Slices
Prepare
‘Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me’ (Psalm 27:10). Rejection is hard, but never our final destiny with God. Allow time to sense his acceptance of you.
Bible passage
23 ‘When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his own people, the Israelites. 24 He saw one of them being ill-treated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defence and avenged him by killing the Egyptian. 25 Moses thought that his own people would realise that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. 26 The next day Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, “Men, you are brothers; why do you want to hurt each other?”
27 ‘But the man who was ill-treating the other pushed Moses aside and said, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? 28 Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?” 29 When Moses heard this, he fled to Midian, where he settled as a foreigner and had two sons.
30 ‘After forty years had passed, an angel appeared to Moses in the flames of a burning bush in the desert near Mount Sinai. 31 When he saw this, he was amazed at the sight. As he went over to get a closer look, he heard the Lord say: 32 “I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Moses trembled with fear and did not dare to look.
33 ‘Then the Lord said to him, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. 34 I have indeed seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their groaning and have come down to set them free. Now come, I will send you back to Egypt.”
35 ‘This is the same Moses they had rejected with the words, “Who made you ruler and judge?” He was sent to be their ruler and deliverer by God himself, through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. 36 He led them out of Egypt and performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea and for forty years in the wilderness.
37 ‘This is the Moses who told the Israelites, “God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your own people.” 38 He was in the assembly in the wilderness, with the angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living words to pass on to us.
39 ‘But our ancestors refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt. 40 They told Aaron, “Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who led us out of Egypt – we don’t know what has happened to him!” 41 That was the time they made an idol in the form of a calf. They brought sacrifices to it and revelled in what their own hands had made. 42 But God turned away from them and gave them over to the worship of the sun, moon and stars. This agrees with what is written in the book of the prophets:
‘“Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings
for forty years in the wilderness, people of Israel?
43 You have taken up the tabernacle of Molek
and the star of your god Rephan,
the idols you made to worship.
Therefore I will send you into exile” beyond Babylon.
Explore
We could never accuse Stephen of hagiography. That’s the term for biographies that erase anything negative about their subject. Stephen’s warts-and-all presentation paints a picture of the Israelite nation as those who got it wrong, rejecting Moses (vs 35,39) and worshipping idols (vs 40,41,43). It’s a sad story that underlines Stephen’s thesis that the rejection of Jesus is part of a pattern. Despite God’s commitment to his historic promise (v 32) and his raising up of Moses as a prophet and rescuer, the people shunned him. What was the exile to Babylon but a judgement on their blindness (v 43)? Jesus as the fulfilment of the promise of a prophet like Moses (v 37; Deuteronomy 18:15) suffers the same rebuff.
We could write our own history and that of the church in similar terms. Bullies and Saints is John Dickson’s title for his honest look at the good and evil of Christian history.* Both are there, often confessing Jesus with lips but denying him in actions or lack of action. But the astounding truth is that all through the messiness of our history God is at work, patiently seeking to turn bullies into saints and deniers into ‘repenters’.
* John Dickson, Zondervan, 2021
Respond
Let’s not be too quick to criticise Stephen’s detractors, but examine our own hearts to see where we might be ignoring what God is saying to us.
Deeper Bible study
Holy Spirit, direct our thoughts that we may rightly understand difficult texts.
The original story of Moses, retold by Stephen, can be found in Exodus 2:11–25. There are differences between these accounts, but that need not trouble us. Both ancient Israel and first-century Christianity were oral cultures in which traditional narratives were told and retold. The stories could be adapted in the telling according to the particular needs of the audience being addressed. Moses’ slaying of an Egyptian slave-driver is set in a context in which this highly privileged Hebrew, brought up as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, had suddenly discovered the terrible plight of his own people as he ‘watched them at their hard labour’.1 That original story of liberation, of a God who heard the groaning of an oppressed people and acted to set them free, was foundational to Israel’s existence and faith. However, as Stephen retells the story, he stresses the resistance of the ancestors to God’s demands and their desire to return to Egypt! This is the prelude to the accusation of his contemporaries’ rejection of the Messiah Jesus – which will result in his execution.
There is another crucial aspect to the context of this story: many scholars believe that Luke, the author of Acts, is writing decades after the events he describes, after the destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of the original community of Jewish followers of Jesus. For Luke, the urgent issues were: why had this happened and what should be the relationship between the synagogue and the church? This second question still hovers over us as Christians and we do well to heed the advice that our interpretation of Acts must demonstrate that the church is ‘wedded to Israel rather than a pretext for our severance from the people who first taught us Gentiles to look for the Messiah’.2
Read Romans 11:17–23 in light of the last sentence and meditate upon it.
1 Exod 2:11 2 William Willimon, Acts: INTERPRETATION: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, John Knox Press, 1988, p89
Bible in a year
Read the Bible in a year: 1 Chronicles 24–27; Galatians 3
Pray for Scripture Union
The Youth Net is a Local Mission Partner based in Stafford. Pray for the team Alison, Cathy, Anji, Scott, Sam, Lottie and Jo and for the children and young people. This term the theme for the work in schools is ending well, transitioning and looking forward.
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