Acts 6:8-7:16 - Filibusters and Cancel Culture

Podcast Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)

Hello, and welcome back to Tabernacle Talk. And today we are continuing in the Book of Acts. We're in Acts chapter six, and we're beginning in verse number eight today.

Yesterday, we discovered the first deacons.

And these were men full of the Holy Spirit, full of wisdom that were set aside for the work of the ministry, to be able to help out the widows, to help bring church unity, to meet tangible needs, and to help the leaders of the early church to be able

to spend time devoted to the Word of God, devoted to prayer. And so, saw some incredible things happen. They're in verse number seven.

So the Word of God spread, the disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly in number, and a large group of priests became obedient to the faith.

Now, we're gonna see one of those specific deacons, one of those men full of the Spirit, and what happened to him. Want to give the quickest shout out to the Christian Standard Bible by Holman. And this is their handcrafted collection.

This is their single column, wide margin Bible. And it is chunky. It's a big Bible.

If you like big Bibles, this guy's great. You can get him in a multitude of different formats. If you're like, hey, I want a $14 leather touch version, they got that for you.

If you're like, hey, I want something that I think is going to last 10, 20, 40 years, they got that for you. So we are going to see today Stephen. And Stephen is kind of special to me.

It's my middle name. Mine is spelled differently than what it would be here, which would be kind of a Greek Stefanus.

But in verse number eight of Acts six, it says this, Now Stephen, full of grace and power, was performing great wonders and signs among the people.

Opposition arose, however, from some members of the Freedmen's Synagogue composed of both Cyrenians and Alexandrians and some from Cilicia and Asia. And they began to argue with Stephen.

So, here you have kind of this Greek Synagogue, so kind of a Hellenist Synagogue. Stephen's name is not really a Old Testament Hebrew name. It's a Greek name, it's Stefanus.

So, from all appearances, I forgot to mention this yesterday, all of the men that were chosen as deacons were from kind of this Hellenist sect.

Sect wouldn't quite be the correct word, but it's from that same group that was being discriminated against. They had some people representative of that group that had a vested interest that, hey, this is a person related to me.

This is my best friend's mom or grandma and I want to make sure that they are taken care of. So, Stephanus, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicholas, all of those are Greek names. And so these would have been Hellenistic Jews.

So here there are some people from the Freedmen's Synagogue and Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicia and Asia. All of these would also have been kind of Hellenistic Jews. So they're arguing with Stephen about Jesus.

Verse number 10. But when they were unable to stand up against his wisdom and the Spirit by which he was speaking, the Holy Spirit, then they secretly persuaded some men to say, we heard him speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God.

Moses was the most revered of the Old Testament prophets.

He was the one that gave them the Pentateuch, the Torah, that first five books of the Bible that really shaped their identity as a nation constantly throughout all the rest of the Old Testament scriptures, they were pointing back to, hey, remember

what happened with Moses and the Exodus, how he brought out the people of Israel. So he spoke blasphemous words against Moses and God. They stirred up the people in verse 12, the elders and the scribes.

So they came and seized him and took him to the Sanhedrin, that most important council, the ones that sentenced Christ to death.

They also presented false witnesses who said, this man never stopped speaking against this holy place and the law, for we heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs that Moses handed down to us.

And all who were sitting in the Sanhedrin looked intently at him and saw that his face was like the face of an angel. It was shining. It was luminescent.

There was some of that glory of the Lord that was shining from his face. Chapter 7 verse 1. Are these things true, the high priest asked?

And here, I don't know how many watching right now are from kind of our area in Essex, Middle River, Baltimore. We're pretty close to DC and many of us would be familiar with a filibuster.

And chapter 7 to me feels like a giant filibuster in Stephen's trial. Are these things true? Kind of a yes or no question.

Are you saying these things against God and Moses and the law or are you not saying these things?

Brothers and fathers, Stephen replied, listen, the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia before he settled in Haran and said to him, leave your country and relatives and come to the land that I will show you, Genesis

12 and verse 1. Then he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. From there, after his father died, God had moved to this land in which you are now living.

He didn't give an inheritance in it, not even a foot of ground, but he promised to give it to him as a possession and to his descendants after him, even though he was childless.

God spoke in this way, his descendants would be strangers in a foreign country and they would enslave and oppress them for 400 years. God speaking, I will judge the nation that they will serve as slaves.

After this, they will come out and worship me in this place. They are quoting Genesis 15, 13 through 14. And so he gave Abraham the covenant of circumcision.

After this, he fathered Isaac and circumcised him on the eighth day. Isaac became the father of Jacob and Jacob became the father of the twelve patriarchs. This is all elementary.

These are things that the Sanhedrin would have known from the time that they were the youngest of kids. The patriarchs became jealous of Joseph and sold him into Egypt, but God was with him and rescued him out of all of his troubles.

He gave him favor and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, who appointed him ruler over Egypt and over his whole household. Now, a famine and great suffering came over all of Egypt and Canaan, and our ancestors could find no food.

When Jacob heard there was grain in Egypt, he sent our ancestors there the first time. The second time, Joseph revealed himself to his brothers, and Joseph's family became known to Pharaoh.

Joseph invited his father, Jacob, and all his relatives, 75 people in all, and Jacob went down to Egypt. He and our ancestors died there.

We're carried back to Shechem, and we're placed in the tomb that Abraham had bought for some of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.

So, we're gonna go further into Stephen's filibuster tomorrow, but for now, with the time that we have left, I want to notice just a couple of things here in this passage.

The first part of Stephen's sermon, and I'll give kind of the shortest play-by-play, is God has always been working. He has cared about his people. He has made promises.

God is good to his promises. God promised a Messiah. He sent a Messiah, but just as Israel would often reject God's way and reject God's prophets, they rejected Jesus too.

But God was faithful, and Jesus was too powerful to be overtaken or overcome by the grave, and so he rose victorious. So that's the, if you're going, okay, well, where's Stephen going with all of this?

That's the end result, and we'll look at some more specifics of that tomorrow. But I want to notice in verses 8 through 15, I want to notice first off that it says in verse 8 that Stephen was full of grace and power.

Many people in our world value power. They value authority. They value boldness.

They value strong people. Very few people in this world value grace.

If you may be on either side of the aisle, if you want to tell everyone off on how President Trump or President Biden is this or that, or if you want to remark on, oh, the Democrats are doing all of these things, or oh, the Republicans are doing all

of these things, or the Republicans in name only are doing all of these things, everyone is really for you. No matter what side of the aisle, if you can call out the other one and just kind of scorch them, everyone loves that.

Grace is a pretty distinctly Christian idea. It is that in our faults and our failures, in the times in which we are wrong, in the times in which we fail, there is still forgiveness, there is still love, there is still favor to be had.

Our world doesn't think that way. It's either 100%, it's 100% black or white, it's 100% good or bad.

If a person is failing in any area, whether it's maybe on the right or on the left, if they don't match up to all of our standards, then kind of scorched earth and you're out of here, we're done with you. You're not really on our side.

And it is a Christian value to, no matter how a person is currently failing, that we love them, that we forgive them, that we bear with them. And you would say, how?

Wouldn't that result in us being harmed occasionally by people that we show forgiveness or show love to, and maybe they take advantage of it? Can I tell you that our God does that every day? Our God does that every day with you and with me.

Every day we sin against a holy God. Every day we use the breath that He has given us to complain and to slander people and to downgrade those that are made in His image. Every day we sin with the bodies that He has given us.

And yet He gives us grace day after day. He does not take away our breath from us. He does not take away our bodies from us.

Those that we take for granted in our life, the things that we take for granted, our homes, our cars, everything, His Word that we neglect to read or we don't bring God into our decisions, He doesn't just snatch those things away from us and say, you

have been an unfaithful steward or manager of what I have given you. Instead, He consistently bestows grace and forgiveness and love and favor on us. We value power, and there are certainly times where we need to be bold, like Stephen was bold.

Well, we've seen several times how Peter was bold.

We'll see later in chapter seven tomorrow where Stephen was bold, but we ought to place a value on grace, that those that are opposed to Christianity, opposed to the gospel, would notice not simply that we speak powerfully, but that we speak

gracefully. Not just that we hold strong beliefs and do not bend to this world, but that we do so with a heart of love, that we do so in a gracious manner that is indicative of how our God has treated us.

And if He has treated us with love and forgiveness and graciousness and forbearance, then we have to pass that on to others. If we are going to be like Christ, if we're going to follow in His steps, then that is demanded of us.

Gracious living is not an option in the Christian life. It is fundamentally basic. If we do not have grace, then we are not being filled with the Spirit.

I see this as well in the section with verses 10 through the end that the only thing that these people could come up with to take out Stephen, to stop his teaching, was to spread lies about him.

And this was exactly what happened to our Savior, that there were lies that he was going to physically tear down the temple, there were lies that he had blasphemed, he had not, he was God himself, he was literally incapable of blasphemy.

And for Stephen, it was not that they could find out, yeah, well, he's evading taxes. It wasn't that they found out, oh, he is cruel to people, he is an adulterer. There was nothing that they could find against Stephen.

I think of even Daniel in the Old Testament, where the ones that were jealous of him wanted to find something against him. And the only thing they could find was that he obeys God. So they made obeying God a crime and he was guilty.

I wonder today, are we living lives that the only thing that someone could bring against us would be lies? Are we living blameless, upright lives that no one could go, oh, okay, this person talks a big game, but I've seen how he treats his kids.

This person purports to be very religious, but I know what they do when they go out with friends.

May we have lives that are so distinctly Christian that someone would have to make being a Christian and doing Christian things illegal in order for anything to stick to us?

What we'll see later with Stephen is it was very evident he hadn't spoken anything against Moses. He hadn't spoken anything against God. Instead, he preached the same gospel that Jesus did, which is that we are all sinners.

We have fallen short of God's glory. We have rebelled against God, and we are in desperate need of repentance, of turning from our sin, from our way, from our pursuits and turning entirely to Jesus in faith.

Hope today would be an encouragement to you. Look forward tomorrow to continuing Stephen's filibuster and seeing what the reaction from the Sanhedrin was to his message.