Stephen Preaches the Love God Gave First

5He gave him no inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on. He promised that he would give it to him for a possession, and to his offspring after him, when he still had no child. 6God spoke in this way: that his offspring would live as aliens in a strange land, and that they would be enslaved and mistreated for four hundred years. 7‘I will judge the nation to which they will be in bondage,’ said God, ‘and after that will they come out, and serve me in this place.’ 8He gave him the covenant of circumcision. So Abraham became the father of Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day. Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob became the father of the twelve patriarchs.

Stephen knew perfectly well that when this sermon was over he would be killed by the people gnashing their teeth at him. Yet he did not stop preaching, and he spoke of Jesus longing that even one among them would hear the word he preached. The message he brought them was the Old Testament, which they knew so well. He preached it because the people of Israel were insisting that they were God’s specially chosen people and the descendants of Abraham.

Acts 7:4-5

4Then he came out of the land of the Chaldaeans, and lived in Haran. From there, when his father was dead, God moved him into this land, where you are now living. 5He gave him no inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on. He promised that he would give it to him for a possession, and to his offspring after him, when he still had no child.

There is a paradox and a mystery in this passage, because it is the verse that lets us see what kind of promise God gave Abraham. God clearly commanded Abraham to go to Canaan and said he would give that land to him and to his descendants. Yet when Abraham came to Canaan, God did not give him even enough ground to set his foot on. This was God telling Abraham in advance what would happen in his life, and it was a promise that he would bring it about at the fitting time. If we remember well what God has told us, we will be able to meet the circumstances and problems we encounter in life without panic.

Hebrews 11:8

8By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out to the place which he was to receive for an inheritance. He went out, not knowing where he went.

Hebrews 11:11

11By faith, even Sarah herself received power to conceive, and she bore a child when she was past age, since she counted him faithful who had promised.

The writer of Hebrews says that Abraham obeyed by faith. Looking at Abraham’s faith as it appears in Genesis, one may even wonder whether he was really qualified to become the father of many nations. Abraham became the father of many nations by faith, and the reason is God’s promise — sovereign, and given from God’s side alone. Once God has made a promise he always fulfills it, and it is because that is God’s character that Abraham could become the father of many nations.

Genesis 18:14-15

14Is anything too hard for Yahweh? At the set time I will return to you, when the season comes round, and Sarah will have a son.” 15Then Sarah denied it, saying, “I didn’t laugh,” for she was afraid. He said, “No, but you did laugh.”

Did Sarah have faith? God said she would conceive Isaac, but Sarah did not believe and did not accept the word. Isaac was born by God’s sovereign work, not by Sarah’s faith. In just this way, if God does not give faith as a gift, we too have no faith with which to believe in Jesus Christ to the end. Abraham and Sarah had no faith, and God made them the ancestors of faith anyway — because God had promised first. This is why Stephen wanted to teach that whether one becomes an ancestor of faith or a martyr, it is all possible only because God gave the faith.

That God did not give Abraham even enough land to set his foot on and still told him to go to Canaan is because faith is believing what one cannot see. If Abraham believed the promise that his descendants would certainly conquer Canaan and live as God’s children, then that land would certainly be conquered. Jesus promised that he would prepare a place and come to take us there. Because heaven is not visible to us now, there is nothing but faith by which to lay hold of that word.

Just as Abraham did not receive the land of Canaan straight away, so we too have not yet received so much as a footing in the New Jerusalem that Jesus Christ has prepared. But just as we can live in joy because we have already received heaven by faith, so Abraham believed that God, who is faithful and who fulfills, would surely give him descendants as many as the stars.

Acts 7:9

9“The patriarchs, moved with jealousy against Joseph, sold him into Egypt. God was with him,

Joseph received the absolute love of his father Jacob. Jacob had a number of sons, but he loved only Joseph, born of Rachel among his four wives. Because Joseph alone wore a coat of many colors such as princes and princesses wore, the other sons were jealous of him. Looking at Joseph in his coat of many colors, the sons envied and hated him, and holding a grievance against their father, they sold Joseph into Egypt.

The brothers acted out of their hatred for Joseph, but God used the brothers’ hatred to accomplish his plan. Of course Joseph must have felt wronged. But just as a ship goes far faster when the wind is strong, the wind of the brothers’ jealousy had to blow for God’s plan to move quickly.

Stephen said that Joseph, sold into Egypt because of his brothers’ jealousy and quarreling, was hated because he had to play a central part in God’s work — and that God used that hatred. That Joseph, once in Egypt, was in Potiphar’s house; that he went to prison because of Potiphar’s wife; that he met the officials there; that he interpreted Pharaoh’s dream and became the prime minister of Egypt — all of it was God’s providence. To Pharisees, scribes, and priests filled with their own righteousness, he was making it known that however many sacrifices they offered and however righteous they claimed to be before God, the work of God moves by God’s absolute sovereignty.

Friends, try thinking of Jacob as God and Rachel as Jesus Christ. God (Jacob) loves Jesus Christ (Rachel), and therefore loves the chosen believers who are his fruit (Joseph) so much that Satan (the brothers) is jealous.

Seen this way, will Satan, who holds the power of the air, leave believers alone? Will he leave weak, utterly frail sinners alone to receive God’s absolute love and enter heaven? Satan will stir people up endlessly to torment and wear them down, tormenting them so that they will not look to God’s work and will stumble.

If you hold the Lord more firmly the more you are refined, God will surely begin a wonderful work through you. For without being grafted into the true vine with its deep roots, no one can ever bear the fruit of the true vine.

Joseph became prime minister at the end of his suffering, and the reason he did not take revenge on his brothers was that he knew what kind of God he had. So there was no need to quarrel with his brothers; God would judge their sin, so there was no need for revenge.

Up to this point Stephen, telling the story of Abraham and the twelve tribes, has been preaching that God is faithful and fulfills his promises. To fulfill the promise to make Abraham a source of blessing, he caused Jesus Christ to be born from his descendants and saved all humankind.

Acts 7:17

17“But as the time of the promise came close which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt,

As the time God promised to Abraham drew near, the people of Israel in Egypt multiplied so that God’s plan could be carried out. To human thinking it may seem that nothing is changing, and we grow anxious. But when the time God promised arrives, every circumstance changes.

Acts 7:20-21

20At that time Moses was born, and was exceedingly handsome. He was nourished three months in his father’s house. 21When he was thrown out, Pharaoh’s daughter took him up, and reared him as her own son.

Stephen connects Moses immediately to this in order to say that Moses too was born to complete God’s plan, and that we likewise were not born for no reason. He is asking them to consider why Moses was born at that very point when all the boys were being killed, and why, in a situation where the boys were being killed, Moses alone was found and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter. If he was a boy born to the Hebrews the princess should of course have killed him, yet God protected Moses’ life — and so, Stephen stressed, Pharaoh’s own daughter protected Moses’ life instead.

Stephen divides Moses’ life into three parts. The first, up to the age of forty, was a time of coming to know himself. Though he lived as a prince, he was born into circumstances where death was unavoidable, and though he ought to have died, Moses did not die. Where God’s promise and providence are, one absolutely does not die in any situation.

We too were born under a death from which there was no escape, and because of Adam’s original sin we were born already dead. But by God’s astonishing providence we were led to the cross of Jesus Christ, and he raised us — the dead — again by his precious blood and called us righteous. Like Moses, who while on a journey toward death came to hold the status of the princess’s son, we who were born in the body of sinners and could only die have come to hold new life as God’s children through Jesus Christ.

Moses grew up as a prince of Egypt, but when he learned that he was a Hebrew he went through a long time of conflict and pain. Second, Moses came to a period of opening his eyes to his people. Only at the age of forty did he think of looking after his people, and he came to a period of thinking about his nation. If we call the first stage of Moses’ life the day his self awoke, the second life was the period in which his eyes opened to his people. Moses killed an Egyptian soldier thinking he was helping his people, but that incident created the hard situation that drove Moses into the wilderness. From Moses’ point of view he would call it patriotism and love.

But because everything is relative, our own country is split into South and North, into ruling party and opposition, and even the church is splitting into denominations. Stephen is telling the people listening in the synagogue not to judge and settle everything by their own knowledge and thinking. From Moses’ point of view it was clearly an act meant to help his own people, but if the other party does not trust Moses and will not accept him, all that fullness comes to nothing.

God saw that Moses’ thinking had to change. So he did not stop him from going out into the wilderness with a murderer’s name on him. People set up good conditions that the world recognizes and then whip themselves to meet them. But God wants sound judgment, faith, and obedience more than human qualifications. God does not use a person because they are clever, passionate, and strong. He uses us when we can do nothing by our own strength. God would not use Moses until Moses had utterly collapsed. So it is wisdom to set everything down early.

Acts 7:30-32

30“When forty years were fulfilled, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush. 31When Moses saw it, he wondered at the sight. As he came close to see, a voice of the Lord came to him, 32‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ Moses trembled, and dared not look.

Only after forty years of wilderness life, at the age of eighty, did the third stage of Moses’ life begin to open — the stage of his eyes opening to God. Meeting God spiritually was not frustration and despair but a beginning. Moses, who had lived as a prince, was shut up for forty years in Sinai as if in prison and spent all his precious youth there. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, he had to tend his father-in-law’s sheep against his will — but at the loneliest and most painful bottom he met the truest God.

The God who appeared to Moses was present in the flame and introduced himself as the God of the living. Moses heard God’s voice directly and saw with his own eyes the God at work in the flame, yet he did not recognize him as God. For the God who appeared in the bush was not the God he had known. Moses had been believing in a God of his own making, so even when his own name was called he did not recognize him.

Believers too attend church and serve, yet they set up a God of their own and serve a God who works for them. God is supposed to answer as they want; and because he does not quickly give what they want, they are disappointed, stumble, and leave for the world.

Acts 7:33-34

33The Lord said to him, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you stand is holy ground. 34I have surely seen the affliction of my people that is in Egypt, and have heard their groaning. I have come down to deliver them. Now come, I will send you into Egypt.’

Moses began to grasp that when the God of truth, the living God, steps into a believer’s life, one can be unafraid and bold.

People who have truly met God pass through two processes. The first is the process of taking off the sandals. That means cutting off the shape of your old self and your past. To come to God the past must be thrown away, and to go out into the sea of the Word the first thing to do is untie the rope that holds us. For without stripping off the shape of the old self and cutting off the past, no matter how much a person prays and reads the Word and sings praise, they do not change. Such a person leaves the vessel of their spirit full of filthy water without emptying it, and then complains that God cannot change them.

But the people God has chosen will finally have no choice but to take off their sandals like Moses before the great and honored God. Though he gives us time for repentance and time to take off our sandals, let us not commit the folly of disobeying and being disciplined by the Lord on the last day. Let us all take off our sandals. Only when we strip off our own lives, our plans, our purposes, and our values will God enter the emptied spirit and work there.

The second is that God sends the trained Moses, knowing the suffering of the people of Israel and hearing their cry. In this process Moses, who had been tending sheep, is called, and Moses — grown into a leader through forty years in the palace and forty years in the wilderness — comes to carry his calling. In the same way, when God has entrusted believers with material things, wisdom, and honor and has let them hear the Word, it is as if he were saying: this is for my people who are to be saved.

That God now trains the murderer Moses, makes him born again, and sends him to the real murderer, Pharaoh, is God carrying out his plan to set the people of Israel free through Moses’ faith. This plan is precisely what he promised Abraham, and by fulfilling that promise he shows the people that God is alive.

John 8:44-45

44You are of your father, the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and doesn’t stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks on his own; for he is a liar, and the father of lies. 45But because I tell the truth, you don’t believe me.

The devil has no truth in him; he speaks lies, speaks his own thoughts, and is a murderer who means to lead people to death. Because there is no truth in them, however much the word of Jesus Christ is preached they will not listen and will not believe. The reason Jesus came to this earth was that he came himself to save his children from the Satan who means to drag souls to hell. Just as Jesus Christ carried that calling completely, and just as Moses brought the people of Israel out of Egypt according to God’s command, you too must live according to God’s command. And you must labor to save souls with the word of truth.

The point of Stephen’s sermon is exactly this: that in calling Abraham and choosing Joseph and Moses, God chooses and trains believers in order to accomplish his work, and does his work through the believers he has chosen. To everyone listening to the sermon he was saying: you pray to God now, you give to the poor, you offer sacrifices with all your care — but you do it in a faith that does not acknowledge that Jesus has come. In the end you do not believe God. That believers today can offer worship and offerings to God and pray with all their hearts is likewise possible only because God gave the grace. There is no reason whatever to be proud because you devote yourself or pray a little more than other believers.

Blessed is the one who truly serves God as the God of the Word and of truth, and as Father. For people who serve God through their own zeal and works can turn and resent God the moment they are hurt or their circumstances become a little hard.

As the Lord said, that a child of the devil will never accept the truth — you must know how blessed a thing it is that you are now full of the Word, and how thankful a thing it is that you are receiving God’s love. Give thanks to Jesus Christ, who called us when we were nothing, sealed us as his children, and is working even now to seat us in a place of glory. Depend on the Holy Spirit, who neither slumbers nor sleeps as he guards us from every temptation of the world and every dark power, and grow spiritually so that you may hear that Word.

Friends, I am begging you — depend on the Word. Stand on the rock of it, and cry out as surely and as boldly as Stephen did. I am begging you. For that faith alone is the reason and the love for which the Lord died on the cross.

May you always walk with the Lord. I bless you in the name of Jesus Christ.