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Following the growth of the Church and the spread of the Gospel, particularly among the priesthood, comes another period of testing. The persecution turns deadly and the Church gains her first martyr in Stephen, the newly elected deacon. It is understandable that the Evil One would intensify his attacks now as the Gospel spreads through priests who have opportunity to spread it among thousands. The religious leaders invent two charges, which they know will be incendiary. The first is that Stephen rejects Moses and the law. The second is that he speaks disdainfully of the Temple, their holy place of worship. Stephen makes two points which defeat the accusations of his persecutors: (1) It is they who have rejected all of God’s servants, including Moses and the law, who pointed to Christ; and (2) the worship of the true God is not isolated to a geographical location.
We are always looking for ways to objectify God’s promises so that we do not actually have to trust him. To trust in God is too nebulous, unpredictable, and frightening for us. We want objectifiable ordinances, books, practices, or places in which to place our trust because spiritual trust is too inexact and too demanding. To trust Christ plus nothing else is a never-ending affair.
In attempting to define God into a form which is manageable and predictable they have rejected Christ and his salvation. Stephen calls his fellow Jews and us back to the essence of the message of the Bible which is this: We must trust Christ alone to fulfill God’s promise to be our God and make us his people.
Someone recently loaned me Ernest Gordon’s To End All Wars. It is a revised edition of Miracle on the River Kwai. Ernest Gordon was chaplain of Princeton University for fifty years, but his conversion to Christ came ironically enough in a Japanese work camp in the jungles of Thailand during World War 2. Not only was Gordon not a Christian when he became a prisoner of war, he despised Christianity and everything associated with the Church. Christianity was but an anesthetic against the pain of living in a meaningless world.
As a humiliated, emaciated, and hopeless captive to cruel tyrants Gordon became even more embittered. His location, torment, and the evil of his captors convinced him beyond doubt that there could be no God.
His attitude was not altogether different from these Jewish religious leaders or even some of you today. He thought that if there were to be a true God he must fit within a certain location, certain set of circumstances, and not challenge his way of life. These leaders thought that they had so captured God. He lived only in Jerusalem, demanded their liberation from Rome, and fully approved of their way of life.
God makes one absolute promise, “You will be my people and I will be your God through Christ alone.” And the only way to benefit from that promise is to receive it by faith. And if received, God will keep that promise regardless of site, suffering, or sin by means of a Savior named Jesus who is the focus of the entire Bible.
God is never restricted by geography. And he is especially unrestricted by any site in fulfilling his covenant promise to be your God and preserve you as his people. Now there are some sites in this world where that is easier to believe than others. Stephen’s first example is a man who lived in a locale which these religious leaders would have thought impossible for God to work in.
While several passages inform us that Abraham was from Ur of the Chaldees (Mesopotamia), only Stephen tells us that he was actually called by God from there. In fact, Stephen says more than that; he says God actually appeared to Abraham in Mesopotamia. That is a long way from Haran where God had to call to Abraham again because he got bogged down in his journey with all of his possessions. And that is an even longer way from Canaan. Some people like these religious leaders think that it might be possible for God to call to some areas of the world, but impossible for him actually to show up there. But here the Bible teaches us that he is everywhere present, no places are shut to him. And he is able to show up and save people or keep his promises to people in the most repulsive of environments. Stephen makes it doubly clear that God is not restricted by locations when he calls him the God “of glory” (cf. Ps. 29:3). In other words, his glory is where he exists not in places made by man.
But the truth is there is no place in this world where it is any more miraculous than another. God’s focus is not to redeem people for a temporal world anyway. He is redeeming people who will live forever in a world re-made without sin. Abraham was called to go to Canaan, the Promised Land. But even when he arrived there, he did not consider that his ultimate destination. He viewed himself as a pilgrim, realizing that Canaan was but the staging ground for redemption that would be completed in Jesus Christ. Jesus said that Abraham “saw his day and was glad” (John 8:56). Paul makes it clear that Jesus was the promised Seed from Abraham’s line. And Hebrews says that he looked beyond the land to the promise of heaven (He. 11:10). These Jewish religious leaders were far too comfortable where they were. They had forsaken Christ and their future inheritance and created a new religion which was man-centered, material, and geographical.
God’s promise to save and keep is not conditioned by place or anything material for that matter. The promise to Abraham was primarily spiritual—that his seed would be a blessing to the nations. Abraham had to pick up and leave based on a spiritual promise alone. Neither the land nor circumcision were given first; the promise was given first.
You may be in a place you view to be God-forsaken, tempted to think that God cannot fulfill his promise because of the place you are in. Maybe you are surrounded by unbelievers who discourage you. Perhaps you are in a job where it seems to you nothing of the Kingdom can be accomplished. You may live in a place where you are bereft of spiritual nurture and fellowship. And in these situations you think that God is challenged to fulfill his promise to bring salvation to others through you or to preserve and foster you as his child. You must remember he is the God of glory whose Kingdom reigns over all the earth; place is no hindrance to his fulfilling his promise to be your God.
At the beginning of this message, we left Ernest Gordon in his embittered agnosticism. Gordon became ill with a number of diseases, which moved his doctors to give up hope for his survival. They placed him in the “death house” a makeshift morgue to finish his days. However, some of his comrades had mercy on him and built him a private shack which was clean and comfortable. Daily a couple of fellow prisoners would come by and bathe him, dress his sores, and visit with him. He could not believe their kindness. He wondered what lay behind it. When he developed the strength he decided to test them. Reflecting on the death and hopelessness of the camp, he said to one, “When you look at the facts, isn’t it hard to see any point in living?” His friend, Dusty, said he disagreed, “I don’t think there is anything accidental about our creation. God knows us. He knows about the sparrow and each hair of our heads. He has a purpose for us.” Gordon challenged, “Then why doesn’t he do something, instead of sitting quiescently on a great big white throne in the no-place called heaven?” Dusty, wisely answered, “Maybe he does . . . maybe he does . . . but we can’t see everything he is doing now. Maybe our vision isn’t very good at this point, ‘for here we see as in a glass darkly.’ I suppose eventually we shall see and when we see we shall understand.”[1]
Gordon was conquered by the hope of these men as well as by their sacrificial love for him. He eventually converted to Christ himself and revival spread throughout the camp. As man after man came to Christ, he realized that his promises are not dependent on place or circumstances, that they cannot be hindered by man’s evil. They set up houses of worship, created libraries and university classes, amputees made prostheses for others, and they formed hospice groups to take care of the dying. They even formed an orchestra. They and the world around them were transformed by the conviction that in Christ God was their God and they were his people.
All of life, the whole of creation, the whole Bible is about God fulfilling his promise, “I will be their God and they will be my people” in Jesus Christ. As long as you live contrary to that truth, you will find your life and your world to be out of sync. But if you come to Christ you will experience the same transformation Ernest Gordon did.
[1] Ernest Gordon, To End All Wars (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 107-08.