Acts 6:7

And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem exceedingly; and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.

Increased ... exceedingly ... At a number of places in Acts, namely, here, Acts 9:30; 12:24; 16:5; 19:20; and 28:31, Luke paused to note the continued success of the gospel. C. H. Turner pointed out that Acts is thus cut into six panels covering, on an average, about five years each.[16]

A great company of the priests believed ... Only here is there such a declaration in the New Testament, and the importance of the truth revealed here is superlative. First of all, here is the secret of all those episodes which took place in the homes of Pharisees, as given in Luke, there being no good reason to doubt that Luke interviewed many of those converted priests; and this student views this as by far the most likely and reasonable explanation of chapters 10-19 in Luke's gospel. In the second place, the conversion of a vast number of Pharisees would account for the savage persecution of the church by that same party, which persecution Luke was in the act of narrating. The defection of many of their own group fired the hatred of the remnant against the gospel.

The success of the gospel, however, in bringing many priests of the old order into the church was not an unmixed blessing. The presence of such a group would tend to meld the old and the new institutions, a melding that was contrary to God's will; and, in this, one may read the necessity for the divine interposition which scattered the young church from Jerusalem. Perhaps it is significant that no name of any priest who became a Christian is found in the New Testament.

Plumptre was evidently wrong in his deduction that:

No priest is named as a follower of the Lord; and, up to this time, none had been converted by the apostles ... the new fact may be connected with the new teaching of Stephen.[17]

There was no "new teaching" by Stephen, whose talent did not consist of inventing new teachings but in the skilled advocacy of the teachings "once for all" delivered to the apostles. As will appear more clearly in Stephen's speech (fully reported in Acts 6:7), there was no "new" element in it.

Obedient to the faith ... Here is another outcropping of that fundamental fact of the New Testament, making "faith" not a subjective thing at all but an objective obedience of the gospel commandments. As De Welt said:

We must not overlook the expression, "obedient to the faith." There was something more to their faith than mere mental assent; there was something in it that demanded obedience ... repentance and baptism ... for the remission of sins.[18]

"This obedience is rendered not by believing; for that is to exercise the faith, not to obey it."[19] Wherever faith is mentioned in the New Testament as the basis of God's forgiveness, remission of sins, or justification, it is invariably an "obedient faith" which is meant. See Romans 1:5 and Romans 16:26.

[16] As quoted by F. F. Bruce, op. cit., p. 131.

[17] E. H. Plumptre, Ellicott's Commentary on the Holy Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1959), p. 35.

[18] Don DeWelt, Acts Made Actual (Joplin, Missouri: College Press, 1958), p. 86.

[19] J. W. McGarvey, op. cit., p. 110.