Dr. Campbell Lenten Lectures 1969; #2

it's been our heavenly father we humbly silently for the succession into which we have been calls to our face in the give us open minds and ready hearts as we consider some who have gone before us locally in this way where they were strong help us to profit by their example and grabbed that out of this time spent together we may emerge more desirous in mind and talk to levi servants in fact as well as a name through jesus christ are mourning a man you know that we might get this man stephen rather clearly

before us i would like tonight to read a selection of verses that have to do with his life and ministry mr beginning at six and then getting into just a fragment of the speech he made in his own defense or properly and defense of the gospel and then finally those verses the deal with these actual death now in these days when the disciples were increasing a number of colonists murmured against the hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution and the twelve human the twelve someone the body of the disciples and said it is not right that we should give up reaching the word of god to serve cables that point rather and techno from a new seven man no good repute for the spirit and the wisdom only male point of this duty but we will devote

ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word and what they said please the whole lot too and they chose steven a man full of place and of the holy spirit and philip and crocker us and the cantor and kevin an ominous a nickel a us across a lot of it up then these they set before the apostles and they prayed and lay bare hands upon them coming end forty and now it's stephen's message in defense of himself and his gospel you stiff necked people on circumcised in five ten years you always resist the holy spirit as your fathers did so to you which of the province did not your father's persecute and they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the writers won lemieux have now

betrayed and murder you'll receive a lot as delivered by angels and did not keep it now when they heard these things they were enraged and they ground their teeth against him i want the fall of the holy spirit gaze into heaven and saw the glory of god and jesus standing at the right hand of god and he said the whole i see the heavens opened and the son of a man standing at the right hand of god but they cried out with a loud voice and stop their ears and ross together upon him then they cast him out of the city and stoned him and the witnesses lay down their garments at the feet of a young man named sa or and as they were stalling steven he prayed lord jesus receive my spirit and he knelt down and cried with a loud

voice warrant do not hold this sin against them and when he had said this he fell asleep and saw was consenting to his death and coming this evening too mr steven we must acknowledge that we are leapfrogging over some very vital and interesting material and moving into stephen's life and death directly from the story of pentecost and the coming of the holy spirit and i would like upsets and just three of those things that we are leapfrogging were so rapidly first is the initial august ballot miracle which was performed by peter and job performed upon the paralytic who was laid daily at the temple the lines that stand out from that story are the lines of peter when he expanded his hands of this man and said silver and all have i none but such as i

have divided under the in the name of jesus christ there is a story perhaps apocryphal concerning thomas aquinas and one of his visits to the holy city the city of rome he was being at that time shown the splendor of the city greece is pointing out and so we turn to thomas and said no longer can the church say silver and all hell why not and thomas replied yes but neither can we say rise up and walk the second incident there was i think what might be called a very modest experiment didn't come you know sharing some have said that there was actually a

practice of communism in the early church but i think that for the first five will indicate that there was a sharing of surplus and reserve but certainly no sharing of production which belongs to the very essence of communism when at least this much can be said that when god warns the human heart and makes us aware of the community of faith the community takes a transcendent importance among us and we cannot allow suffering an imbalance to prevail so at least the people of the time agreed that they would share their texture is placing it into a common pool and in this rather vivid story which almost defies belief and i have sensed a fire or had been part of the bargain but they had secretly sold a piece of land and kept the money but

somehow the church found out about this they were not only reprimanded for what they were that they had done but in the words of the text they were struck down when anna nye has heard these words he fell down and died in great fear came upon although heard of it the young man rose and wrapped them up and carry them up and buried him and the other part that i think is worth stopping up for just a moment concerns the the brush of the early church with the senator this was one of the earliest exposures that they had to this judicial body and in this particular case they were saved by a man by the name of the mail and now they'll referred to by jewish historian says the mayor leo the first you'll recall that they have been brought in on charges of disruption and the thought was that they should be punished and perhaps put to death

what the melee arose we don't exactly know why they had been out of a great sense of fair mindedness or it may have been that he was and weirdly someone attracted to this moment so in the present case as familial i tell you keep away from these men and let them alone or if this plan or this undertaking is a man that will fail but if it is oh god you will not be able to overthrow them you might even be found opposing god those words can be weighed and discussed and debated most people feel that what he is suggesting here is is almost a kind of success a cult but if god is in a given moment it cannot help but flourish and the evidence of this plan will be so overpowering but you generally all now in the long run i believe that this is true but not necessarily in the short run because the commerce of this would mean that any group that is

suffering at a given point in history is therefore not being blessed a lot and as you know there are many many churches in odd time both in this country and in other places which are bearing such an exceedingly faithful witness that they don't suffer drastically and visibly to millennials it will flourish you better not tamper with it and have it isn't that will die i think has to be taken on a long range bases and not on a short term basis but let us move on now to the man who engages our attention the night this man stephen i think most of us have a very warm attitude toward this man he's introduced us basically because he is on hand when indeed has to be met this gets them off to a good start immediately he's a man who comes into the book of the acts of the

apostles something like a medio there is the church there is peter rabbit dominant and suddenly this man comes into the sky is saying he dominates and then he is saying no more he isn't around very long when he makes an indelible impression indeed not only on that early church but upon us the problem was there are other innocent looking problem on the surface but like many things in scripture there is more to it i think than simply because they hide the problem was that there was an intramural difficulty in this early church and an altar occasion of sorts between the hell in essence and if he grows now i say intramural because both the helen lists and the hebrews were christian people that is they were caught in the church the helen

lists were joe's originally who had learned a great language and who therefore might be considered to be more cosmopolitan and perhaps a bit more sophisticated a little less orthodox and more liberal than the hebrew christians who had not had that liberating experience issue seems to be that out of the common foreign from which how was given to me the widows that apparently perhaps not intentionally but would also came from the hebrew wing of his church were being better cared for and there were those who came from the colonized version of the church and so the plea was that there ought to be fair play and the quality of the treatment it is not worthy i think that this early church had adopted a very strong

hebrew sympathy for the widow it is part of the old testament but got to continually laid upon the heart of israel but here should be provided for the widow and the often and the stranger and those three had one thing in common namely they were not protected by war and the very fact that they were not less protected place them more and more at the mercy of the religious faith of the hebrew community this is just another instance i think of the churches indebtedness to the hebrew community but the very beginning women whose husbands and women who were ottoman empire that morales subjugated them orderly particular attention and special treatment there is some comfort of a backhanded sort to be gained from an awareness that even in the early church there was not

perfection the idealist who says when the church straightens out i'll be there putting my force along with the force of the others actually would've found no place in history where he would have been president on those terms for way back when the waters where presumably bureau there was still this inclination to a modest bias at least buster division between the colonists and the hebrew christians and so the search had an administrative problem on its hands one has tended here to make a long digression on the fact that we cannot separate administrative detail on the so called spiritual side of the church's life the word administer means to surrender a service to you and the very first item of business and the young churches the gender was an administrative item namely who will succeed you notice as one of the twelve so i

call the great accommodation and as you know we were lost fighters became a success i simply mention this because there are always those who feel that anything that has to do with the administration is somehow also a christian ross that through rather quickly and get on with the real meaning of the church where this is a lot of the real meaning of the church mose is almost killed himself out there in that desert marks because he had learned to administer and finally his father in law of all people took him to one side and let it be said that this service attests the humility of moses that he could take advice from his father in law his father a lot of the what he needed was to divide these people up and get some under leaders who would share in the work with them and so if that administrators strategy as moses was able to survive ive and carry our

solar does not feel that the spiritual side of the churches in one particular basket and the administrative side and something else and the case here of course was how to deal with these widows to be sure that they were treated fairly now the record tells us that they picked out from among them seven men would repeal it for the spirit and the wisdom only may appoint to liz do that now at the arrest of deflating those of us or baptist background that it really doesn't say that they were dickens you and on to be perfectly fair about it it doesn't say that they were elders either what it does say that they were seven men who were to dig in because they the noun form is not clear but the reform advocates today as we say somewhat colloquially today they want

to date and the table so that is to say they were to administer the tables which is just another rather than way of saying they were to administer the care that was given to these widows what right along and the fourth course these men went on the apostles at what we will devote ourselves to prayer and the digging of the war so the same word is news regarding the serving of tables and the interpretation and preaching of that were it is not until we get over the first time authentic so that are bought his friends will breathe a little easier but the word lincoln issues as a nun was some intimation that it is now an office in the church and certainly subsequent church history one on to establish the diaconate as one of the official orders of the

church's life now all the names given us here of the seven are great even though these were jews who had perhaps been hellenize they were known by their great names for them had become obscure and three we know something about nicholas is the man according to irony is so fama de nicolay at in harris it if you're familiar with the book of revelation and the letters that were written to those churches you will recall that the church's emphasis on the church of cardamom where warned against the heresy other militants most interpreters feel that these were people who were against the law who were interpreting spirituality in such a way that there were no standards let anything goes because we have the freedom of a spirit and so the occasion certain surge and furthermore warned against

courting the kind that doctrine up in the la times were teaching there is a kind of comfort in this i want out of this so much so that another also had to address himself for the problem that this one person created do this one of the twelve was a defector and a traitor and policy was recounting those who have stood with him and those who had resisted and turned away says rather mournfully at one point famous have forsaken me again i think there's a lot of realism here that even when you know what's sad hussein to be good men and for the holy spirit possible that one out of the seven mike disappointed fervor church has not yet been established even on the score but the interesting thing is that we are still thinking of the deacons as being tables

servers that the other two especially that we know our thought and steven we're really not voting for any administrative funds or who thought we'd all be go his of his connection with the ethiopian eunuch and the label way in which he was able to bring this man to faith in jesus christ that horse the other is all manner that even stephen which means garland or crawl but garland the crown that was given by a city for an athletic achievement or in some cases given because of fine service rendered to that city the very fitting name for this man because one cannot help but associate with stephen that the attitude and found and revelation to ten which one seasons pride in many churches the dow faithful unto death and i would give the the crown of life now i mentioned a moment ago that there was a

larger matter involving simply the fairness of the distribution of aid to the widows and that larger matter really had to deal with one of the search was going to allow itself to be broad minded enough to be hellenized to a degree one never can really count on being moderately simply tries to administer food and eight this is not a substance behind the charge by any means and there was this tension even in the early church and we have a stake in this tension there's a sensibility appointed to stevens that the earliest christians would have continued as a mayor subset of judaism and this is really what was at stake and there are some writers today to reconstruct the whole history of this period and this tension feeling that this was the foremost and basic tension exists and at that time again

baby the hebrew christians wanted very much the state close to the hebrew background as they could not altogether unlike martin luther who is still very much stronger role and other reformers and the silly bro at least all from rome because of this great feeling that he had for roman tradition and roaming free wesley others scattered who had tasted just a little bit of that seizure life for corinthian life while in life there were just a bit more broad minded these were the ones that had been reading the saturday review of their time so this week and not simply to talk and they were all for trying to put abroad reflects on the gospel so that it might have relevance ultimately not simply for those who have been raised in judaism but indeed for all men

and so the charge that was leveled against them as rendered forest by moffett found intact six ten this fellow is never done talking against this holy place and the law why we have heard him say that he uses them as a rain will destroy this place and change the customs handed down to us by moses but it's interesting that they could not withstand him this is quite a tribute to stephen what they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke i think we would be right in saying that this man had a charismatic quality about him and because they could not withstand that he having this intrinsic a foreigner in a foreign aid which comes from the very being of the man himself and not simply be a foreigner is that is confirmed by some higher

power bait and resorting to force and this is the all played this trick that when you cannot defeat a concept or an idea that baby out and winning in that in that way that you resort to force one thinks of the night jesus was apprehended in the garden when he says in all innocents why economy out with swords and stadiums was i not a minute daily in the temple could you not withstand a at the ideological level for jihad not the stress with many why is it now that you come with swords and states now it's very interesting that the charge that was brought against even hear this is exceedingly curious was brought by the hellenistic side there is an important job but learned commentators is that

these people really were a disease because there was a nazi was constantly in doubt and they were trying to maintain some flooding also and so they turned and said this man is threatening the whole enterprise but we have grown into as a result of our having been in a hebrew phrase but the important point is that that stephen i think was trying if not to get the church to face the gentile world and four he was trying to get it to have a little later grass and they'd judaism out of which had come he was trying to get it out of a swan and clothes of judaism so that it might be a faith for all nations now this man's speech the mindset that he really doesn't answer the charges and it's only fair to say that there are many commentators who regard the whole speech as an inter collection something which is

broad and how it into substances troll was representing what the early church leah but nevertheless the speech that stephen perhaps never really said himself and one can make that case stand up by simply read in the book of acts and leaving out that speech and finding that there still is a very good connection running between the remaining parts but there are others who insist that while the speech does not apparently deal with a charge according to our western way of thinking logically but it really does answer the charge and a kind of oriental roundabout parabolic way i'm i'm inclined toward this view i think we should say though that in all the speeches that we find in the book invites local rides in an awful lot of theology it's not unlike some of a radical moments of our time

and a man who moderates a meeting today on the university campus and i really believe that whoever gets up to simply don't answer the point of issue is is mistaken because if you sit there for three hours waiting for your innings on your feet it's audio them to carry the flag and to say what it is that your group believes that and maybe by the way and so the point that issue and there's a little bit of what we might call bootlegging of theology and the this defense what he's trying to say basically is that the hebrew people have not responded to god's light in jesus christ nor did they respond to affirmatively to light prior to christ and he makes the point that before there was law or are before there was a place the temple in jerusalem got worked

it establishes this point by resorting to abraham more and more i'm drawn to the fact that not only look in this study but also call himself with a great deal of weight on abraham at abraham is the father of the faithful that of course abraham was free law dre jumble three of us if he is indeed a man of faith that might be that abraham judaism and christianity can find a forest fire or you know understanding and i was not a wholly soil when he was told he wasn't her colleagues illustrates also that the fathers had a history of profit rejection switzer the province that about your father's style answer is that most of them most of the province a very hard time they felt that they were

covering the grain of the assumptions of their time im accelerators the illusion the joys of again just it was cared for by god and spoken to why god in egypt he was off limits he was an anomaly landed all he was down there in egypt and god is working through him at that point incidentally there's a very very telling verse that i think speaks to all of us at one time or another in our laws regarding joseph in egypt and local reports for us as being part of stevens' speech but at the time of the promised to mirror which got a graduate program the people grew and multiplied in egypt phil there arose over egypt another king who knew not joseph this is the story of the man who was hired by cooperation in analyzing says nah you to stay with us at this

desk for a few years and one of these days we're going to move you up while a spot for you and the home office but then that man goes and there comes on the same another executive who knows not harry with this particular favor but this particular phone went for naught because they're owes another farrow who may not just so they just haven't this and since then was was no longer able to depend on his public relations skills he was thrown back on the action of god and out of this action ultimately came the leverage but the point is that god was working three on palestinian soil in this instance also moses you hail him as a great lawyer but it gave him an awful lot of static to and he makes an allusion to the golden calf which was one of a

sorry as the bubbles in the history of the old testament people now all of this simply added to the infuriated other people and eventually as we know this man was martyred john kimble speaks of three kinds of martyrs miners in will and indeed that is laid will to be martyred and they were a martyr like steven those who are willing to be martyred what were in fact not martyred st john the devine oh there is the condor tradition that john himself was water those who are moderate indeed but not and will the holy innocents would die through the madness of her and when jesus was born now there is some question as to whether this was a

legitimate legal killing or whether it was a lynching david were a little telling them they the process was to strip him out of his clothes and toss them off a cliff and throw huge boulders upon his unprotected flesh it was of a blessing for it then people simply took up their stones taking the law into their own hands and hurled them at a man until he fell and death before the chances are i think that it was more of a take in a law into one's own hands and it was an actual legal ceiling authorize life arctic but certainly we cannot concentrate on that point to the exclusion of an awareness of the dignity and the nobility of this man and his dying minutes we read it saw

jesus standing at the right hand of god i would like someday to to work out a message on this concept of the right hand of god a right hand is the place for finding the person to the king's rights in the days of royalty was the one who executed and administered for the keg and theologically what churches say when it talks about jesus at god's right hand is that god only knows in history as we have seen him move in jesus christ and karl barth i think has done more with this concept and many other top theologian with the bible as he looked up this place show there was the splendor here there was continuing terrorist law

we always gets a lot of the things we know and says jesus this case was a long time that for him was not a plunge into the unknown he had the same daring that jesus said before he said simply receive my spare and so we my intros say that he really did not lose his life he gave his life he surrendered it he was conscious of what was going all and this is this must've been his style of life i don't think we assume suddenly this kind of forbearance this must have been the way steven live the gracious and forgiving person and so he died as he lit it has been pointed out by most observers that jesus prayed for his enemies first and then said

receive my spirit and that steven came it close but did reverse the true it's interesting that when the church fathers piece together what we know as the church here in guinea in various signs that that is that they always date the larder calling his navel day the day when he died and went on into the larger kingdom of god the birthday of a martyr is not the day in which he was born into the surf than a whole day of the water as the day as close as we can fix it a day when he was received by god after his work was done now it's interesting that in the nineteen nineties some way or if you re going on to the eighth chapter and on that day that is the day of steven's death a great

persecution arose against the church in jerusalem and they were all scattered through the region of judea and sumeria accept the apostles this is another way of saying that that god uses the persecution of the church and the enemies of the church to extend the bombs and part of a church and this was the case here you know sometimes we worry so much about how history is going from the point of your face that we don't have another imagined open enough imagination to ask ourselves how the enterprise looks on the other side and it's interesting too to ask sometimes about whether really and believe is not gonna live within believe how we got our problems to be sure i believe that it's hard not to and i think of her and however it was resolutely determined that he was then a status thing out

and he tried and several different ways wants he didn't get all of john and saw to it that jon was what a depressing because john was the one i was doing most of the talking about this new moment and also it got an john safely incarcerated than his messengers came and said they're saying it again you're saying it again and the answer was this man from nazareth ann meyer tells us rather persuade now after john was arrested jesus came into galley preaching the gospel of god and after jesus it was adapted to hear stephen and saw and all the rest so that from the point of view of the enemy wanting to see it exterminated by just calms one after another and even after yet it had a job on the strike of a

foolish promise made less when it had too many apart a heron said john i be headed what was this about whom i hear such thing as the key of course and i still get a mighty fight that with the demise of stephen a young man and look brings immense so skillful a young man it over to one side simply taking care of the clothes now if this was a legitimate kind of a death authorized by the powers of that day then he was holding the close of state if it was one of these i'll take the law into my own hands kind of death then he was holding the stones of the men who were so excited that they want a total free for her low stones with all the force that they

could muster but whichever way as he hauls those clothes eternal truth begins to break down upon and with the demise of steven we're introduced to the greatest apostle of them all but justin says that the church owes pole to stevens' prayer and obviously stephen never knew that he was having this effect on this well trained able young man it reminds us of the word stanley the reporter who learned of the dike of africa to seek out david livingston well no activity of a good journalist and who following livingston's death said he made me a christian and he didn't know he did it

because by next week we will consider together the true conversions of saul of tarsus show we stand for the benediction the grace of our lord jesus christ the love of god the father the communion and fellowship of god the holy spirit rest upon you and remain with you this night and always a man