Preaching to a Hostile Crowd

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I invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to the book of Acts, chapter 7.
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And we're going to be looking at verses 54 to 60, so hold your place there.
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As I was examining my notes this morning, praying and thinking, I got the feeling that I'm not going to be able to get through this today.
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Not all the way through anyway.
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And rather than try to hastily run through something that is certainly worthy of our attention for more than a week, I'm going to preach as much as I can.
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And when it's time to finish, I'll pray and we'll come back next week and finish.
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Does that sound fair? I appreciate your encouragement.
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But we're going to be looking, continuing our look at Acts, chapter 7.
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We've been, or continue our look at Acts.
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We've been in a series, the series is entitled Beyond Our Borders.
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And at the beginning of the year we said, you know, we wanted this year to be different than the years preceding it in that we wanted to be really focused in our heart and in our mind on missions and evangelism.
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And we've tried in every way to expand ourselves in this area, understanding the value of being obedient to Christ in reaching the lost.
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And I believe that we need to be challenged more than ever in our own personal evangelism.
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I see God working in various ways, in opportunities that He's given to me, in opportunities He's given to us, in opportunities that He's given to our church, and even in people that He's bringing to our church.
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I see God working and our goal as a church should always be to glorify God and seek that people worship Him as He ought.
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And that's what evangelism is.
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I like what John Piper said.
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He said the reason why evangelism exists is because worship doesn't.
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There are people out there that aren't worshiping God that should be.
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So we need to be finding them and telling them about Christ.
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And so we know that the ultimate goal in all of this is the glory of God.
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So we seek people to glorify God.
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And that's what we're doing in evangelism.
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And we've seen so far in our study of Acts that the church was continually having to overcome obstacles.
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The first one was persecution.
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When the Sanhedrin tried to put a sanction against John and Peter, and they said, You can't preach in Jesus' name.
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And they looked at them and said, Hey, we can only preach about what we have seen and heard.
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And you must judge whether it's right or not for us to listen to you or to God.
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And of course the answer is we're going to listen to God.
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We're going to do what God tells us to do.
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And then corruption tried to enter the church.
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When persecution couldn't shut them up, Satan entered in with corruption through Ananias and Sapphira and their attempted embezzlement of the church.
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And God didn't allow that either.
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He exercised the first instance of what we would call church discipline, albeit in a much different way than we would exercise it.
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He simply caused their life to extinguish in an instant.
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And yet there it was.
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God said, My church will be pure, and I'm maintaining it, maintaining that purity.
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So persecution didn't stop the church.
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Corruption didn't stop the church.
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And then there was an attempt at division because the Hellenists and the Hebrews couldn't get along because the Hellenists were not getting the right attention for their widows.
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And so there began to be an eruption of division within the church.
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And if that's one thing that Satan's been pretty good at over the centuries, it's bringing division in God's church.
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But yet, in its infancy, God protected it by giving the apostles wisdom and said, No, here's what you do.
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Appoint from you seven men of good reputation, and out of those seven men you're going to see a new administration of ministry which would later become what we call the diaconate or the ministry of the deacons, the servants of the church, those whose responsibility it is to see that ministry in the church is properly maintained.
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Well, today we come to a major turning point in Acts.
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In fact, you could call this the watershed moment of the early church.
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Because up until now, the church is mainly in Jerusalem.
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It's going some 15,000 to 20,000 strong in Jerusalem.
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But now, because of what we're going to see today, the church is going to be dispersed from Jerusalem.
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And we'll start beginning to see an inkling of the fulfillment of Acts 1-8 where Jesus said, You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Samaria and Judea and to the end of the earth.
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You're going to see this happen.
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Well, it took a man being stoned to death to get it started.
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And while we might see tragedy, God saw triumph.
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We're moving out from Jerusalem and we're moving into the world.
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And it is tragic as we watch this scene unfold.
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It's tragic that people would close their ears to the Gospel, but we mustn't forget the hand of God in all of this.
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So as we begin to read, I want to invite you to stand.
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It's our custom to stand for the reading of God's Word.
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Verses 54-60.
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Now when they heard these things, they were enraged, and they ground their teeth at Him.
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But He, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
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And He said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.
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But they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and rushed together at Him.
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Then they cast Him out of the city and stoned Him, and the witnesses laid their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.
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And as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.
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And falling on his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against them.
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And when he had said this, he fell asleep.
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Father, I thank You for Your Word.
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I pray this morning for two things.
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One, that You would keep me from error.
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And two, that You would strengthen me by Your Holy Spirit to complete the message.
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And Father, in addition to these, open the hearts of Your people to the truth.
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May it be that there are those here who have never heard the Gospel, and that they would hear it and be saved.
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And Lord, those that are in Christ, would be ever strengthened in their commitment to following after Him.
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For it is in His name we pray, Amen.
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This is a very horrific scene in the early church.
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It's really one...
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I have to tell you, when I was thinking about this message, and I was preparing to write this message, I got to thinking, you know, we're a family church.
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We have kids in here.
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And really, it was an issue for me.
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I asked one of our parents, because I put questions in the bulletin to go along with the message, and I said, you know, the little kid question in regard to this message was kind of hard to think, you know, because obviously...
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Have you ever thought about what stoning is? Have you ever thought about it? Stoning was very common in the ancient world, and unfortunately, it is making a comeback in the Middle Eastern countries, and it's still very popular.
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In Iran, it's the number one form of capital punishment.
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A few years ago, a 21-year-old woman named Najiba, I believe is how you pronounce it, was stoned in front of a hundred cheering men after being accused of, quote-unquote, moral crimes by the local warlords in the Parwan province.
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A hundred men cheering, stoning her.
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In 2011, a mother and daughter were stoned in Ghazni City.
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And the reason why this is...
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It's the number one for the Taliban.
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They love it, especially for women.
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And the reason why is because it's a fearful thing.
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It's public, it's horrific, and it puts the whole world at bay.
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Look what we can do.
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And unless you want it done to you, you better toe the line.
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It's a very powerful mental image.
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And most of us understand, at least in a sense, what it is, stoning.
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It's capital punishment where a person is pelted with stones until they die.
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That's the definition of stoning.
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There are several methods of stoning.
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Sometimes a person was simply surrounded and stones were thrown until they died.
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Other ones require burying a person to the waist.
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I assume that's so they can't run away.
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They'll bury women to the chest.
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I'm assuming to cover her body.
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Some places they put you on a cliff, not high enough to kill you, but just high enough to where it'll break something and you can't run away.
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And they'll push you off the cliff and you'll fall and you'll hit the ground.
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And then everybody stands up on the cliff.
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You know, now they got gravity helping the pelting of the stones.
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So it is in every way a very violent, horrific death.
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And the only reprieve that a person can hope for in a stoning is hit me in the head early.
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I mean, really, that's it.
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To get knocked out so that I don't feel what's gonna come and take my life.
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And it's vital that we understand the weight of this.
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As we're reading this, as Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul long ago taught me something, and that is this, we don't often read the scriptures as we ought.
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We don't often read the scriptures existentially.
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And when you hear the word existentialism, you think about 19th century or 20th century existentialism.
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That's not what I'm talking about.
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What I mean, we don't read the scriptures with an eye to the fact that this is a real person in real time who existed in a very real way.
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I mean, the way Dr.
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Sproul explained, he said, think about Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain.
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You know, we read it as a story.
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But it's not a story.
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It's a real man with a real son who's got a real knife.
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And his son's saying, where's the lamb? Can you imagine the pain that Abraham felt at that moment when his son looked at him and said, Dad, where's the lamb? You know, we don't think about the reality of these people and the reality of their life.
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But Stephen was a man.
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And Stephen was stoned to death for his commitment to the gospel.
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And it should weight our heart when we read a story like this to know that it's not just a story.
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This is not a Shakespearean tragedy.
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This is a real man in a real time and a real place undergoing real hatred under a very real enemy.
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He's the first Christian martyr.
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The first person to give himself to death for his fidelity to Christ.
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He won't be the last.
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For in the first couple hundred years of the church, it will go on forever.
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It will go into the thousands who die for their faith.
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But Stephen is the prototype.
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He's the first to give himself.
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His death was horrible and unjustifiable from the sense of what was done to him because he was simply killed for preaching the truth.
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So I want to simply walk through the scene.
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And as I said today, I'm simply going to look at the exposition of the text.
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And normally how I preach, for those of you who are not used to my preaching, I'll normally give an exposition and an application.
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And it'll be in the same message.
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Well, today I think I'm just going to deal with the exposition.
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And next week we'll come back and remind ourselves of what we've learned and make applications.
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So there'll be application today throughout.
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But we're going to simply stick, just read through the text and learn from it.
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But to do that, I want us to back up and understand the scene a bit.
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Because we're first introduced to Stephen in chapter six.
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If you turn back to chapter six in verse 5, this is the calling of the first servants of the church.
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The church has had this attempt at division.
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The division has caused a problem in the church.
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And so the elders, or apostles rather, they're not elders, the apostles are now calling for this need of these seven men.
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And so we see in verse 5, and what they had said pleased the whole gathering and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit.
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And it goes on to say they chose Philip and Prochorus and Nicanor and Timon and the others.
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But we see Stephen is the first one.
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He's called a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit.
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And almost immediately, we come down to verse 8, almost immediately we see Stephen is preaching Jesus and he's accused of blasphemy.
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Now that's a common thing to happen in the early church because what they're saying about Jesus is that Jesus is God in the flesh.
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And for the first century Jew, that's idolatry.
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So they would say he's an idolater and a blasphemer.
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And so they come against him for his preaching about Jesus.
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And then in chapter 7 in verse 1, all the way down to verse 53, we have Stephen's sermon.
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Now, I sent out an email this week.
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I don't know how many of you saw it.
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I encourage you to read this sermon.
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Stephen's sermon is one of the most precious messages in the New Testament that's outlined for us as a sermon.
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What he does is he recounts the history of Israel.
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He talks about Abraham's call and the covenant that God had with Abraham.
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He talks about the patriarchs and their ministry and Joseph who came from them.
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And the call of Moses and those who followed him.
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The tabernacle and the eventual temple which would be built by Solomon.
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And he expresses that God is not confined to that temple, which is something that was a hard thing to swallow for people who had worshipped at the temple and believed that's where God was.
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And he said, no, God is not confined to a place built with hands.
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And while we have this temple place wherein the presence of God is known to have resided, that doesn't limit God to just that place.
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Yes, it's a holy place.
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Yes, it's a sanctum sanctorum.
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It's the holy of holies.
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But God's not limited to that.
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And as he's teaching this, at verse 51 he changes.
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I want you to notice this if you look with me at verse 51.
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At verse 51, he's recounting the history of Israel and he stops and he says, you stiff-necked people.
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Now, it doesn't say anything in the text that causes this change.
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But if you're reading through the message, you see that this is a hard shift.
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Now, it could be that this is just I've given you the history, now I'm going to give you how it applies to you.
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I'm going to smash you with this.
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Or it could be that he is seeing the response on the faces of his hearers.
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And if you've never preached, I'm going to tell you how it goes.
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I'm preaching and I see people's face go, hmm, that means I need to back up.
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That didn't make sense.
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Or I see people going, and this is not going to come over the recording.
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We used to have people that would sit and just grind their teeth, because they didn't like what I was preaching.
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And we've had that over the years.
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That's fine.
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No, it's really not fine.
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But you see their arms folded, teeth grinding.
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And I think that's what's happening here.
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And again, it doesn't say it in the text, but we see this hard shift in his preaching.
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I think he's to the point now, I'm going to address you.
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Because you're the one, you're hearing what I'm saying, but you're not really hearing it.
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I'm preaching this message, but you're not listening to me.
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So I'm going to get your attention, and I'm going to say what is the real problem here.
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And it's your stiff neck.
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And that reference is an older reference.
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It had to do with how an animal would treat a yoke.
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If you're trying to yoke an animal, and it would fight with that stiff neck to keep you from hooking something to it.
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He says, you guys, you're fighting this.
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You stiff-necked people.
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And he says, uncircumcised in heart and ears.
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That is a reference, of course, to circumcision, which we know is a physical thing.
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Circumcision was something that was done from father to son throughout Jewish history as a reminder of the covenant that God made with Abraham.
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God gave Abraham the covenant of circumcision, or the covenant promise and the sign of circumcision.
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He said, every one of your male children on the eighth day will be circumcised.
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And so there was a symbol.
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But now he's making it a spiritual thing.
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He said, you might be circumcised physically, which all of them would be because they were all Jews.
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He said, but you're uncircumcised in your heart and you're uncircumcised in your ear.
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Now, physically, we know you can't circumcise the heart and you can't circumcise the ear.
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But spiritually, what he means is that your religion is external.
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You have a circumcised body, but you don't have a circumcised spirit and you don't have a circumcised mind.
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Your heart and your ears are still worldly.
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You are not yet a child of God.
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All the physical things that you have done, physical circumcision, physically keeping the law, you are still lost.
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Now, how do you think that sat with a group of very religious guys who would have considered themselves the crème de la crème of the religious elite? You're telling me I'm lost? You're telling me I am spiritually uncircumcised? Who do you think you are? I'm not on trial.
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You're surrounded.
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You're the one.
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How dare you? And he says, not only are you stiff-necked, you're resistant, not only are you spiritually lost, but you always resist the Holy Spirit.
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Now, this is not a message on Reformed theology.
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I'm not going to get into this.
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This is an issue, this passage, on resisting the Spirit, because we teach a doctrine, the eye and tulip, irresistible grace.
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And some people say, well, here's a place where it says people resist the Holy Spirit.
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Newsflash.
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We don't say that people don't resist the Spirit.
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We say people resist.
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That's all people do from birth is resist the Spirit.
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That's all people do.
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What we believe is the only reason why any man ever stops resisting the Spirit is that God gives him a new heart and that he is able then to receive the things of God because the natural man cannot receive the things of God.
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Romans chapter 8.
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So yeah, no duh.
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Yes, they're resisting the Spirit because they act like we never read this.
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No, we understand this.
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It's there.
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They're resisting and He's challenging them because guess what? It is still our responsibility.
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It's still we who will answer to God for our resistance to the Spirit.
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And think about this.
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This is the same guys who just a couple months earlier had condemned Christ.
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This is not a whole new Sanhedrin.
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This ain't like Congress went out and a new Congress came in.
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It was the same group.
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And when He said you resist the Holy Spirit, you resist the very man of God, the Son of God through whom the works of the Spirit were so manifest among you that He even raised the dead and you saw that and denied Him.
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How dare you? You resist the Holy Spirit as your fathers did.
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See? He's now looking back.
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Look at all the guys in Jewish history.
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Think of all the people that were following Moses.
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Moses, obviously led by the Spirit.
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Moses parted the Red Sea.
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Moses did all these miracles.
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And yet the people, when they got hungry, what did they do? They ran that gator against Moses.
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And He said, your people have always resisted the Spirit.
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Your people have always gone against the Holy Spirit.
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And then He goes on.
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Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? That's a powerful question.
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You are not sons of God here.
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You're sons of your fathers who were all sons of the devil because you were persecuting God's men.
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And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One.
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That's a reference to Christ.
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Whom you have now betrayed and murdered.
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So now let's just kind of take stock.
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He's called them stiff-necked, which means obstinate or resistant.
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He has called them uncircumcised in heart and ears.
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That means lost.
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He said they're resistant to the Holy Spirit, which means they're spiritually dull.
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And now He said you're a murderer.
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Kind of sounds like that Wednesday night thing when we're telling people about their sins.
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Have you ever lied? Have you ever stolen? It's almost like He's recounting for them their sins.
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He said you murdered Christ.
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And then He goes in verse 53.
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You who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.
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And again, that is the hardest of all offensive things to say to a Jew.
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You've been given the law and you don't keep it.
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And to them who believe themselves to be the most powerful keepers of the law are now highly offended.
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So all that leads up to verse 54.
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Now we finally get to what I want to preach about.
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That was all just introduction.
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That's why I said we're not going to get through it all today.
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We get to verse 54.
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Now we're in the passage that we're actually going to give an exposition.
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And I'm not going to get to the outline of the bulletin.
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So don't worry about trying to fill those in.
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If you just have to know because it bothers you, I'll give it to you next week.
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Let me give an exposition of the text.
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The first thing we see is the hatred of the accusers.
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The hatred of the accusers.
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Verse 54, it says, Now when they heard these things they were enraged and they ground their teeth at Him.
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Now the word enraged there, I think ESV misses it a little.
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Because the word means to be sawn in half.
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And you could say, well that means to be angered or whatever.
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King James says they were cut to the heart.
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And that's what happened.
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Stephen is preaching to them and they are cut to the heart.
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And what that tells me, it's so interesting when you start comparing Scripture to Scripture.
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Because if you go back to Acts chapter 2, Peter preached a sermon to some men at Pentecost.
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And they were cut to the heart.
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Here Stephen preaches to the Sanhedrin, the most religious of the elite.
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And they are cut to the heart.
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Peter saw 3,000 people get saved.
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And Stephen is about to get stoned.
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It's amazing.
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When you compare the two situations.
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In one, hearts are cut and people respond, what shall we do to be saved? In another, hearts are cut and the people respond in murderous rage.
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What's the difference? This is again getting back to the issue of God's sovereignty.
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Because I'll tell you this, the difference is not that the people on Pentecost were good old boys with good hearts and malleable spirits.
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And the Sanhedrin were stiff necked, hard hearted guys.
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That's not the big difference.
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Because we're all stiff necked, we're all hard hearted.
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The difference is the sovereign grace of God who opened the hearts of those men on Pentecost.
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That's the difference.
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Never apply someone's willingness to come to Christ to their own goodness.
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The only reason anyone's willing, whether it's one or 3,000, the only reason anyone is willing when their heart is cut to come to Christ is because it so pleases God to open their hearts to come.
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Just keep that in mind.
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I remember one time I was talking to a guy about Reformed theology and he just couldn't take God's sovereignty and salvation.
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He just couldn't stand it.
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He used to fuss at me about it all the time.
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And at one point I said, I said, listen.
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I said, imagine that you were in church and there was another guy sitting beside you.
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And you both came at the same time.
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You both as lost as a goose.
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You had a similar past.
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You both came in lost as a goose.
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You both heard the same Gospel.
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You both heard the truth proclaimed.
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And when the pastor called for repentance and faith, you stood up and came forward and received the gift of eternal life and your friend stayed seated, left as obstinate as when he came.
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I said, now you tell me this.
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What's the difference? Were you smarter? Were you better? Were you more spiritually sensitive? Was your heart more malleable than his? Are you better than him? And he said, no.
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I said, so what you're saying is that God opened your heart? Yeah? There it is.
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Stop fussing.
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Because you are telling me.
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You are telling me everything I'm telling you.
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But the only reason any of you have ever come to Christ is because God was merciful to you.
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None of you have ever come to Christ because you were willing.
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The Bible says no one can come to Me unless the Father in Heaven grants it to him.
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You think you're outside of the no one? That's what we call a universal negative.
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Like if I said no one can ride a bike and then here comes Ching Ching, a little kid riding a bike, that means I'm wrong.
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Because I made a universal negative.
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And if I say no one can come to Christ unless the Father grants it to him and somebody does on their own come to Christ, guess what? Jesus is wrong.
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The only reason those men on Pentecost came is because it so pleased the will of the Father to open their hearts to come.
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It's simple.
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It's simple.
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At this moment we see though that is not the case.
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And what we see is their anger, their natural hatred of God is allowed to go free and show itself.
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It says they ground their teeth at Him.
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This is an interesting word here.
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The word Bruxo is the Greek word and it actually became a medical term, Bruxism.
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Some of you may have it.
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Where you grind your teeth.
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Some people have that.
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You grind your teeth.
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Some people have to wear a brace in their mouth so they don't hurt their teeth at night.
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And so this term simply means that they were so mad that their teeth were literally crunching on themselves.
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And this is an interesting thought for me because the Bible says in hell...
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By the way, we believe in hell.
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In case anybody's wondering.
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And we believe in eternal punishment, not in some type of a temporary punishment or soul sleep, psychopenia.
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We don't believe in that.
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We believe that hell is a horrible, terrible place and our goal is to seek that men don't go there.
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But it says in hell men gnash their teeth.
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That means to grind their teeth together.
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And often people say, well, why do people grind their teeth in hell? Well, the simple thing you could say, well, they're in pain.
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And often when we're in pain, which I certainly know about, you grind your teeth.
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It hurts.
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But couldn't it also be that what men do in hell is continue to demonstrate their hatred of God and gnashing their teeth at Him? You know, somebody asked, and I think it was Dr.
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White who made this point, and I heard Dr.
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MacArthur say it as well.
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Somebody asked, why is it that hell is forever? It's because their hatred of God never stops.
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The man in hell will never stop hating God.
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You don't think in hell he's going to turn it around, do you? If he didn't repent under common grace, he's certainly not going to repent under no grace at all.
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And that's what hell is.
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Hell is no grace at all.
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So what we see here, when these men are hating Stephen so much that they're grinding their teeth at Stephen, it's simply just a momentary glimpse of the hell that many of them would experience for eternity.
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Dr.
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F.F.
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Bruce said this.
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He's talking about...
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Oh, I'm sorry, I jumped ahead.
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Excuse me.
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I'm not going to quote Dr.
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Bruce yet, but I'm going to get to him in a minute.
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But the reality is the hatred of God is what's demonstrated in their gnashing of their teeth.
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Now we look at verse 55.
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We see the peace.
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We saw the hatred of the accusers.
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Now we're going to see the peace of the accused.
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P-E-A-C-E.
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Peace of the accused.
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Because it says in verse 55, It said, But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God in Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
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I can't even imagine.
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I really, I can't, for the life of me, imagine what Stephen must have thought at that moment.
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It says, He was full of the Holy Spirit.
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To be full of something in Scripture means to be consumed by it or controlled by it.
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It says not to be filled with wine, for that is debauchery.
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Why? Don't be controlled by wine.
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That's what that means.
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So when he says he was filled with the Holy Spirit, he was under the control of the Holy Spirit.
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He was consumed with the Holy Spirit.
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At that moment, he was given an otherworldly strength.
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And it says in chapter 6, verse 15, he had the face of an angel.
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This man is being accused of blasphemy, a capital crime, and he looked like an angel.
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And it said, And he looked, and he saw the glory of God.
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And he saw Jesus standing.
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And if you have your, if you're an underliner, a Bible underliner, is that a verb? I don't know.
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If you underline your Bibles, underline the word stand, standing.
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Because that's important actually.
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Because in this moment, what we see is not what we expect to see.
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Because in every other case where it says that Christ, you know, he died, and he was resurrected, and he ascended into heaven, and he did what? He sat down at the right hand of the Father.
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And we see this in Scripture.
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We read it in Hebrews when we read from Hebrews earlier in our communion meditation.
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We see this in Ephesians where it says he sat down at the right hand of the Father.
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Ephesians 1, verses 20-23 talks about sitting down.
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And the Apostles' Creed, which we use at this church in times of when we're doing certain meditations, the Apostles' Creed says he was seated at the right hand of the Almighty in heaven.
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So we see this difference here.
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Stephen's not sitting.
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I mean, Christ is not sitting.
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But he's standing.
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Standing.
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Why? Some people see a meaningless difference.
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They say, oh, it doesn't mean anything whether you're standing or sitting.
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What does it matter? But could it not be that what we are seeing here is the Christ, the Advocate, standing as the defender of His beloved brother.
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We're called brothers and sisters of Christ, right? We're called to join heirs with Christ.
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And here He stands as His Advocate.
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He stands at this moment to defend His servant.
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His servant is being condemned for his faith in Him.
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And here He stands in His defense and welcoming His servant home.
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Now I'll quote F.F.
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Bruce.
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Stephen has been confessing Christ before men and now he sees Christ confessing His servant before God.
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What a beautiful thought.
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And here we have Christ seated at the right hand of the Father until all will be made a footstool for His feet.
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But He arises to welcome home His beloved.
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It's beautiful, as I said.
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I can't imagine what He saw in all of its glory.
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And then we see the beatific announcement.
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This is verse 56.
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The beatific announcement.
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And He said, Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.
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Now, that term Son of Man, hugely important passage.
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We read in our opening for today's worship service, Daniel 7, verses 13 and 14.
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You might want to make a note of that and go back later and look at it because that is a prophetic announcement about the One who would come and be seated at the right hand of the Father.
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That's Christ, the Son of Man.
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That's why Jesus often referred to Himself many times when He was talking to Peter.
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Who do they say the Son of Man is? He's talking about Himself.
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And as far as I know, and I'm willing to be corrected, as far as I know, Stephen is the only other person in Scripture that calls Him by this title, Son of Man.
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And what's interesting is Stephen calls Him by that title in the very place Jesus called Himself by that title in front of the Sanhedrin.
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Remember Jesus said, You will see the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven.
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That's Me.
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You remember Jesus? And now Stephen, same condition, same situation, fixing to be condemned to die.
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And he said, I see the Son of Man standing beside the glory of God the Father.
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It's a powerful inference made in the text regarding who Jesus is and continues to be.
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The One prophesied in the Old Testament whom these men should have known.
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The Son of Man.
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And it was that title that enraged them.
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And so we see in verse 57 the childish reaction.
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The childish reaction.
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It says in verse 57, But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed at Him.
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That literally means to press from both sides or press from all sides.
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So literally, they stuck their thumbs in their ears and they ran at Him.
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Now, have you ever seen a kid? I'm sure none of you did this.
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But did you ever see a kid? Mom is yelling, Come home.
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I can't hear you.
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You run away.
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La, la, la, la, la.
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I can't hear you.
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Now maybe that's a silly way of looking at this, but what we see here is childishness in the midst of men who are supposed to be among the most religiously mature.
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They stick their thumbs in their ears and they run at Him.
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I am not going to listen to this anymore.
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You've attacked me.
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You've called me a murderer.
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You've called me lost.
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You've called me obstinate.
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How dare you? And they run at Him.
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And in verse 58, we see the introduction of Saul in just a very subtle way.
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Nothing is said about him before and nothing is said in this context afterward.
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Just he's introduced to us.
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He'll come in later and we're going to study that when we get there.
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But he's just introduced subtly at this moment in verse 58.
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It says, Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him, and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.
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Can you believe that this guy is going to be the greatest missionary in the history of the church? Can you believe that this guy is going to be responsible for writing the majority of the books of the New Testament? Can you believe that this guy will just a few decades later himself die for the same faith that's now being proposed and espoused by Stephen? It's amazing.
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He's consenting to his death.
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And what's interesting about the life of Saul is that throughout his life, he'll remember this moment.
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And he'll recount it.
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He recounts it when he's testifying that I persecuted the church.
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I did these things.
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To the point that he calls himself what in 1 Timothy 1.15? The chief of sinners.
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You think this might have been in his mind when he thought back to the things that he had done? This moment where he is not only giving full consent, but he stands by as a witness to the evil that's being perpetuated in the name of quote unquote faith.
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And finally, we see in verses 59 and 60 the final words of the first martyr.
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The final words of the first martyr.
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He says in verse 59, and they were stoning Stephen.
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As they were stoning Stephen, he cried out, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.
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That's very similar to what Christ said when He was on the cross.
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He said, Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit.
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But there's a difference here.
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When Jesus said it, He said it to God.
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When Stephen said it, He said it to Jesus.
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When Jesus said it, He said, Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit.
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But in this text, it says specifically, He said, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.
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Jesus speaks to the Father on behalf of us.
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Jesus is our advocate with the Father.
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Jesus is one with the Father in Trinitarian glory.
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And Stephen here represents that triune power by committing himself, not to the Father alone, but to the Son through whom we find salvation.
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And he said, do not hold this sin against them.
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That's a tremendous act of grace that he would commit a prayer of pardon to those who have hated him so much that they would pelt him with stones until he died.
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And it was most beautifully fulfilled.
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He said, Father, do not hold this sin against them.
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And the them included a man named Saul.
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Augustine made a bold assertion saying that if it were not for the prayer of Stephen, the church would not have gained the apostle Paul.
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Calvin disagreed, but he said this.
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He said, well, I will not say as Augustine said that unless Stephen had prayed that the church should not have Paul, for this is somewhat hard, only I say this, that whereas God pardoned Paul, it appeareth thereby that Stephen's prayer was not in vain.
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Father, forgive them.
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Father, forgive them.
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And he did.
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He reached out in grace to a young man named Saul.
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And then it says that he fell asleep.
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He fell asleep.
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You know, beloved, that is the most powerful analogy in Scripture for the death of a saint.
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It never says that saints die.
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It says they fall asleep.
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And that's not trying to recount to us any false doctrine of soul sleep whereby we go to sleep here and wake up at judgment.
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That's not what's being taught.
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What's being taught is that death for the believer is no longer a reality.
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All death is for us is a transferring from life to life.
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We go from life here, which is bound in sin.
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We go from life here, which is bound in the flesh.
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We go from life here, which is often painful and hurting.
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And we go from life to life, not from life to death.
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He's not dead.
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His body sleeps, and his soul is with Christ.
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Beloved, what a promise.
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And that's how I kind of want to bring the sermon to a close today.
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To remind you of this.
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For the unbeliever goes from death to death.
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Spiritual death here to eternal conscious punishment in hell from death to death.
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But the believer goes from life to life.
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What are you? Are you one who is still dead in your sins? And if so...
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Hey, sweetie.
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Are you still dead in your sins? And if so, looking forward to nothing but eternal death? But are you alive in Christ with no fear of death? I pray you would search your heart.
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And on this day, know for certain.
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Let's pray.
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Father, Your mercy is so amazing.
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And as we see Your merciful hand on Stephen throughout this horrible situation, we are reminded, O God, that You never abandon Your saints.
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As Stephen stood there being pelted with stones, he saw the arms of Christ reaching for him.
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And he was not afraid.
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God, I pray that everyone under the sound of my voice would know the same Christ that Stephen knew.
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That we would have no fear in life.
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That we would have no judgment in death.
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But that all that we would have is Christ.
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In Him we live and move and have our being.
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For He is our Savior and there is none other given to man.
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And no other name under heaven among men by which we must be saved.
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Lord, use this time of teaching for Your glory to edify Your saints and to save those whom You call.
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In Jesus' name.
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And thank You for Your grace for today.
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Amen.