WARTS AND ALL
Opening Prayer
Father in heaven, thank you for your gifts that are always freely given. Help me to use my gifts to bring you glory, to bless those you have given me to love and care for.
Read ACTS 7:23–43
23 “When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his own people, the Israelites. 24 He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian. 25 Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. 26 The next day Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, ‘Men, you are brothers; why do you want to hurt each other?’
27 “But the man who was mistreating the other pushed Moses aside and said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? 28 Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’[a] 29 When Moses heard this, he fled to Midian, where he settled as a foreigner and had two sons.
30 “After forty years had passed, an angel appeared to Moses in the flames of a burning bush in the desert near Mount Sinai. 31 When he saw this, he was amazed at the sight. As he went over to get a closer look, he heard the Lord say: 32 ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’[b] Moses trembled with fear and did not dare to look.
33 “Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. 34 I have indeed seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their groaning and have come down to set them free. Now come, I will send you back to Egypt.’[c]
35 “This is the same Moses they had rejected with the words, ‘Who made you ruler and judge?’ He was sent to be their ruler and deliverer by God himself, through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. 36 He led them out of Egypt and performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea and for forty years in the wilderness.
37 “This is the Moses who told the Israelites, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your own people.’[d] 38 He was in the assembly in the wilderness, with the angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living words to pass on to us.
39 “But our ancestors refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt. 40 They told Aaron, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who led us out of Egypt—we don’t know what has happened to him!’[e] 41 That was the time they made an idol in the form of a calf. They brought sacrifices to it and reveled in what their own hands had made. 42 But God turned away from them and gave them over to the worship of the sun, moon and stars. This agrees with what is written in the book of the prophets:
“‘Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings
forty years in the wilderness, people of Israel?
43 You have taken up the tabernacle of Molek
and the star of your god Rephan,
the idols you made to worship.
Therefore I will send you into exile’[f] beyond Babylon.
Footnotes
New International Version (NIV)Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Reflect
‘Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me’ (Psalm 27:10). Rejection is hard, but never our final destiny with God. Allow time to sense his acceptance of you.We could never accuse Stephen of hagiography. That’s the term for biographies that erase anything negative about their subject. Stephen’s warts-and-all presentation painted a picture of the Israelite nation as those who got it wrong, rejecting Moses (vv. 35, 39) and worshipping idols (vv. 40, 41, 43). It was a sad story that underlined Stephen’s thesis that the rejection of Jesus was part of a pattern. Despite God’s commitment to his historic promise (v. 32) and his raising up of Moses as a prophet and rescuer, the people shunned him. What was the exile to Babylon but a judgment on their blindness (v. 43)? Jesus as the fulfillment of the promise of a prophet like Moses (v. 37; Deuteronomy 18:15) suffered the same rebuff.
We could write our own history and that of the church in similar terms. Bullies and Saints is John Dickson’s title for his honest look at the good and evil of Christian history.* Both are there, often confessing Jesus with lips but denying him in actions or lack of action. But the astounding truth is that all through the messiness of our history God is at work, patiently seeking to turn bullies into saints and deniers into ‘reenters.’
Apply
Let’s not be too quick to criticize Stephen’s detractors, but examine our own hearts to see where we might be ignoring what God is saying to us.
Closing prayer
Almighty God, help me to view the issues of the church and world in the light of your Word. Give me wisdom as I seek your will in your ongoing plan of redemption.
*John Dickson, Bullies and Saints of the Christian Church (Zondervan, 2021)
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