Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Let's bow in prayer.
Father, we do thank You for the day that our blessed Christ was born.
We thank You for the day that heaven came to earth, God became a man, the day that Jesus Christ began to walk with us.
We thank You that He grew up and died and rose again, that He lives within us, that He returns soon to take us to be with Him.
Father, for all that Christmas is to us, we are grateful.
And, Father, as we hear the words of thy blessed servant, Stephen, today, we pray that we might indeed be focused upon not so much him but upon the Christ whom he desires to exalt.
We pray in Christ's name.
Amen.
If you have your Bibles, we'd like to ask you to turn to the seventh chapter of Acts.
We are continuing to study Stephen's sermon,and we'll kind of hustle through it this morning and finish it up.
Acts, chapter 7, beginning at verse 1 and running through 53, is really the text of his sermon.
So if you'll just hold your place there for a moment, I'll give a few words of introduction and then we'll look at the text itself.
Some people have said, and it's nothing new, it's rather old, "Forget about the Old Testament.
All we really need is the New Testament."
And there are many people who carry around a New Testament who know very little about the Old Testament.
Some people would say, "Well, Abraham and Moses have very little to do with us.
All we need to do is stick to the things that are revealed at the coming of Christ and afterwards."
And some people would cut off the New Testament from the Old, Christ from Israel.
Now, this viewpoint was presented most forcefully and articulately a century after Stephen by a wealthy ship owner by the name of Marcian.
Marcian had become a Christian, and about the year 139 AD had come to Rome.
He became very influential, and he believed that the church had no connection with Israel at all, that Christianity had no connection with Israel, that Christ really had little, if any, connection with Israel.
And so he repudiated the authority of the Old Testament.
He claimed it had nothing to do with the New Testament whatever.
Marcian had put together, then, a text of scripture, or a canon of scripture, and in his bible he left out, and I think this is interesting, all references to God's acts prior to the life of Jesus.
He believed they had no place.
Well, the church had to deal with a man who would cut off the new from the old, and so they branded him a heretic and they put him out of the church.
But the church has never gotten rid of Marcians.
They keep popping up in every generation.
There are always people who want to cut off the New Testament from the Old.
There are always people who want to cut off the church from its connection to Israel.
Martin Luther faced it in his own day, and he made this statement: "The Old Testament is the cradle in which the Christ child is laid."
It is not irrelevant to study the Old Testament, for the New Testament finds its birth in the Old.
The Old Testament heritage supports the New Testament and explains it.
And that is exactly Stephen's point as he preaches in .
He builds everything he says on the Old Testament.
And our faith in Jesus Christ is rooted upon the fact of the Old Testament, that He is the Redeemer promised to Israel, the one who fulfills all of the Old Testament types, patterns and prophecies.
And this is the way Stephen directs his attention, and the attention of his hearers, in chapter 7.
Now, we've already learned about Stephen, and I'm going to skip a lot of introductory remarks.
He was one of the seven chosen leaders of the early church, dynamic, full of the Holy Spirit, full of faith, full of grace, full of power.
He came about preaching to Jews who were removed from Israel.
He came about preaching to Grecian Jews or Hellenist Jews who had been scattered, and when they would come back to Jerusalem they would maintain their own synagogue.
He went to those synagogues, not those of the Palestine Jews but those of the Grecian Jews, there proclaiming the Messiahship of Jesus Christ.
As a result of the power of his message and the miracles that he performed, he was arrested and charged with blasphemy.
They said, "He blasphemes God, Moses, the law and the Temple," the most sacred things in Israel.
And so Stephen sets about to defend himself before the Council, the supreme court of Israel, in chapter 7.
The church is beginning to explode.
It has already reached Jerusalem.
People have been saved.
Dynamic things have been happening.
Miracles have been happening by the hundreds, perhaps the thousands.
The resurrected Christ has gone to be with theFather and sent His Holy Spirit to empower this new dynamic church, and they're really doing the job.
They have become a threat to Judaism.
And now the threat has not only filled Jerusalem, but it threatens to extend itself outside of Jerusalem with these non-Jerusalem Jews, and they panic.
And they realize that their whole ecclesiastical system can come apart at the seams unless somebody stops this thing called Christianity.
Stephen becomes the very dynamic voice for Christianity, and so they must stop Stephen, even as they tried to stop Peter and John.
And so they capture him and charge him with blasphemy, all trumped up on the basis of false testimony by perjured witnesses.
Now, Stephen begins to preach in chapter 7, and in his sermon he does four things that we mentioned last time.
Quickly, let me review them.
Four things weave their way through the whole sermon.
Number one, he tries to gain their interest.
He knows that if they're going to hear what he says, they're going to have to want to hear it.
They're going to have to have a desire to listen to this.And so he talks about their favorite subject.
He builds his whole sermon on their own history, and that was their favorite subject.
The second thing that he wants to do in his message is answer the charges that he's a blasphemer.
He wants to prove that it was perjury, that he is no blasphemer, that he believes in God, Moses, the law and the Temple, and that he believes God ordained those last three.
And so he wants to do that.
Third thing he wants to do is indict them for killing their Messiah.
He doesn't let them off the hook.
He doesn't just want to defend himself.
That would be to shirk his responsibility as a preacher.
He will defend himself.
At the same time, he will indict them for what they needed to be indicted for.
The fourth thing he wants to do is present Messiah.
Is Christianity really anti-God, anti-Moses, anti-law and anti-Israel's Temple?No.
And it's a good thing Stephen defended those things, for he defended not only himself but all Christians since then on the basis of the same charges.
We believe in the God of Israel.
We believe God ordained Moses.
We believe God ordained the law.
We believe God ordained His Temple and His Tabernacle, all for a specific time and a specific purpose.
And it was His mind and His will.
We're not against those things.
So Stephen defends himself and all Christianity.
But he's not just selfish.
At the same time, he is indicting and proclaiming Christ.
And that's important.
Now, we will see these four things woven throughout chapter 7. Defending himself is the key, and so he defends himself first of all against the charge that he blasphemed God, and we saw that last week.
From verses 1 through 16, he is busy defending himself against the charge that he is a blasphemer of God.
Now, to blaspheme means to take that which is sacred and call it worthless.They had accused him of blaspheming God, counting God as...their God as worthless, valueless, as nothing.
And so he begins by defending himself against that charge in verse 2.
He said, "Men, brethren, fathers, listen.
The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran."
Now, he does two things here.
First of all, he says, "the God of glory."
He acknowledges God in His fullness.Glory is the fullness of God's attributes, and so Stephen says, "I believe in God, the God of glory."
And they couldn't argue with that, because the term "the God of glory," El Hakavod, had to do with the consummate nature of God, you see.
He is not...they couldn't say, "Oh, well, you might not believe in this fact about God or this fact about Him.
Maybe you've got a little partial God." "I believe in the God of glory," the full God.
And not only that, he says, "the one who called Abraham." "I believe in the God of Israel."
They accused him of blaspheming God.He says, "Wrong.
I believe in God.
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