Pushing Buttons with Stephen (Part 2)
Acts 6-7 (and Genesis)
Welcome back to Pushing Buttons with Stephen. In this journal entry, I want to start looking at the content of Stephen’s presentation to the Sanhedrin.
However, before we jump into the content, I want to begin this journal entry by looking at the closing words of Acts 6: “they saw his face was like the face of an angel.”
Personally, I think this was due to the filling of the Holy Spirit. It was God showing the judicial group that they weren’t just dealing with a mere human here. They were trying a man of God.
I’d also venture to say that how he appeared should have clued them (and us) into the fact that what he’s about to say is fully infused with wisdom from the Spirit.
Now, let’s look at his content.
He begins his presentation of his defense at the beginning of Israel’s history. With Abraham. With God’s promise that Abraham’s descendents would possess the land and with the covenant of circumcision.
In this paragraph of his sermon (verses 4-8), there is reference to a (familiar) stumbling block moment for me from the past. Verse 6 says, “For four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own…”
A couple of years ago, when I was helping my husband do his cleaning contracts while his leg was healing, I was listening to a teaching about this passage in Genesis that is quoted by Stephen. I remember wondering if this was proof for meticulous determinism being true. I asked God as I moved from vacuuming between one set of chairs to another set of chairs. And I could show you the exact place in this particular church’s sanctuary where God put that worry to rest with the words, “just because I know something is going to happen, doesn’t mean I caused it.”
The descendents of Abraham weren’t in Egypt because God manipulated things for them to be there and be slaves just so He could show off His power. They were there “because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph” and “they sold him into Egypt” (v. 9).
Now, God is pretty cool in how His Holy Spirit leads us, and the day before I read this chapter of Acts, I was listening to an episode of the Big Life Devotional Podcast. The host of the show mentioned Joseph in her devotional. I don’t remember what she said, but I do remember where God took my thoughts. It was a moment of viewing a familiar story from a different angle.
You see, I’ve always viewed the events of Joseph’s life as the actions of a rather mean and angry God. Which makes sense that I would view God that way if subtly, for decades, I have been taught that God determines all things – good and bad. How can you see God as anything other than mean and angry when He is the cause of a young man being sold as a slave by his brothers, lifted up to a position of power, and then, tossed into prison for a crime he didn’t commit? It’s that “God meant it for good” comment that Joseph says to his brothers which sparks this kind of thinking and makes it so easy for it to slip, nearly unnoticed, into Sunday School lessons and sermons.
But that day in the shower, as Pamela mentioned Joseph in her devotional, my thoughts were, “Well, of course, the enemy wanted Joseph in jail. Of course, the enemy wanted to get rid of Joseph from his father’s house. He was trying to wipe out the family of Jacob (aka Israel). He was trying to wipe out the family which God had chosen so that the promise made in Genesis 3:15 about the enemy being crushed wouldn’t come to pass.”
The enemy has always been trying to thwart God’s plan. Always. And he’s been using the same tactics for millennia. Go back to the story of Cain that I mentioned in last week’s journal entry. Even then, the enemy was using jealousy to wipe out righteous Abel.
Joseph’s story is a wonderful example of God working things together for good despite what sins man perpetrates, despite the evil the enemy throws in the path.
We read the story of Joseph as it is recorded in the Bible as the only way that story could have played out. And if I am looking at the story through a lens of determinism, then, there’s no other way events could have arranged themselves because all of this was planned by God in eternity past.
However, if you take off those man-made determinism glasses, you will see that this being the only possible way for Jacob’s family to survive the famine just isn’t true. How we read the events is the way it did play out, but it’s not the only way Jacob’s family could have been saved from starvation when the famine hit. Joseph could have been used to save his family while still at home. God could have arranged things in any fashion He chose.
But… Joseph’s father played favourites. Joseph shared his dreams. His brothers became jealous, and sin ruled the day as they sold Joseph into slavery (which, if you recall, was the better of the two options for what they wanted to do to him. Option one was to kill him.)
And God worked it all for good. For the saving of many lives.
Just to be clear, God wasn’t taken by surprise when Joseph’s brothers sold him. He had told Abraham that his descendants would be in a land not their own for 400 years before Isaac was born, before Jacob was born, before Joseph was born. God knew the end of things before He created anything. He knew that Joseph would be sold by his brothers. He knew that there would be a famine in the land. He knew that Jacob’s family would move to Egypt and his descendants would live there for four hundred years.
But just because He knew what would happen before it did happen, does NOT mean He authored the famine or the slavery or the favouritism of Jacob for Joseph or the plotting of brothers against one of their own.
There is a war that rages around us and in us. It’s a battle between good and evil… between God and Satan… between creating our own place to fill or filling the place God has given us to fill.
Stephen was filling his place – loving God and others, serving them, doing great things in their midst. Those who accused him were not filling their place. Those who were trying him were also not filling their place. For I do not see a whole-hearted, everything-within-them love for God or others being demonstrated in their actions.
They were clinging to the old covenant, unwilling to accept the new covenant as true. I think we’ll talk about that a bit next week.
For now, let me just close out this journal entry with some thoughts that have been going through my head, in regards to the story of Joseph and the goodness of God, since that moment in the shower when the Holy Spirit switched out the lens through which I saw the story.
If you remember the story, you know that Joseph had two dreams about sheaves of grain and the sun, moon, and stars bowing down to him. I’d always seen that as a bit confusing and as maybe God using Joseph’s relating of those stories to his brothers as a way to provoke them into selling Joseph and getting Joseph to Egypt.
But as I stood there in the bathroom drying my hair on that day when Pamela mentioned Joseph and the Holy Spirit switched my perspective on this story, I saw those dreams as a loving promise from God to Joseph and as encouragement that would follow him through the dark, dark hours, days, and years to come. He had been ripped from his family.
There seemed little hope that he would see his father or his brothers - any of them, including his younger brother Benjamin – ever again, but he had those dreams from God that told him that what seemed to be true wasn’t true. There would be a day when he saw his family again, and they would bow to him. How that would happen likely wasn’t something he understood until the events we read about unfolded.
Perhaps it was these dreams which helped Joseph see God’s hand of goodness working in his life despite the evil plots against him and allowed him to forgive his brothers and say…
So, check your Bible study lenses. Are they God-given or man-made? Because if you’re looking through the wrong lens – as I was – you’re going to miss out on learning about who God truly is. You’re going to miss out on witnessing His glorious goodness.
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5 NIV)