Acts Chapter 7

What Happens:

Stephen is in front of the high priest and all his council, (falsely) accused of blasphemy. While listening to his accusers, the chief priests look intently at Stephen, and see that his face is like the face of an angel.

Then the high priest asks Stephen, “Are these charges true?” Stephen replies with a short speech about the Jews’ history. He says that their ancestor Abraham was visited by God and told to leave his land and go to the land God showed him, which Abraham did. God didn’t give him the land, but promised him that his descendants would have it. God said that his descendants would be slaves in a strange land for 400 years, but God would punish the slavers, free the slaves, and bring them to the land he promised Abraham.

Then God had given Abraham the “covenant of the circumcision”. Abraham became the father of Isaac, Isaac later became the father of Jacob, and Jacob later became the father of the Twelve Patriarchs. The patriarchs got jealous of Joseph, one of Jacob’s other sons, and sold him as a slave in Egypt. Joseph, aided by God, did well for himself in Egypt and eventually became the Pharaoh’s chief advisor. When a famine came, Israel had no grain, but Egypt had plenty, so Jacob (Joseph’s father) and the whole family moved to Egypt. They stayed there and their descendants lived there for several hundred years, and were eventually enslaved.

Moses was born, and was rescued from being killed like all the other Jewish newborns when the Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him. He was raised by the Egyptians, but when he saw an Egyptian mistreating a Jewish slave, Moses killed the Egyptian. When people found out about it, he ran away to Midian, but later God visited him in the form of a burning bush. God told him to go back to Egypt and free the Jews, which God helped him do. However, after being freed, the Jews rejected Moses. They abandoned God and made an idol of a calf to worship instead.

Moses had had the tabernacle for God, and Solomon had built a temple for him. However, Stephen says, God doesn’t need a “house”. He quotes from the Old Testament: “‘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 resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things?'”

“You stiff-necked people!” Stephen exclaims to the court. “Your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You are just like your ancestors: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him – you who have received the law that was given through angels but have not obeyed it.”

The council explodes with fury at this. Then Stephen looks up at the sky and says, “Look, I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” This is just too much for the council to take, and they cover their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rush at him, drag him out of the city, and begin to stone him to death. Meanwhile, the witnesses lay their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.

While they are stoning him, Stephen prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he falls on his knees and cries out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” After he says this he dies. Saul is looking on with great approval at Stephen’s death.

Commentary

The first sentence of the summary is where the last chapter ended, just to reacquaint us with events since most of us probably don’t go back and read previous chapters. The second sentence (“While listening to his accusers” etc) is actually the very last sentence of chapter 6. But I put it at the beginning of chapter 7 because it makes more sense that way. The story break is less jarring in the summary because I’ve smoothed it over, but in the actual text it’s quite jarring: Acts 6 and Acts 7. The last sentence (“Saul is looking on with great approval”) is actually the first sentence of chapter 8. But I put it here because contextually it is part of this story and has nothing to do with any of the stuff in chapter 8. Anyways, moving on!

Wasn’t Stephen supposed to be one of the Grecian Jews? He seems very knowledgeable about Jewish history, so perhaps the Hellenized Jews were not so Hellenized as we had thought. I guess later history sort of bears that out as well, since every time there was a revolt in Israel, Jews from many other parts of the Empire would come to help out. There were also a few anti-Roman revolts in Jewish communities in Libya, Egypt etc that were started totally independent of events in Judea. (wiki link) The rebellious streak in me admires the Jews for being so incorrigibly defiant.

Stephen’s speech here is basically a super-condensed version of the Old Testament. I shortened it a lot. The take-away from it is that throughout history God sent various prophets (e.g. Moses, Joseph) to the Jews, and each time the Jews always opposed them.

Re the “covenant of the circumcision”, according to the notes when God made his promises to Abraham about the promised land, letting him have many descendants, etc., one thing God wanted in exchange was for Abraham and all his male descendants/followers to be circumcised. The notes say that, “Circumcision was God’s appointed ‘sign of the covenant’, which signified Abraham’s covenanted commitment to the Lord […] It symbolized a self-maledictory oath: ‘If I am not loyal in faith and obedience to the Lord, may the sword of the Lord cut off me and my offspring as I have cut off my foreskin.'” According to wiki, it also served to help the Jews differentiate themselves from their neighbors. Wikipedia told me more than I ever, ever wanted to know about circumcision, and I’m not looking forward to the Old Testament where this topic will no doubt be revisited much more.

The temple that Solomon built was the first temple; it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587BC. The Jews built a new temple on the same spot in 517BC, and that was the temple that was around in Jesus’ time (and the one that got destroyed by the Romans in 70AD).

I’m probably wrong, but I’m assuming all the stuff Stephen said about the temple(s) was a response to the priests’ claim that Jesus was supposedly going to destroy the temple. Stephen is basically saying that God doesn’t need a building made by men, because God made everything. Or at least that’s what I took away from that part.

Also, I thought only the Romans could carry out the death sentence. The Romans obviously didn’t authorize this, and probably don’t even know it’s going on (although presumably they’ll find out after the fact). I wonder if they’ll be mad when they find out.

The next part of Acts is mainly about Saul, who we see here receiving everyone’s cloaks at the execution. According to the notes, people giving him their cloaks might have indicated that he was in charge of the execution. But that doesn’t really make sense to me, because wouldn’t the high priest have been the one in charge? My personal theory is that everyone throwing rocks was working up such a sweat doing it that they took their cloaks off, and Saul got put in charge of watching the cloak pile. Just like how women will leave their purses on a table so they can go do something else, and leave one woman in charge of watching them.