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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 608. The Defence
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The Defence
1. Stephen's defence is really one of the finest things in that Book of splendours-the Word of God. Carelessly reading it, one might take it for an epitome of the history of his people, and might imagine that, ere he had reached the application of it, Stephen, suddenly pricked by the apparent indifference and definite hostility of his audience, had thrown the rest of his speech to the winds and had poured over them a lava torrent of burning, scorching invective that had blistered and burned until they could bear the agony no more, and with one horrid, bloodcurdling shout had, after a moment's pause, cast themselves upon him, and had halted not until he lay dead under a shower of stones.
True, the end came suddenly, but when we study the speech word by word, we find Stephen had by three parallel lines crept up to the enemy's weak spot, and then with a mighty climactic rush had hurled himself upon it. Notice the three parallel lines of attack:
(1) What relation has locality to the acceptable worship of God? His accusers said that he had spoken against “this holy place.” Now Abraham had acceptably worshipped God, yet no possession had he in that land save for a burial-place. Moses saw in a lonely spot in the wilderness a bush burning yet not consumed, and from the heart of it came a voice, “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” Although David had captured Jerusalem, yet he was not allowed to build a temple there, the tabernacle meanwhile being pitched in various parts of the land. Even Solomon, who built the Temple, said: “But will God in very deed dwell on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded!” And what saith the prophet Isaiah many years later? Stephen tells us: “The heaven is my throne, and the earth the footstool of my feet: what manner of house will ye build me? saith the Lord: Or what is the place of my rest?” Therefore it is the Presence and not the place that makes worship acceptable.
“Where is the Sanctuary of God?”
“Where two or three in My name have met,
There is the Sanctuary of God.”
“Just ‘two or three'? Nay, that may be
In garret grim or on moorland free,
And there no Sanctuary I see.”
“Where two or three in My name have met,
There am I.” “Yea, Lord, indeed
There is the Sanctuary of God.”
(2) What relation has the Mosaic economy to time? Was it permanent or transitory? His accusers said that he had “blasphemed Moses.” Stephen calls them to behold the evolution of true religion. Abraham had been called from his own country-an idolatrous land-and brought into a strange land, yet there he erects his altar. Then comes the covenant, with its seal of circumcision. Next, when the performance of the promise is nearly due, there arises another great leader who is to bring them-now grown a great company-out of Egypt into the Land of Promise. This was another great act of faith, yet Moses points to a coming and yet greater Leader, for “this is that Moses, which said unto the children of Israel, A prophet shall God raise up unto you from among your brethren, like unto me.” As Moses brought in one economy, so his successor was to bring in another. Thus from the altar of Abraham, which smoked whilst dawn stained the sky, and blazed at dewy eve a beacon light on the heights of Mamre, to the elaborate service of the tent of meeting in the wilderness was a step; and from the tent that at the motion of the pillar of cloud could be taken down, to the temple that crowned the rocky heights of Moriah, with its stately fabric and splendid ritual, was another; yet as these were all material, and “the Most High dwelleth not in houses made with hands,” there must be still another step. And in that dazzling moment when Stephen stood on that mount of spiritual exaltation we so seldom climb, and saw with keen vision the greatness of that step, doubtless the Paraclete brought to his memory the words of the Lord Jesus: “The hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father.… God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
To assert, then, the permanence of Moses and his economy was to deny what he himself had said and what the history of their nation had proved. Therefore he could not have “blasphemed Moses” in thus speaking the truth, for no blasphemy is of the truth.
Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends on a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Heretics.]
(3) In thus treating him, the preacher of the truth, with contumely and cruelty, they were manifesting the continuity of that generation which had ever been the curse of their race from its beginning, when “the patriarchs, moved with jealousy against Joseph, sold him into Egypt.” And here Stephen adds one more of his significant phrases-“and God was with him.”
As Joseph had suffered for speaking the truth, so Moses suffered for doing the same. Let him slay the Egyptian, but let him not dare to remonstrate with a Hebrew. “Sirs, ye are brethren; why do ye wrong one to another?” For these words Moses had to flee into Midian. Yet again God was with him, and the Angel of the Lord, the pre-Incarnate Messiah, as his hearers understood the expression, appeared unto him. Yet again, although this great leader had brought them out from their bondage and the land of their slavery, they turn against him whilst he is absent talking with this selfsame “angel which spake to him in the mount Sinai.” Nay, they turned away from God Himself, from His service, and from His worship.
Did his eye light upon the crafty Caiaphas and the hoary Annas, and did he realize what this generation had now done? They made much of the Moses their fathers had rejected, but what of Him whose coming Moses had foreseen and prophesied? They had crucified Him! And in a moment the three parallel lines of argument met in one mighty shock. The thunder of his voice rolled and reverberated through Gazith whilst the lightning of his eyes lighted to their dim depths their false hearts: “Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? and they killed them which shewed before of the coming of the Righteous One; of whom ye have now become betrayers and murderers; ye who received the law as it was ordained by angels, and kept it not.”
“Who art Thou?” we answer to His cry of sharp pain, when, through His grace, this sense of “otherness” is brought home to us for the first time, and we find that in betraying, despising and resisting our conscience we have all along been betraying, despising and resisting our God, as real actors in that supreme tragedy which the historical Passion of Christ but symbolizes and makes visible to our imagination. Even when we are not crucifying Him afresh by flagrant sin, we are ever tormenting and persecuting Him by negligence, by recklessness, by skirting the edge of sin's precipice, so that He is never at rest or free from anxiety.1 [Note: George Tyrrell.]
2. A denunciation so scathing and so fearless, from the lips of a prisoner whose life depended on their will, might well have startled them. He could hardly have addressed them in words more calculated to kindle their fury. The very terms in which he characterized their bearing, being borrowed from their own Law and Prophets, added force to the previous epitome of their history; and to call them uncircumcised in heart and ears was to reject with scorn the idle fancies that circumcision alone was enough to save them from God's wrath, and that uncircumcision was worse than crime. To convict them of being the true sons of their fathers, and to brand consciences, already ulcerated by a sense of guilt, with a murder worse than the worst murder of the prophets, was not only to sweep away the prestige of an authority which the people so blindly accepted; it was to arraign his very judges and turn upon them the tables of accusation. And this he did, not only in the matter of their crucifixion of the Messiah, but also in the matter of disobedience to that Law ordained by angels of which they were at that very moment professing to vindicate the sanctity and the permanence.
Robertson was never violent, never “in a passion” when he spoke, but each word fell like a sledge-hammer upon its point and on its victim. I have been told that once, when he found it necessary to denounce a man for a dastardly and wilful crime, his words had all the awfulness of a judicial sentence; that the hardened sinner writhed under them as if under a whip. To this, I think, he alludes in a letter, when he says, “Once in my life I felt a terrible might. I knew, and rejoiced to know as I spoke, that I was inflicting the sentence of a coward and a liar's hell.”2 [Note: S. A. Brooke, Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 352.]
3. The members of the Sanhedrin were roused to fury. The most excitable of Western nations can hardly imagine the raging passion that maddens a crowd of Eastern fanatics. Barely able to continue the semblance of a judicial procedure, they expressed the agony of hatred which was sawing their hearts asunder, by outward signs which are almost unknown to modern civilization-by that grinding and gnashing of the teeth possible only to human beings in whom “the ape and the tiger” are not vet quite dead.
To reason with men whose passions had thus degraded them to the level of wild beasts would have been worse than useless. The flame of holy anger in the breast of Stephen had died away as suddenly as the lightning. It was a righteous anger; it was aimed not at them but at their infatuation; it was intended not to insult but to awaken. But he saw at a glance that it had failed, and that all was now over. In one instant his thoughts had passed away to that heaven from which his inspiration had come. From those hateful faces, rendered demoniac by evil passion, his earnest gaze was turned upward and heavenward. There, in ecstasy of vision, he saw the Shechinah-the Glory of God-the Jesus “standing,” as though to aid and receive him, “at the right hand of God.” Transported beyond all thought of peril by that Divine epiphany, he exclaimed as though he wished his enemies to share his vision: “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.” At such a moment he would not pause to consider, he would not even be able to consider, the words he spoke; but whether it was that he recalled the Messianic title by which Jesus had so often described Himself on earth, or that he remembered that this title had been used by the Lord when He had prophesied to this very Sanhedrin that hereafter they should see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, certain it is that this is the only passage of the New Testament where Jesus is called the Son of Man by lips other than His own.
But those words were too much for the feelings of his audience. Stopping their ears as though to shut out a polluting blasphemy, they rose in a mass from both sides of the semicircular range in which they sat, and with one wild yell rushed upon Stephen. There was no question any longer of a legal decision. In their rage they took the law into their own hands, and then and there dragged him off to be stoned outside the city gate.
This vision of Jesus does not present Him as seated in colossal calm, like those sublime Egyptian statues that look out with folded hands, as if having finished their work, across the desert sands. The great truths of Christ's session at God's right hand were not those which the prisoner before the council most needed. What he needed he received in the shape, as well as at the moment, required. The seated Jesus has risen to His feet, as if intent to watch and help His servant. It is the attitude of service, of priestly ministry, of readiness to succour. It expresses true interest in what is going on down there in the council, and is the attitude which says, “The Lord shall help thee, and that right early.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
He heeded not reviling tones,
Nor sold his heart to idle moans,
Tho' cursed and scorn'd, and bruised with stones:
But looking upward, full of grace,
He pray'd, and from a happy place
God's glory smote him on the face.2 [Note: Tennyson, “The Two Voices.”]