p. 269 | The Sabbath-School

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Jun 14, 1883

The Sabbath-School.

Stephen's Defense.

The following, from Farrar's "Life and Work of Paul," is an excellent statement, in brief, of the object and scope of Stephen's address to the Sanhedrim:—

"Since the charge brought against St. Stephen was partly false and partly true, it was his object to rebut what was false, and justify himself against all blame for what was true. Hence apology and demonstration are subtly blended throughout his appeal, but the apology is only secondary, and the demonstration is mainly meant to rouse the dormant consciences of his hearers. Charged with blasphemous words, he contents himself with the incidental refutation of this charge by the entire tenor of the language which he employs. After his courteous request for attention, his very first words are to speak of God under one of his most awful titles of majesty, as the God of the Shechinah. On the history of Moses he dwells with all the enthusiasm of patriotic admiration. To the temple he alludes with entire reverence. Of Sinai and the living oracles he uses language as full of solemnity as the most devoted rabbi could desire. But while he thus shows how impossible it must have been for him to have uttered the language of a blasphemer, he is all the while aiming at the establishment of facts far deeper than the proof of his own innocence. The consummate art of his speech consists in the circumstance that while he seems to be engaged in a calm, historical review, to which any Jewish patriot might listen with delight and pride, he is step by step leading up to conclusions which told with irresistible force against the opinions of his judges. While he only seems to be reviewing the various migrations of Abraham, and the chequered fortunes of the patriarchs, he is really showing that the covenants of God, with his chosen people, having been made in Ur and Haran and Egypt, were all parts of one progressive purpose, which was so little dependent on ceremonials or places as to have been anterior not only to the existence of the tabernacle and temple, not only to the possession of the Holy Land, but even to the rite of circumcision itself. While sketching the career of Joseph, he is pointing allusively to the similar rejection of a deliverer greater than Joseph. While passing in review the triple periods of forty years which made up the life of Moses, he is again sketching the ministry of Christ, and silently pointing to the fact that the Hebrew race had at every stage been false alike to Moses and to God. This is why he narrates the way in which, on the first appearance of Moses to help his suffering countrymen, they rudely spurned his interference; and how in spite of their rejection he was chosen to lead them out of the house of bondage. In defiance of this special commission—and it is well worth notice, in order to conciliate their deeper attention, this palmary point in his favor is not triumphantly paraded, but quietly introduced as an incident in his historic summary—Moses had himself taught them to regard his own legislation as provisional, by bidding them listen to a Prophet like unto himself who should come hereafter.

But the history of Moses, whom they trusted, was fatal to their pretense of allegiance. Even when he was on Sinai they had been disloyal to him, and spoken of him as "this Moses," and as one who had gone they knew not where. And, false to Moses, they had been yet more false to God. The Levitical sacrifices had been abandoned, from the very time of their institution, for sacrifices to the host of Heaven; and the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of Remphan, had been dearer to them than the tabernacle of Witness and the Shechinah of God. At last a Jesus—for, in order that he might be heard to due purpose, Stephen suppresses the name of that Jesus of whom his thoughts were full—led them and their tabernacle into the land of which he dispossessed the Gentiles. That tabernacle, after an obscure and dishonored history, had passed away, and it may perhaps be intimated that this was due to their indifference and neglect. David—their own David—had indeed desired to replace it by another, but the actual building of the house was carried out by the less faithful Solomon. But even at the very time the house was built it had been implied in the prayer of David, and in the dedication prayer of Solomon, that "the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands." And to guard against the dangerous superstition into which the reverence paid to material places, is apt to degenerate—to obviate the trust in lying words which thought it sufficient to exclaim, "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these"—the great Prophet had cried, in God's name, "Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool; what house will ye build for me, saith the Lord, or what is the place of my abiding? Did not my hand make all these things?" The inference from this—that the day must come, of which Jesus had prophesied to the woman of Samaria, in which neither in Gerizim nor yet in Jerusalem should men worship the Father, constituted a perfect defense against the charge that anything which he had said could be regarded as a blasphemy against the temple.