A Christian speaker talked about his own journey as a former avowed atheist. At one time he considered the basic claims of Christianity untrue, but in looking at the evidence for the life and resurrection of Jesus, and for the authenticity of the Biblical writings, he became convinced that Christianity is ‘true’.
OK.
But what about the other two objections? That is, that Christianity is perceived by many as being both, first, boring and second, irrelevant. That is unquestionably true in our culture. C.S. Lewis has famously said that ‘Christianity, if untrue, is of no importance. If true, it is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.’ So, if Lewis is right, how do we communicate the infinitely important reality of the eternal God, reconciling doomed sinners to himself by the death and resurrection of his eternal Son Jesus, and inviting them into life, both ultimately fulfilling and eternal? And so, how has the church over the centuries managed to make that appear ‘boring’ and ‘irrelevant’ to so many people?
Part of the answer (if not the whole answer) lies in the tendency the church has shown over the centuries to drift from a gospel-centered to a religion-centered, from a Jesus-centered to a church-centered.
In our day, it is an inescapable fact that the evangelical church in North America is in decline, and that scores of people have left the church, not because they have issues with Jesus but because they have issues with the church. It has become almost a cliche to say, ‘I believe in Jesus but I don’t believe in organized religion, or the institutional church.’
I believe in the institution that is the church. I do. I believe it is God-ordained, Biblical and necessary: structure, appointed leaders, organized ministry, formal relationships and partnerships between groups of Christians, and so on. But there is the danger of having the honoring of the institution cross the line into institutionalism. To honor and affirm the institution is good; institutionalism is bad.
Consider this analogy: If you are a gardener and you have ever tried to grow tomatoes, you know that it is essential to stake your tomatoes. By securing the tomato plant to a stake, the plant is propped up, and the tomatoes are held off the ground. If tomatoes lie on the ground, they will rot on the underside, and are more likely to be bug-eaten. If you want healthy tomatoes, you need a stake.
In recognizing the necessity of the stake, it might be artsy and even fun to start painting and decorating the stake to make the tomato section of your garden beautiful. But wouldn’t it be foolish to prune back the tomato plants so that the stake becomes more visible? Or worse, to uproot the plants themselves so everyone can see the nicely painted stakes?
Christianity as a religion, or the church as an institution, is the stake: it is the necessary framework or context in which the kingdom of God grows and bears fruit in us. But we do not make the church or the ‘religion’ itself central.
It is impossible to ‘do’ Christ without the church, but it is possible to do church without Christ. You cannot grow good tomatoes without propping up the plant, but you can have a stake in the soil with no tomato plant attached. It is when Christianity becomes church without God that it becomes, like a stake with no tomatoes, boring and irrelevant. (Apart from me you can do nothing, Jesus said.)
Worse yet, when church itself becomes central, when religion becomes God, it is more than a drift off-center. It is idolatry, and though the religious trappings may all be there, such Christianity is not only missing God, it is actively against God.
That is the point being made in our text today, in Acts 6 & 7. There is a warning and rebuke for God’s people here. But more so, this chapter is a word of grace, of profoundly good news for us. It is a message that frees us and gives us hope as a church.
Acts 7 It is a long chapter and one that if you’ve read through Acts before you have probably (as I have done) skimmed it. But it is actually a brilliant speech by Stephen.
The Book of Acts, through chapter 5, has focused on the Twelve apostles, and most specifically Peter. In chapter 6 we have been introduced to a new set of characters. In response to a crisis regarding the distribution of food to widows, seven men are commissioned to give leadership to that particular issue. One of those seven men is Stephen.
The criteria for selection of these seven men are that they must be men of good repute full of the Spirit and of wisdom. Stephen was apparently such a man. It is further said of him that he was full of faith and of the Holy Spirit and full of grace and power. All of these words are descriptions of the strength of his inner life. It does not say, ‘He was a man of skill, with tremendous administrative ability’, which we might expect, considering that he was pressed into leadership to help run a program. No. What qualified him to serve was his reputation as a man of faith, wisdom, grace, power and the Holy Spirit. Those very things made him a mighty man for God. For he does not just administer the food distribution: Stephen was doing great wonders and signs among the people. In other words Stephen is continuing the program of God’s Kingdom that was first begun by Jesus, who was attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs. This work was then carried on by the apostles: Many signs and wonders were regularly done among the people by the hands of the apostles. Now Stephen is performing wonders and signs.
And, just as the apostles did, Stephen encounters opposition. Anyone who acts out of God’s grace and power will experience opposition. Stephen’s opposition came from various religious Jews: from the synagogue of the Freedmen, Jews from Cyrene & Alexandria on the African coast of the Mediterranean, and from the Roman provinces of Cilicia & Asia north of the Mediterranean. (They almost certainly included Saul from Tarsus in Cilicia, for Saul is present at Stephen’s death in chapter 7. We, of course, know Saul as the Apostle Paul, who later became the greatest campaigner for Jesus the world has ever known. Perhaps the journey to his own conversion began here, with the ministry and martyrdom of Stephen. Perhaps.)
These Jews sought to dispute with Stephen, but they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking.
When people cannot win a dispute, even religious people, they sometimes resort to deceit and violence, and that is what happens here. False charges are trumped up against Stephen, and he is seized and brought before the religious Council.
The charges brought against him are these: ‘We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and against God’ and ‘This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place (ie. the Temple) and against the Law, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs that Moses delivered to us.’ These charges against Stephen had to do with those things that were most precious to 1st Century Jews: the Temple and the Law. These were the very issues that had alarmed the religious leaders about Jesus.
Jesus once said, Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. What he meant was that by virtue of his coming resurrection on the third day, the worship of God would no longer be centered in a building (the temple) but a person (Jesus himself). The coming of Jesus necessarily meant that the age of the temple was at an end. In Mark 13 Jesus had actually prophesied the destruction of the temple.
Jesus also had the reputation of being a Law-breaker because he did not buy into all the extra rules that had grown up around the Word of God but were not a part of it.
Now Stephen is accused of being of the same stripe: anti-temple and anti-Law. So he is arrested and brought before the Council – the same body of elders that had flogged the apostles in chapter 5, the same Council that had tried and condemned Jesus. And the High Priest (Caiaphas, presumably) asks Stephen, ‘So, are these charges true? Are you placing yourself in opposition to Moses, to God, to the Laws and customs, to the Temple, in opposition to everything that marks us as the people of God? Is this true?’
Then Stephen gives his defense and as Stephen revisits the history of Israel for the next 50 verses it becomes clear to his listeners that what Stephen is doing is turning the tables, accusing them of standing in a long line of ‘God’s people’ who have rejected God. He culminates his speech in verse 51: You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.
Stephen’s defense has four parts, in which he highlights, respectively, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and the tabernacle/temple.
First, Stephen brings them back to Abraham and the very beginning of God’s particular relationship with them as his people. And Stephen summarizes the covenant promises of God to Abraham in Genesis 12, 15 & 17:
Brothers and fathers, hear me. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him, ‘Go out from your land and from your kindred and go into the land that I will show you.’ Then he went out from the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran. And after his father died, God removed him from there into this land in which you are now living. Yet he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot’s length, but promised to give it to him as a possession and to his offspring after him, though he had no child. And God spoke to this effect—that his offspring would be sojourners in a land belonging to others, who would enslave them and afflict them for four hundred years. But I will judge the nation that they serve,’ said God, ‘and after that they shall come out and worship me in this place.’ And he gave him the covenant of circumcision. And so Abraham became the father of Isaac, and circumcised him on the eighth day, and Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob of the twelve patriarchs.
God initiated the covenant, and it is a covenant of faith that was established centuries before the Law was given to Moses, and before the temple was built by Solomon.
This is a theme that Paul would take up years later, perhaps remembering Stephen’s address. In Romans chapter 4: that Abraham pleased God before he was circumcised (that is, before he ‘kept the Law’). It was his believing of God’s promise that was credited to Abraham as righteousness. Right standing before God is not (and has never been) a matter of keeping a religion, a set of practices or rituals. Instead, right standing before God is (and has always been) a matter of faith and trust.
On what are you basing your hope for God’s approval of you? Your generosity to Christian organizations? The fact that you don’t ‘cuss’ as much as you used to? Your commitment to the church, and your activity in ministry?
Jesus once said, Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father in heaven’. What does it mean to do the will of God the Father? Jesus himself answered that question: Then they said to him, ‘What must we do to be doing the works of God?’ Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he has sent’.
Your value as a stake is not your color or design, the kind of wood you are. Your value as a stake is your relationship to the plant. The relationship between God and his people is not a relationship of performance, but of faith.
The rest of Stephen’s argument outlines how this covenant of faith was repeatedly broken by the Jewish ‘fathers’.
After Abraham, Stephen talks about Abraham’s great-grandson, Joseph. Joseph is one of several Christ-figures in the Old Testament, in that by him God’s people were saved from destruction, in this case, from starvation. Though Joseph was the agent of their deliverance, blessed with special favor from God, he was rejected by the ‘patriarchs’ (ie. fathers), who actually sold him into slavery. Stephen uses ‘fathers’ 3x in verses 11, 12 & 15, and repeatedly throughout this chapter, so that later, when Stephen says, ‘You’re just like your fathers’ it packs a real punch.
This is what Stephen says about Joseph:
And the patriarchs, jealous of Joseph, sold him into Egypt; but God was with him and rescued him out of all his afflictions and gave him favor and wisdom before Pharaoh, king of Egypt, who made him ruler over Egypt and over all his household. Now there came a famine throughout all Egypt and Canaan, and great affliction, and our fathers could find no food. But when Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, he sent out our fathers on their first visit. And on the second visit Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and Joseph’s family became known to Pharaoh. And Joseph sent and summoned Jacob his father and all his kindred, seventy-five persons in all. And Jacob went down into Egypt, and he died, he and our fathers, and they were carried back to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham had bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.
So, not only do the ‘fathers’ not recognize the man God has chosen to save them, they actively reject him. It is a trend that will only continue.
Stephen moves on to Moses. He spends a long time with Moses, perhaps because Stephen is specifically accused of speaking against him. Moses, like Joseph, is a Christ-figure. He, too, is God’s chosen deliverer to save his people, in this case from slavery. He, like Jesus, revealed God’s character and will, and was accredited to the people by God by signs and wonders. But ‘our fathers’ refused to obey him. Instead, they set up and worshiped idols.
Here is what Stephen says. Listen for God’s choosing of Moses, and the fathers’ rejection of Moses:
But as the time of the promise drew near, which God had granted to Abraham, the people increased and multiplied in Egypt until there arose over Egypt another king who did not know Joseph. He dealt shrewdly with our race and forced our fathers to expose their infants, so that they would not be kept alive. At this time Moses was born; and he was beautiful in God’s sight. And he was brought up for three months in his father’s house, and when he was exposed, Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him and brought him up as her own son. And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds.
When he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brothers, the children of Israel. And seeing one of them being wronged, he defended the oppressed man and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian. He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand, but they did not understand. And on the following day he appeared to them as they were quarreling and tried to reconcile them, saying, ‘Men, you are brothers. Why do you wrong each other?’ But the man who was wronging his neighbor thrust him aside, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ At this retort Moses fled and became an exile in the land of Midian, where he became the father of two sons.
Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush. When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight, and as he drew near to look, there came the voice of the Lord: ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.’ And Moses trembled and did not dare to look. Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their groaning, and I have come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send you to Egypt.’
This Moses, whom they rejected, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’—this man God sent as both ruler and redeemer by the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush. This man led them out, performing wonders and signs in Egypt and at the Red Sea and in the wilderness for forty years. This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers.’ This is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our fathers. He received living oracles to give to us. Our fathers refused to obey him, but thrust him aside, and in their hearts they turned to Egypt, saying to Aaron, ‘Make for us gods who will go before us. As for this Moses who led us out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ And they made a calf in those days, and offered a sacrifice to the idol and were rejoicing in the works of their hands. But God turned away and gave them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: (And Stephen then quotes the prophet Amos, who looked back on Israel’s time in the wilderness): Did you bring to me slain beasts and sacrifices, during the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?
The answer is ‘no’. They did not worship God, even in the desert with Moses. Instead:
You took up the tent of Moloch and the star of your god Rephan, the images that you made to worship; and I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.’
The history of Israel’s rejection of God that led to their exile to Babylon was already in full bloom in the days of Moses: They rejected Moses, several times threatening to leave him and return to Egypt. Moses spoke God’s Law to them, which they tripped over themselves in finding ways to continually rebel against. They were constantly and blatantly disobedient, and even made and worshiped other idols.
Then Stephen turns his attention to the Tabernacle, and says:
Our fathers had the tent of witness in the wilderness, just as he who spoke to Moses directed him to make it, according to the pattern that he had seen. Our fathers in turn brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations that God drove out before our fathers. So it was until the days of David, who found favor in the sight of God and asked to find a dwelling place for the God of Jacob. But it was Solomon who built a house for him. Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands, as the prophet says, ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me,’ says the Lord, ‘or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?’
In the wilderness and in the Promised Land they had the tabernacle, the visible reminder of God. They are the same ones who rejected Moses, so the tabernacle was no guarantee that they knew God’s ways. They also built and worshiped idols, so the tabernacle was no guarantee of right worship.
Many years later, David, Israel’s greatest king, had God’s special favor, but was not allowed to build a temple. So the temple was not obviously essential in Israel’s glory days.
In fact, David’s son Solomon, who built the temple, was the one who led Israel back into idolatry! And God himself de-emphasizes the temple and the idea that ‘where the temple is, God is’. Heaven is his throne and earth his footstool. Do you think you can build a house, a place where God can be contained?
So Stephen has laid out the history of Israel, and said, essentially,
- ‘God initiated a covenant of faith, and you and your fathers have turned it into religion, and a poor one at that.‘
- ‘Your patriarchs were routinely hostile and violent towards God’s chosen prophets and leaders.’
- ‘After they received the Law they responded by worshiping idols.’
- ‘The tabernacle and temple did not by any means help them honor God, and now you think God is necessarily identified with that temple.`
‘You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.’
The culmination of the people’s opposition to God was when they killed his Son Jesus, the promised Savior and Messiah, and despite the fact that in their religious fervor they have sought to preserve the honor of the temple and the rules that were built up around the Law, they have managed not only to miss God entirely, but to actually position themselves against him.
Is Stephen speaking against Moses? They have a long history of speaking and acting against God’s prophets: from Joseph through Moses and ultimately Jesus.
Is Stephen speaking against the Law? They have a long history of disobedience to the Law, especially rejecting God himself and worshiping idols.
Is Stephen speaking against the temple? They have dishonored God by making the temple central. God’s great revelations of himself took place not only outside the temple but outside Israel: in Mesopotamia to Abraham, Joseph in Egypt, Moses at Sinai.
Is Stephen speaking against God? They have killed God’s Son, the righteous Messiah.
See what they have done, and what Stephen confronts them with is this: They are worshiping their religion, not God. When religion becomes God, that is what creates this scenario in which a man of faith and the Holy Spirit, a man of wisdom, of grace and power, can be tried on religious grounds and be accused of being anti-God.
Stephen’s defense is simply: `You are the ones who are guilty of the very things you accuse me of!!`
Now when they heard these things they were enraged, and they ground their teeth at him. But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’ But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together at him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. (This is Saul of Tarsus, later Paul.) And as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And falling to his knees he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ (Doesn’t that sound like Jesus at his crucifixion?) And when he had said this, he fell asleep. And Saul approved of his execution.
Thus Stephen becomes the first recorded martyr, the first person to die as a follower of Jesus Christ. A man of grace and power, even in death, killed by those who (incredibly!) believed they were defending the things of God. Pagans and atheists are not the only ones who can miss God. The religious can, too.
There is an obvious warning here for us: not to identify our religious practices and culture too closely with God, as if the two are indistinguishable. There is a danger that we elevate the elements of our Christian worship to the level of ‘sacred’. That is why you never hear me refer to the church building as ‘the house of God’. Because it is not, as Acts 7 made so very clear.
What are the aspects of your Christian life and worship, or of our ministries and Sunday services that are most dear to you? Are they so dear that you run the risk of considering them essential to what it means for you to be a Christian?
I personally fall into that trap when I consider my engaging in the activity of praying a sign of spiritual health, quite apart from whether or not I am actually seeking God in prayer. Or when I pat myself on the back for getting through the Bible without considering whether the Bible has gotten through me. Or when I am more concerned with whether people are supporting a certain ministry, than whether that ministry is supporting and strengthening the people.
I fall into that trap when I think more in church terms than in Jesus terms.
When you call yourself ‘Christian’, what is at the center of that understanding? Is it church? Is it morality or goodness? Or is it Jesus? Are you religious, or do you love and honor Jesus?
There is a warning here.
And yet the underlying note to us as readers of Stephen’s address is the note of grace, of profoundly good news. See, if religion and God are not the same, then our acceptance by God is not tied to our religious activities. God does not relate to us on the basis of our religious performance.
A lady told me of a book for kids she saw in the waiting room of a clinic. It was a Muslim book, exhorting, in kid friendly fashion, the reader to do good things, etc. Because, the book said, maybe, just maybe, Allah will be pleased with these things and accept us.
We Christians often teach the very same things: Do good, and if you’re good enough maybe, just maybe, God will be pleased and accept you. No guarantees, though, so be religious! But the good news is that religious performance is not at the center. Jesus is at the center. Are you facing Jesus’ direction? Are you throwing yourself upon his goodness, not trying to present your own goodness to God?
Religion vs. Christianity: What does it mean to do the work of God, to obey him? Jesus said, ‘The work of God is this: Believe in the one he has sent.’ Do you recognize and surrender to the Lordship of God’s chosen prophet and Savior of his people? Come to me, Jesus also said. Do you remember each Sunday morning that the location, the center of Christian worship, is not a place, not a building, but a person?
The world does not need another religion, or even a better religion. If we give them religion, if we offer them church, the world will rightly consider Christianity both boring and irrelevant. The world needs Jesus.
What kind of Christianity will our culture no longer see as boring and irrelevant? A Christianity with Jesus Christ at the center. How do we ‘reach’ a lost world? Not by having ‘better’ Sunday services. People can be more impressed at the movies or the concert. Not by having programs that help people to connect. The RotaryClub, hockey for the kids, and a thousand other opportunities are already out there. Not by inviting people to feed the hungry or serve the poor. Lots of organizations do that and do it quite well without Jesus.
Reaching a lost world is not so much a question of strategy, figuring out a new plan or program, as it is focusing on Jesus. When Sundays are about Jesus, when our programs are about Jesus and arise from our devotion to Jesus, when we begin to sense and then to share Jesus’ own heart for people in need, when we see kids in India or Columbia or Kenya (or wherever) as Jesus does, or when we love our hurting co-worker or neighbor as Jesus loves, then Christianity catches fire!
Church, religion that includes Jesus but is not centered on him, is inevitably boring, irrelevant. Nobody wants it. People will flee it. More than that, it is actually anti-God.
But Jesus! When he is the center, that is the only thing that satisfies the soul, brings fire and life to a church, and fuels transforming ministry. More than that, it sets us at the center of the will and pleasure of God. No other organization does that.
And that is the only thing that matters.
Amen.
(Quotes are taken from from the ESV)