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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
The Defense of Stephen and His Death.
Stephen refers to the call of Abraham:
v. 1. Then said the high priest, Are these things so?
v. 2. And he said, Men, brethren, and fathers, hearken: the God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran,
v. 3. and said unto him, Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall show thee.
v. 4. Then came he out of the land of the Chaldeans and dwelt in Charran; and from thence, when his father was dead, He removed him in to this land, wherein ye now dwell.
v. 5. And He gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on; ye the promised that He would give it to him for a possession and to his seed after him when as ye the had no child.
The charges having been preferred, the president of the Sanhedrin, the high priest, gave Stephen permission to answer upon them. And Stephen opens his speech of defense with a respectful address to the judges, some of whom were of his own age and station, and thus might well be called brethren, while others were venerable with age, and thus should be called fathers. The very first words of his speech make it clear that he intends to correct some prevalent notions. The glory of God in the cloud of the covenant, the so-called Shechinah, was not confined to the Tabernacle or to the Temple, but the God of glory, the Possessor of the unlimited divine majesty, revealed Himself also at other places, just as it suited His purposes. It was thus that He appeared to Abraham while the latter was still living in Mesopotamia, in Ur of the Chaldees, before the entire family moved to Charran, or Haran, Gen_11:31; Gen_12:1. In Charran, Abraham had received the command of the Lord to leave both his country and his kindred, and to move to the country which even Terah had had in mind before his death. So Abraham, at that time Abram, had completed the removal to the land of Canaan, where he lived as a stranger among the Canaanites, not having so much as where he could place his foot to call his own. It is true, indeed, that both Abraham and Jacob had small parcels of land in Canaan, but they had them by purchase, not by God's gift, and Abraham was even obliged to buy a burying-place for his wife, Gen_23:1-20. Thus the promise of God to Abraham that he, and his descendants after him, should have the land as their possession, at a time when he did not even have a child of his own, required a very strong faith.