called)—Jews of Cyrene and Alexandria as well as the provinces of Cilicia and Asia—who began to argue with Stephen. 10 But they could not stand up against the wisdom the Spirit gave him as he spoke.
11 Then they secretly persuaded some men to say, “We have heard Stephen speak blasphemous words against Moses and against God.”

12 So they stirred up the people and the elders and the teachers of the law. They seized Stephen and brought him before the Sanhedrin. 13 They produced false witnesses, who testified, “This fellow never stops speaking against this holy place and against the law. 14 For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs Moses handed down to us.”

15 All who were sitting in the Sanhedrin looked intently at Stephen, and they saw that his face was like the face of an angel.


Dig Deeper
A few months ago I had to go to Miami for a conference. I had a limited amount of time for the trip and so I had to fly to be able to get there and back in the time frame that I had and still leave me some time to actually participate in the conference. I simply did not have time to drive so flying was the only option that would get me where I needed to be. But once I got to Miami, I got off the plane, went into the airport, and caught a van ride to my hotel. It wasn’t that the plane was bad or that there was something wrong with it, but it had served it’s purpose and it was time for me to transition to other places and other modes of transportation. I wasn’t demeaning the necessity of the plane to get me to Miami, but at the same time, I would not be using the plane at all while in Miami.

In many respects, the role of the Temple and the Law of Moses were like that in the estimation of the early church. The Law and the Temple structure were important, necessary, and good but they were limited in their purpose. They did not have an eternal purpose but a temporal one. They enabled the coming of the Messiah but once the Messiah had come, they were a little bit like that plane. They just weren’t needed in the same way anymore (see Gal. 3:19). When you get to Miami, you don’t continue to sit on the plan and when the Messiah has come you don’t continue to cling to the Temple, the Law, and animal sacrifices that pointed to and helped bring about the Messiah but were never the point of where God was going (just as the point of my trip was to be in Miami not to be on the plane).

That all sounds well and good to Christians living over 2,000 years after the coming of the Messiah but this was pretty controversial stuff in the first century. Faithful Jews had died for hundreds of years defending God’s honor and their loyal commitment to the Law and to the Temple. They saw it as a matter of defending God’s honor and being loyal to their God. But somewhere along the line, they became so committed to those things that they forgot to keep listening to what God himself was saying about them. It’s almost like a dog who begins to bark so loudly in defending his house that he fails to hear his owner telling him that it is okay and to pipe down. That’s not to denigrate the Jews. They were doing their best to be sincere and faithful to God but in reality, they had stopped listening to the owner. They were defending the house so vehemently that they could no longer hear God or see what he was up to. It is easy to do, really. One can easily get so caught up in their cause for God that it eventually becomes more about the cause than God.

It’s hard to figure out why some people just seem to draw more attention and controversy than others, but Stephen was apparently one of those people. We don’t know specifically why he drew so much attention, but Luke evidently thought a great deal of him, telling us that he was full of faith (Acts 6:5), full of the Holy Spirit (Acts 6:5), and full of God’s grace and power (v. 8). Luke also informed his readers in the previous passage that the apostles had laid hands on Stephen and the other men who would oversee the distribution of food in the community. The New Testament seems to indicate that believers, full of the Spirit, were often enabled to perform great signs and wonders and became the bearers of specific miraculous gifts of the Spirit (see Acts 8:18-19) after having the apostles lay their hands on them and pass these great gifts to them.

Beyond just the working of signs and wonders and God’s grace and power that was working through Stephen, he must have been speaking with a boldness and clarity that brought about great opposition. That soon became a problem with those who had become more committed to the cause than to God himself, because anything that sounded like it might endanger their particular cause became a threat. And oftentimes the easiest way to deal with a threat is to simplify and reduce it to a parody of itself so that it can be demonized, criticized and properly done away with. That appears to have been the case with the Hellenized Jews who likely were descendants of Jews who had been taken as slaves and captives in previous centuries but who had earned their freedom and returned to Jerusalem. They were often even stricter about adhering to the Jewish Law and ethnic markers than were Jews who had lived in Israel their whole lives. It was these men who would first try to debate with Stephen but found that he was so filled with the wisdom of the Spirit, just as Jesus had promised his disciples they would be (Lk. 21:15), that they found that approach to be fruitless.

One important possibility that should be noted before we examine the charges against Stephen, has to do with the men of this particular synagogue that had come in conflict with Stephen. Luke says that the synagogue consisted of Jews from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia, and Asia. The most important city in Cilicia was Tarsus, the hometown of Saul who would later become known as the apostle Paul. This was a Hellenist synagogue and it is not beyond the realm of possibility or feasibility to assume that Saul was a member of this synagogue (which would explain his otherwise rather sudden appearance in overseeing the stoning of Stephen in the following chapter). But just as interesting as that is the fact that this was a Hellenist synagogue and that Stephen was Greek, it is quite plausible that this was Stephen’s former synagogue of worship before he left to join the Christian movement. This could explain the particular focus on Stephen and vehemence towards him. It is possible to imagine that these men, including possibly Saul, knew Stephen and felt particularly betrayed by him.

With debating Stephen publicly proving to be a dead end, the Jews switched tactics and reduced Stephen’s proclamations of the gospel to be little more than blasphemies against Moses and God, meaning he they were charging him with violating the power and majesty of Israel’s God. They didn’t really deal with what Stephen was saying, they just labeled it and determined themselves to eradicate it. So, having failed in public debates with Stephen, due to the wisdom and power that he had received as a result of the work of the Holy Spirit, the freedmen turned to false witnesses to besmirch Stephen as they brought him before the Sanhedrin. The term false witness doesn’t necessarily mean that what they were saying were lies but they were false witnesses in that they were speaking against the truth of God’s witnesses. There was a ring of truth to the charges that they brought, but they had reduced the message of Stephen and the early church to such a simplistic level that the claims they were making against Stephen weren’t really the full truth, thus in that way they could also rightly be called false witnesses against Stephen.

It was of no coincidence that the charges centered around Stephen having supposedly demeaned the Temple because, as New Testament scholar Ajith Fernando has pointed out “capital punishment was allowed only by the decree of the Roman governor, except for offenses by word or deed against the sanctity of the the temple. In such situations, the Sanhedrin was allowed to pronounce and execute the death sentence. They had tried to convict Christ in this way but failed. As a result, they took him to Pilate. With Stephen, however, they succeeded.”

So, what had Stephen said against the Temple and the Law? In short, he almost assuredly said the same sorts of things that Jesus had said. Jesus had made it clear that in his presence and message of the coming of the kingdom that “something greater than the temple is here” (Matt. 12:6). Jesus had not come to improperly interpret, in other words “abolish” the law (Matt. 5:17), he had come to fulfill it. The promise that the Temple and the Law had always pointed to had arrived. They had reached their fulfillment and it was time for those who valued God’s purposes more than the cause of defending the Temple and the Law to transfer their loyalty to God’s Messiah and his true people. To make it quite clear, that the time had come, Jesus had repeatedly spoken of his superiority to the Temple and his authority over it (see especially Lk. 19:45-48), and made it clear that God’s judgment would soon fall on the Temple and those in Jerusalem that continued to cling to it and reject God’s family (Matt. 24; Mk. 13; Lk. 21). Stephen wasn’t simply railing against the law and the Temple and blaspheming them. He was proclaiming their fulfillment and the truth of God’s kingdom. God’s presence was no longer housed in the Temple, if it ever really had been to start with. His people no longer had to identify themselves as those who followed the Law of Moses. God was dwelling among his people, the church, as the Temple of his presence (see commentary on Acts 5:11; also 1 Cor. 3:16), and they identified themselves as God’s people by having faith in the life of Christ and joining his body. This was Stephen’s message.

As Stephen’s words were twisted and brought against him in a hearing that was meant to end in his death, Luke tells us that the entire Sanhedrin turned to look intently at Stephen. We don’t know what they expected to see, perhaps the steely gaze of a defiant blasphemer, but instead Luke tells us that they saw the face of an angel. In using this somewhat rare, but not unheard of phrase, Luke did not mean an innocent or “angelic” look as we might use that term today. Biblical scholar L.E. Brown says that Stephen’s face was “not the mild, gentle look that is often seen in paintings of angels; not the fierce look of an avenging angel, but a look that told of inspiration within, clear eyes burning with the inner light.” The great irony is that Stephen, who was apparently reflecting some of the glory of one who had been in the presence of God just as Moses had once been (Ex. 34:29), was now being accused of blasphemy against God and Moses.



Devotional Thought
Are you more committed to God or your religion? Do you take steps to make sure that you are beholden to God’s will rather than “the cause”? Being part of God’s mission is certainly important but we have to constantly take stock to ensure that we haven’t become so committed to that mission and cause that we’ve failed to notice that it stopped being about God and started to be about us and our “cause.”