Acts 7:1-60

Chapter 17

Prayer

( Easter Sunday. )

O Thou who hast thyself risen from the dead, raise us up also with thyself that we may die no more. We bless thee for the word of resurrection, for the gospel of restoration, and for the hope that death itself shall die and the whole creation be filled with joyous life. If we be risen with Christ we will set our affections on things above. Help us in this way to show how truly we have been buried with Christ, and how certainly we have been raised again with the Son of God. May we know the fellowship of his sufferings and the power of his resurrection. Crucified with Christ, may we also rise with him. Having known his shame, may we share his glory. Help us to overcome in the great battle of life, that we may sit down with Christ upon his throne.

Thou dost bring the years round from day to day, with all their sacred memories, with all their solemn inspirations, and with all their ennobling and instructive lessons. May ours be the seeing eyes, the hearing ears, and the hearts that do understand. Let nothing of thy providence be wasted upon us. Let the whole ministry of thy grace operate constantly in our hearts, subduing every evil passion, controlling every unholy thought, and lifting our whole life up to the sublimity of the life of Christ. We bless thee for all thy care. May we never forget thy benefits. Make our memories quick to retain every gracious impression, and whilst our memory remembers may our hope strengthen itself upon nourishment from heaven, that it may live through all the night of life, and finally enter into the joy of heaven's own morning.

Thou hast reminded us this day of the open grave of the Son of God. He is not here. He is risen. We will not seek the living among the dead. Our hearts will fly towards the heavens where the Christ of God now pleads and prays, and we will breathe our prayer through His infinite intercession, and because of his priesthood the answer to our desire shall be worthy of thyself, thou giver of all good. Our hope is still in the Cross; our confidence is in the abandoned tomb. Because Christ died we shall live, and because he rose again from the dead death shall have no dominion over us. Having this hope in us, may we purify ourselves, and set ourselves earnestly to all the high service of thy kingdom. May we not be slothful; may we rather be reckoned among those who redeem the time, and who prevent the rising of the sun, and toil till the night has fallen. Blessed is that servant who shall be found waiting and watching and serving when his Lord cometh. Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Delay not thy coming. The earth is wearying for thee, and the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. Come as thou wilt, and when thou wilt, only make us ready to receive thee with the eager love which should possess the hearts of men redeemed.

Comfort thy people. Speak a work of tender consolation to the heart that is filled with trouble. To some, life is a river of tears, a long pain, a dark and terrible disappointment, an agony which death alone can heal. Surely thou knowest such, and today, when the heavens are glad with a new hymn, and the earth is young with a new spring, and a new hope, thou wilt find them out in their hiding-places, and make them also glad.

Help us to hold on steadfastly during the few years that remain. May there be no break in our constancy; may our fidelity be without flaw or hesitation; may our life, redeemed with blood, spare not itself in the service of thy truth; and may our whole hope in Christ be made glad at last with the revelation and the enjoyment of his own heaven. Amen.

The Defence of Stephen

Acts 7:0 (continued)

THE first use we made of this speech was to inquire into the character of the speaker. I propose to recur now to this great apology, and to use it in the second place for the purpose of showing the method of Divine revelation and providence. Taking this great speech as our guide, what is the method of God's revelation to His creatures and the method of His providence over them? Let us see whether what is related here agrees with our own observation and experience. It may be that we can re-deliver Stephen's great speech ourselves. If we cannot find the words of such eloquence, we can identify Stephen's words as a fit expression of the sentiments which animate our own hearts. The first point to which attention is now called is the very point which came before us in our first study of the Acts of the Apostles. Notice how God has from the beginning made himself known to individuals. Stephen relates the great names of history. Some names are as mountains on the landscape. We start our journeys from them, we reckon our distances by them, we measure our progress according to their height. God does not reveal Himself to great crowds of men by some common revelation which ten thousand men seize at one and the same moment. So Stephen tells us that God appeared to Abram, to Joseph, to Moses, and to Solomon. This is the method of the Divine revelation all through and through history. It is in some senses a perplexing method, but we cannot deny it. We may reason about it, and fear it as we fear a great dark cloud, but there it is; and it is not there only in theology, it is there in science, in politics, in commerce, in literature, in family life, all through and through the fact that God speaks to the individual, and entrusts him with some great gospel or spiritual mystery, or of scientific and commercial progress. Why make so much ado about religious election? Why talk about election as if it were a distinctively and exclusively religious word? You find this principle of the selection of individuals as evangelists, apostles, preachers, and pastors, in agriculture, in astronomy, in statesmanship, in theology. If we could conceive valid objections against any accidental application of this doctrine of personal election, we should still have to encounter it along the whole line of human history. How is it that one man in the family has all the sense? How is it that one of your boys has all the adventure? How is it that one man is a poet and another a mathematician? How is it that one boy can never be got to stay at home and his own brother can never be got to leave home? How is it that one man speaks out the word that expresses the inarticulate thought of a generation, though all other men would have been afraid to speak it, even if they had been wise enough to discover it? Stephen therefore recognizes this great principle in the Divine revelation, that God speaks to individuals, and clothes individuals with peculiar and most solemn responsibility. In all ages God has had His prophets, apostles, evangelists, errand runners, men who have digged into the rocks and soared into the stars, and plunged through tumultuous seas to discover unknown lands. God has adopted the same method also in the kingdom of heaven. He has made some apostles, some prophets, some pastors and teachers, but the principle of individual election and coronation has been the same.

In the second place Stephen recognizes the great fact that God has constantly come along the line of surprise. Revelation has never been a commonplace. Wherever God has revealed Himself He has surprised the person on whom the revealing light has fallen. The power of surprise is one of the greatest powers at the disposal of any teacher. How to put the old as if it were the new! How to set fire to common sense so that it shall burn up into genius? How to reveal to a man his bigger and better self! How has God proceeded according to the historical narration of Stephen? To Abram he said, "Get thee out from thy country and from thy kindred." We cannot conceive the shock of surprise with which these words would be received. Travelling then was not what travelling is now. Get thee out on foot, bind on thy sandals, take thy staff, gather together thy family, and go out, not knowing whither thou goest! No man could receive a call of that kind as a mere commonplace! It must have gone thrillingly through every fibre of the man's being. Called to leave something positive for something promised called to give up a reality in the hope of realizing a dream! Then pass on to the case of Joseph. Stephen reminded his hearers that God gave Joseph favor and wisdom. Joseph's life was a surprise a greater surprise to himself than to anybody that could look upon it. How was it that he always had the key of the gate? Why did men turn to him in the night-time, and ask him the way through the valley of darkness and across the mountain of gloom? How was it that he only could tell the King the meaning of the King's dream? Then pass on to Moses. Stephen recognizes the same principle of surprise, for he reminds his hearers that God appeared unto Moses in a flaming bush not that He baptized him with the dew, not that he insensibly surrounded him with a new atmosphere, and breathed upon him a benediction without words. Moses was startled. The power of surprise was used by the Almighty to attract attention. So a bush flamed at the mountain base, and a voice said to the wanderer, Stop! Nothing but fire can stop some men! There are those to whom the dew is a gospel, there are others who require the very fire that lights the eternal throne to stop them and arouse their full attention. God knows what kind of book to give you. The book that would suit you might be an offence to your own mother. God knows what kind of ministry you need, so He has set in His Church a thousand ministries, of dew, of tenderness, of lute-like music, of pathos and tears and infinite persuasiveness, and thunder and lightning, and fire and alarm! It is not for us to compare the one with the other, but to see in such a distribution of power God's purpose to touch every creature in the whole world.

In the third place, Stephen, looking over the whole range of human history, shows how God has all the time been overruling improbabilities and disasters. We should say that when God has called a man to service, the road would be wide, clear of all obstructions, filled with sunshine, lined with flowers, that the man leaning on God's arm will be accompanied by the singing of birds and of angels. Nothing of the kind is true to fact. Stephen recognizes this in very distinct terms. He says that God spake in this wise, that Abram's seed should sojourn in a strange land, and that they should bring them into bondage, and evil entreat them four hundred years! In the face of such an arrangement can there be an Almighty providence? Yes. And Joseph was selected, as we have seen, and yet he was sold into Egypt. "Godforsaken" we should say, looking at the outside only. And there were those, as we are reminded by Stephen, who evilly entreated our fathers, so that they cast out their young children to the end they might not live. Yet the first word was supposed to be a Divine direction! Moses himself was "cast out." Stephen does not cover these things up or make less of them, or seek to hasten away from them as from disagreeable circumstances in the order of Divine Providence. Nay, he relates them, masses them into great black groups, and says Still the great thought went on and on! There is the majesty of the Divine Providence. Its movement is not lost in pits, and caves, and wildernesses, and rivers, and seas. The disasters are many, the sufferings are severe, the disappointments are innumerable and unendurable; still the thought goes on. Judge nothing before the time. So is it with our own life. To-day white-clothed apostles, mighty with God, the uplifting of our hands a prevailing prayer to-morrow like the beasts that perish! Living the forbidden life, eating stolen bread, living the beggar's life, can we be the called of God? Can God be living in us and leading us onward to some great destiny? Yes! He will yet cause death itself to die. There shall be joy in the presence of the angels of God over this little sin-blighted earth, more than over ninety and nine of the planets that never knew the tragedy of sin! Do not say you are forsaken of God because you have broken every commandment of the ten. The gift of God is not a question of good behaviour as from the outside, and as measurable by the letter; it is a question of purpose, thought, supreme intent; and GOD alone is judge!

There is nothing in this review of history as conducted by Stephen that ought to startle us as a novelty, or disturb us as an improbability. God has revealed himself to individuals in the making of the steam-engine, and the spinning jenny, and the telegraph, and the telephone, and a thousand other things. He did not reveal these inventions or possible inventions to all together, but to the singular man, to the solitary student, to the one brooding mind. "The Holy Ghost hath overshadowed thee, therefore, that holy thing which shall be born of thee, shall be called the gift of God!" That is true of every miraculous conception, whether it be of the Son of God or of the last invention of progressive civilization. Do not, then, distrust the individual teacher.

There is a common sophism, which only requires to be stated to refute itself, to the effect that it is very strange that God should have kept back this or that truth until this or that man should have arisen. There is nothing in all history less strange. It is God's common method. Yet there are those today who will tell you that it is very strange that God should have kept back his truth for nineteen hundred years, and should have revealed it to this latest of the teachers. It is a most fallacious sophism. We all know better. It is God's plan to say to Abram, "Get thee out." To call individual minds to his service, and to set the flame of the new revelation on the altar of the indvidual understanding. Do not fear to be surprised. Distrust commonplace rather than novelty. Astonishment would seem to be the keyword of the Divine Book. Every page is a surprise. Every syllable flames with a new light. The Lord sends us not a new book, but new readers of the book, men whose tones are comments and whose expositions are revelations. Do not succumb to misfortune. Our fathers were evil entreated, said Stephen; for four hundred years they seemed to have no deliverer. Moses was cast out; Joseph had been thrown into prison; disaster had marked the whole history of the Church. It was still God's Church, and you are God's child, his loved one still, though you have been evil entreated, and have done evil, and have left undone much that you ought to have done. God does not elect and disentitle according to our paltry rules and technicalities. "The gifts and calling of God are without repentance." Bruised, ragged, sin-stained, tearful, worn, we may yet arrive at the city whose streets are gold and whose walls are jasper, for God's grace is greater than man's sin.

Mark how exactly this whole history of Stephen's corresponds with Christ's method of revelation and providence. We can trace the whole of the old history in the new, and entirely fit piece to piece, letter to letter, line to line. Did not Christ reveal himself to individuals? Did he not say to the Abram of his time, "Follow me?" Did he call ten thousand men with one loud call, or did he go closely to one waiting fisherman and say to him, "Come?" A greater call than was addressed to Abraham! Peter was summoned to a more honored and sublime destiny. "Follow me;" to weariness, to shame, to misunderstanding, to reproach, to abandonment, to death, to heaven! Did not Christ also use the power of surprise? When was he ever received into any town as an ordinary visitor? Who did not know his voice amongst a hundred others? Who did not wait for him to speak, and look, and act? Who was not impatient with all the multitude lest they should interrupt any sentence of this marvellous eloquence? Did not Christ also take his Church through improbabilities, disasters, and dark places? Has not his Church been evil entreated? Have not our Christian fathers been cast out? Have we not also our heroes, and sufferers, and martyrs, and crowned ones? I saw a great city, and one of the elders answered and said unto me, These are they that came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. And, lastly, was not Christ always master of the occasion? Without a place whereon to lay his head, he was still the LORD. Without a beast to ride upon, he still called himself the MASTER. Washing his disciples' feet, he lifted himself up from his stoop to name himself LORD and MASTER. We remember our disasters, our slaveries, our punishments, our reproach, and our sorrow; still, notwithstanding all, the Church is the Lamb's Bride, and he will marry her at the altar of the universe!