Many, perhaps all, of the great movements in history have had their martyrs; and many of the freedoms enjoyed and taken for granted today were won by men and women who were prepared to give their lives for the principles on which those freedoms are based. Who does not revere the memory of Socrates who died at the hands of ignorant superstition and political vested interests rather than abandon his uncompromising search for truth and justice?
The Christian church, too, has had a long list of martyrs. Jesus Christ himself was persecuted to death by the civil and religious authorities, and he taught his followers that persecution for his sake was an extreme honour and joy. It is no wonder, then, that Luke has devoted a great deal of space in Acts to Stephen, the first, and perhaps the greatest of all Christian martyrs. Understandably, the Christian church has revered his memory ever since.
But there are two things we should bear in mind about martyrs. First, true martyrs are not fanatics. Fanatics are just as liable to hound other people to death (by the [p 34] million, if necessary) for opposing their beliefs as they are to die for them themselves. True martyrs kill nobody. Secondly, the way to truly honour martyrs is not simply to erect statues to them, or paint pictures of them, but to find out what they stood for, and then to stand for it ourselves.
What, then, were the principles for which Stephen was prepared to die, and why did his executioners think them so subversive as to merit execution?
To put it briefly, Stephen died for proclaiming that through Christ every person has the right of immediate and direct access to God without the need of any intermediary except Christ, and the right of knowing that through Christ they can here and now enjoy complete acceptance with God.
Put this way, it is perhaps difficult for us to see why anyone could have objected to what Stephen preached, let alone persecute him for it. But we must try to understand the historical situation. His opponents were the leading members of the Jewish hierarchy of priests in the national temple at Jerusalem; and they saw immediately that Stephen’s Christian ideas would eventually make their temple, priesthood, and sacrifices unnecessary, irrelevant and obsolete. Hence their opposition.
Now of course they had a vested interest: the dues from the sacrifices offered by the local people and the thousands of international pilgrims made the high priest and his colleagues very wealthy men. But they were not motivated simply by the fear of financial loss. They honestly believed—and in this the Christians would have agreed with them—that the temple in Jerusalem, its [p 35] sacrifices and priesthood had been set up by God’s authority through the law of Moses in the Old Testament. They, therefore, charged Stephen with propagating the idea that Jesus Christ was going to destroy the temple, priesthood, and sacrifices which God himself had instituted. If proved, the charge carried a mandatory sentence of death for blasphemy.
Now Luke makes it clear from the start that Stephen had never said that Jesus Christ would physically destroy the Jerusalem temple. That part of the charge was false (Acts 6:11, 13, 14). But in another sense, there was a great deal of truth in what they said.
Consider the temple sin offerings. By their means, the Old Testament had taught the Israelites that sin against God (and all sin is ultimately against God) forfeits the life of the sinner. Sin’s penalty must be paid before the sinner can be honourably forgiven. To find forgiveness the sinner had to bring an animal to the temple, confess his sins over its head, and kill it. The animal died as his substitute; the penalty was paid and the sinner forgiven.
Now Stephen and the other Christians agreed with the priests that this system was set up by God. They maintained, however, that it was self-evidently only symbolic. The death of animals could not in actual fact pay the penalty for human sin, as the Old Testament itself pointed out (Ps 40:6–7). They argued, therefore, that the system was never intended to be more than a temporary means of preparing people’s minds for the death and sacrifice of Christ, the Lamb of God who should take away the sin of the world. This, too, the Old Testament had stated (Isa 53:5–12). The old system, then, was like a toy shop with [p 36] toy candies and toy money which parents sometimes give their children to play with, so that when they grow up they will be prepared to discover that real candies have a price, and must be paid for with real money. Of course, when they reach that stage, toy money will be discarded.
The implications of this for the Jerusalem temple were, as the Jewish hierarchy rightly perceived, far-reaching. Their ancient system of sacrifices had never been more than a series of promissory notes which acknowledged, but could not actually pay, an ever-increasing debt. Now the death of Christ had paid that accumulated debt, and the old system could be abolished.
But the implications were even wider. Since Christ’s sacrifice had paid the full penalty of all the sins of all who would thereafter believe on him, no other kind of sin offering would ever be necessary again. Nor would there be any need for Christ continually to repeat his own sacrifice, as the Jewish priests had been obliged constantly to repeat theirs (Heb 10:11–18).
But Stephen and the other New Testament writers were more radical still. They said that it was not only the temple sacrifices that were now obsolete: the temple itself was fast becoming obsolete as well (Heb 8:1–13). Christ himself had said the same while he was still on earth (John 4:19–24). And when he offered himself on the cross as the perfect sacrifice for sin, the historians tell us that something of major significance happened to the temple itself.
Like the tabernacle of Moses before it, the temple in Jerusalem was divided by a wall and a veil into two compartments. The inner compartment was called the Most Holy Place, and was a symbolic representation of heaven and of [p 37] the immediate presence of God. Ordinary people were never allowed into that Most Holy Place. Only the high priest could go in, and that only once a year on the Day of Atonement. The point of this visual, architectural arrangement was, so the Bible tells us, to impress on the minds of the people that, as long as they were dependent on the constant sacrifices of animals, and ablutions in holy water, the way into God’s immediate presence was for them not open (Heb 9:8–10).
But when Christ died on the cross, God himself tore down the veil in the temple (see Matt 27:50–51). By this symbolic act he indicated that, for all who put their faith in Christ, there is already unrestricted spiritual access into the immediate presence of God; and, in addition, a vigorous assurance of bodily access into God’s presence in heaven at the second coming of Christ (Heb 10:19–22; John 14:1–3). For Stephen, the symbolism of the veil in the Jewish temple, therefore, was now obsolete, and, if retained, would deny the freedom proclaimed by the gospel.
But to the Jewish hierarchy, grounded in centuries of tradition, Stephen’s views must have sounded completely heretical. His first task, therefore, was to try to convince the council that his views were not blasphemy against God—according to whose directions the original tabernacle had been built.
To prove this, Stephen pointed to the clear lesson of Old Testament history (Acts 7:2–53). Although God’s overall purpose had always remained the same, there had been several distinct phases in his education of Israel for the coming of Messiah. Naturally, each phase superseded and left behind what had gone before. The child that has learned to count by playing with bricks will never [p 38] be asked to abandon the laws of arithmetic; but he may rightly be called upon to give up the bricks and move on to computers. To refuse to move on would be disastrous.
So God had called Abraham out of the Gentiles, and told him and his son, Isaac, to stay in the promised land of Canaan (Acts 7:2–5; Gen 26:3). But later on, Isaac’s son, Jacob, was told to take the whole tribe back among the Gentiles to Egypt (Acts 7:11–12; Gen 46:1–4). Then, some centuries later, Moses was sent to bring them out of Egypt back to Canaan once more (Acts 7:7–36). Through Moses, God had commanded Israel to build him a tabernacle, and to offer animal sacrifices. But, again after some centuries, God had indicated in the Psalms and Prophets that the animal sacrifices, the temple and the Aaronic priesthood would one day be superseded by something better (Pss 40 and 110; Isa 66:1–2).
There was, therefore, nothing blasphemous in Stephen’s claim that, now that Jesus the Messiah had come, these old things had in fact been superseded by the promised better things. The real danger was that, just as their fathers before them had rejected Moses, the council would reject the Messiah and all these better things.
But the Jewish chief priests, faced with the great spiritual realities of the gospel of Christ, refused to give up their mere—and now obsolete—symbols, and they murdered Stephen for saying they should. Like their ancestors before them, they refused to keep pace with the living God; and all they were left with was a temple, full of symbols still, but deserted by the incarnate Son of God (Matt 23:37–38). In AD 70, God allowed the pagan Romans to come and raze it to the ground (Matt 24:2).
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