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Acts 7 — A history lesson so sharp it got the speaker killed
12 min read
fresh.bible editorialis standing before the — the highest religious court in . He's been arrested on trumped-up charges of speaking against the and . False witnesses have twisted his words. The entire council is staring at him, waiting.
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Reflect
Stephen forgave the people killing him. Who do you need to forgive even though they don't deserve it?
Would you have the courage to stand on your faith if it cost you everything?
And instead of defending himself the way anyone would expect — denying the charges, calling witnesses, playing the legal game — Stephen does something extraordinary. He retells the entire story of . From to . And as he tells it, a pattern starts to emerge. The same pattern, over and over. God sends someone to rescue his people, and his people reject that person every single time. By the time Stephen is done, everyone in the room knows exactly where he's going with this. And that's when things get very real.
The asked the obvious question — "Are these charges true?" answer started somewhere no one expected. He went all the way back to the beginning:
"Brothers. Fathers. Listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was still living in Mesopotamia — before he ever set foot in Haran — and said to him: 'Leave your land. Leave your family. Go to the place I will show you.'
So Abraham left. He settled in Haran for a while, and after his father died, God moved him into this land — the one you're standing in right now. But here's the thing: God didn't give him a single square foot of it. Not one patch of ground to call his own. He just gave him a promise — that one day this land would belong to him and his descendants. And at the time? Abraham didn't even have a child.
God told him straight: 'Your descendants will be strangers in a foreign land. They'll be enslaved and mistreated for four hundred years. But I will judge the nation that enslaves them, and afterward they will come out and worship me in this place.'
Then God gave him the Covenant of circumcision. Abraham became the father of Isaac, Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob became the father of the twelve patriarchs."
Notice how Stephen started. Not with a defense. With a story about a man who had nothing but a from God — and trusted it anyway. left everything familiar, walked into the unknown, and never owned a single piece of the land God promised him. The whole thing ran on trust. Stephen was reminding the council where their story actually began — and it wasn't in a building or a set of rules. It was in a relationship.
Then moved to the next chapter of the family story. And this is where the pattern started:
"The patriarchs — Jacob's own sons — were jealous of their brother Joseph. So they sold him into Egypt. But God was with him. God rescued Joseph out of every hardship he faced and gave him favor and wisdom before Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Pharaoh made Joseph ruler over the entire country and over his whole household.
Then a famine hit all of Egypt and Canaan. Devastating. Our ancestors couldn't find food. But when Jacob heard there was grain in Egypt, he sent his sons — their first trip. On the second visit, Joseph revealed who he really was to his brothers, and Pharaoh learned about Joseph's family. Joseph sent for his father Jacob and all his relatives — seventy-five people in all.
Jacob went down to Egypt. He died there, and so did our ancestors. Their bodies were carried back to Shechem and laid in the tomb Abraham had purchased from the sons of Hamor."
Catch the pattern forming? own brothers — the people closest to him — were the ones who rejected him. They sold him off because they couldn't handle that God had plans for him. And then, years later, when they were starving and desperate, who was the one God had positioned to save them? The exact person they'd thrown away. It's the kind of irony God seems to . The rejected one becomes the rescuer. File that away — Stephen was building toward something.
kept going. The story was gaining momentum:
"As the time of God's promise to Abraham drew closer, the people of Israel multiplied and grew in Egypt. But then a new king came to power — one who had no memory of Joseph or what he'd done for the nation. This king dealt ruthlessly with our people. He forced our ancestors to abandon their newborn babies so they wouldn't survive.
It was exactly at this moment that Moses was born — and he was beautiful in God's sight. His parents kept him hidden for three months. When they finally had to let him go, Pharaoh's daughter found him, adopted him, and raised him as her own son. Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. He became powerful in everything he said and did."
Think about the timing. At the exact moment when the situation looked most hopeless — when babies were being killed and an entire people were being systematically crushed — God was already growing the deliverer in the oppressor's own house. was trained by the very empire God was going to use him against. Nobody saw it coming. That's how God works. The rescue is already in motion before you even realize you need one.
Here's where the story took a painful turn. And knew his audience would feel it:
"When Moses was forty years old, something stirred in his heart. He went to visit his own people — the Israelites. When he saw one of them being mistreated, he stepped in, defended the man, and struck down the Egyptian who was attacking him.
Moses assumed his brothers would understand — that God was using him to deliver them. But they didn't get it.
The very next day, he found two Israelites fighting each other. He tried to make peace between them. 'Men, you're brothers,' he said. 'Why are you hurting each other?' But the one in the wrong shoved Moses away and said: 'Who made you a ruler and judge over us? Are you going to kill me like you killed that Egyptian yesterday?'
When Moses heard that, he ran. He fled to the land of Midian, where he lived as a foreigner and had two sons."
There it is again. The same pattern. God sends a deliverer — and the people he came to rescue are the ones who push him away. showed up ready to help, and his own people said, "Who asked you?" It's a painfully recognizable reaction. We do this constantly. Someone tells us the truth, offers to help, tries to intervene — and our first instinct is "Who made you the authority here?" Moses spent the next forty years in the desert because the people he was trying to save weren't ready for him yet.
Forty years passed. was in the middle of nowhere — literally. And then everything changed:
"After forty years, an Angel appeared to Moses in the wilderness near Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire inside a bush. Moses was stunned by what he saw. As he moved closer to look, the voice of the Lord came:
'I am the God of your fathers — the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.'
Moses started trembling. He couldn't bring himself to look.
Then the Lord said: 'Take off your sandals. The ground you're standing on is holy. I have seen the suffering of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cries. And I have come down to rescue them. Now — I'm sending you back to Egypt.'"
God waited forty years. Not because he forgot, not because he was busy — but because there's a difference between God's timeline and ours. Moses had tried to force the rescue at forty. At eighty, God said "now." And the call came in the most ordinary place imaginable — a desert, a bush, the middle of a normal day. God doesn't always show up in the places you'd expect. Sometimes the sacred ground is the place you almost walked past.
This is where started pressing his point. Hard. Listen to the repetition:
"This Moses — the one they rejected, the one they said 'Who made you a ruler and judge?' — this is the man God sent back as both ruler and redeemer, through the Angel who appeared to him in the bush.
This man led them out. He performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and in the wilderness for forty years.
This is the Moses who told the Israelites: 'God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from among your own people.'
This is the one who stood in the assembly in the wilderness with the Angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai and with our ancestors. He received living words from God to pass on to us."
Do you hear what Stephen was doing? "This ... this man... this is the one..." Over and over. The same person they dismissed became the one God used. The rejected deliverer became the national hero. And then Moses himself said: "God is going to raise up another like me." Someone else is coming. Someone who will be treated exactly the way I was treated. Stephen was building a case, and every person in that room could feel where it was headed.
pressed further into the painful part of the story:
"But our ancestors refused to obey Moses. They pushed him aside. In their hearts, they were already back in Egypt. They told Aaron: 'Make us gods who will lead us. This Moses who brought us out of Egypt — who knows what happened to him?'
So they made a golden calf. They offered sacrifices to an Idol. They threw a celebration for something they'd built with their own hands.
But God turned away from them. He gave them over to worship whatever they wanted — the sun, the moon, the stars. Just as the Prophets wrote: 'Did you really bring me sacrifices during those forty years in the wilderness, Israel? No. You carried around the shrine of Moloch and the star of your god Rephan — images you made to bow down to. So I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.'"
The people who had seen the split chose a statue. Think about that. They had watched God split a sea in half to save them, and the moment things got uncomfortable — the moment was gone a little too long — they built something they could see and control. That's the pull. It's always the pull. We want a god we can manage, a we can customize, a spirituality that fits in our pocket. The real God is too big, too unpredictable, too demanding. So we make something smaller and call it enough.
Now turned to the itself — the thing they'd accused him of disrespecting. He handled it carefully:
"Our ancestors had the Tabernacle in the wilderness — built exactly the way God told Moses to make it, following the pattern God had shown him. The next generation brought it with them under Joshua as they took the land from the nations God drove out before them. It stayed until the time of David.
David found favor with God and asked to build a permanent dwelling place for the God of Jacob. But it was Solomon who actually built the house.
Yet the Most High does not live in buildings made by human hands. As the Prophet Isaiah says:
'Heaven is my throne. The earth is my footstool. What kind of house could you possibly build for me? says the Lord. Where would my resting place be? Didn't my own hand make all of this?'"
This is the moment the room got tense. Stephen wasn't attacking the Temple. He was doing something more dangerous — he was putting it in perspective. The Temple was never meant to be a container for God. It was a meeting point. God designed it, sanctioned it, filled it with his presence — but he never fit inside it. The moment you think God needs your building, your institution, your system to operate, you've made the same mistake kept making. You've shrunk him down to something you can manage.
And then stopped telling history. He looked at the men judging him and said what nobody else would:
"You stubborn people — hard-hearted and deaf to the truth. You resist the Holy Spirit at every turn. Your ancestors did it, and you're doing it right now.
Name one Prophet your ancestors didn't persecute. Go ahead. They killed the ones who predicted the coming of the Righteous One — and now you have betrayed and murdered him yourselves.
You received The Law — delivered by Angels — and you didn't keep it."
The whole speech clicked into place. trusted God and left everything. was rejected by his brothers and became their rescuer. was rejected by his people and became their deliverer. The were rejected and killed. And now — the One, the ultimate deliverer, the prophet Moses predicted — rejected. Betrayed. Murdered. By the very people who claimed to be guardians of the story. Stephen wasn't disrespecting the or the . He was showing that the people accusing him were repeating the exact pattern their ancestors had followed for two thousand years.
What happened next was not a trial. It was a mob:
When they heard this, they were enraged. They were grinding their teeth at him.
But , full of the , looked up. And what he saw changed everything:
"Look — I see Heaven opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."
They screamed. They covered their ears. They rushed at him all at once. They dragged him out of the city and began throwing stones at him.
The witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named .
As the stones hit him, Stephen cried out: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit."
Then he fell to his knees and shouted with his last breath: "Lord, don't hold this sin against them."
And then he was gone.
Let that sit for a moment. His last words weren't a curse. They weren't fear. They were — the same kind of forgiveness asked for from the . Stephen saw open, saw Jesus standing — not sitting, standing, as if he'd risen to welcome him — and with rocks breaking his body, Stephen's final act was to pray for the people killing him. This is what it looks like when someone actually believes what they're saying. Not a performance. Not a theological argument. A life — and a — that proved every word true.
And that young man holding the coats? His name was . Remember him. He's about to change everything.
