The God Who Isn't From Around Here
Introduction: The Accused Becomes the Accuser
We come now to one of the great courtroom scenes in all of Scripture. Stephen, a man full of grace and power, has been hauled before the Sanhedrin on trumped up charges. The accusation is blasphemy, specifically against "this holy place and the Law." His enemies claim he is trying to unhitch the faith of Israel from the Temple and the Mosaic code. The high priest, with all the pomp and circumstance of a dying religious establishment, poses the question: "Are these things so?"
Now, a man on trial for his life would be expected to mount a careful, lawyerly defense. He might quibble over definitions, deny the charges outright, or plead for mercy. Stephen does none of these things. Instead, he turns the tables. He understands that he is not the one on trial here. The Sanhedrin is on trial. Their entire religious system, which had become a fossilized monument to a God they no longer knew, was on trial. And Stephen, filled with the Holy Spirit, becomes the prosecuting attorney.
His defense is a history lesson, but it is not a gentle stroll down memory lane. It is a polemical masterpiece. It is a devastating, frontal assault on the central idol of first-century Judaism: the idol of place. They believed God was tied to their land, their city, and their building. They had domesticated the Almighty, putting Him in a beautiful stone box on Mount Moriah. Stephen's response is to unleash the God of their own fathers, the God of glory, and to show them that this God has never been tied down. He is a God on the move, a missionary God, a God who consistently works outside the established boundaries. Stephen is about to prove from their own Scriptures that they, the guardians of the holy place, have profoundly misunderstood their own story and, consequently, have missed the point of everything, culminating in their rejection of the Messiah.
The Text
And the high priest said, “Are these things so?”
And he said, “Hear me, brothers and fathers! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him, ‘LEAVE YOUR COUNTRY AND YOUR RELATIVES, AND COME INTO THE LAND THAT I WILL SHOW YOU.’ Then he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. From there, after his father died, God had him move to this country in which you are now living. But He gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot of ground, and He promised that HE WOULD GIVE IT TO HIM AS A POSSESSION, AND TO HIS SEED AFTER HIM, even when he had no child. But God spoke in this way, that his SEED WOULD BE SOJOURNERS IN A FOREIGN LAND, AND THAT THEY WOULD BE ENSLAVED AND MISTREATED FOR FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. ‘AND I MYSELF WILL JUDGE THE NATION TO WHICH THEY WILL BE ENSLAVED,’ said God, ‘AND AFTER THAT THEY WILL COME OUT AND SERVE ME IN THIS PLACE.’ And He gave him the covenant of circumcision; and so Abraham was the father of Isaac, and circumcised him on the eighth day; and Isaac was the father of Jacob, and Jacob of the twelve patriarchs.
(Acts 7:1-8 LSB)
The Untamable God of Glory (vv. 1-3)
The high priest asks his question, and Stephen begins. But notice where he begins.
"Hear me, brothers and fathers! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran..." (Acts 7:2)
He does not start in Jerusalem. He does not start at the Temple. He does not even start in the Promised Land. He starts in Mesopotamia. This is enemy territory, the heart of pagan idolatry, the land of the Chaldeans. And who appears there? "The God of glory." This is not some local tribal deity. This is the transcendent, sovereign Lord of all creation. And what is He doing? He is invading. He is initiating. He is calling a man out of paganism into fellowship with Himself. From the very first sentence, Stephen establishes that God's program is not defensive, but offensive. He is not the God of a particular place; He is the God who shows up in any place He pleases to accomplish His will.
This was a direct shot across the bow of the Sanhedrin. Their entire worldview was centered on the idea that God's special presence was confined to "this holy place." Stephen reminds them that the entire story began when God's glory appeared far outside their sacred geography. God is not managed. He is not contained. He is not a holy relic to be polished and kept safe in a building. He is the God of glory, and He appears where He will.
And the call to Abraham is a radical one: leave everything. "Leave your country and your relatives." The call of the gospel is always a call to leave one world for another. It is a call to subordinate all earthly loyalties, family, nation, culture, to the command of God. Abraham was called to be a pilgrim, a sojourner, and this sets the pattern for all true people of God.
A Faith That Owns No Dirt (vv. 4-5)
Stephen continues to trace Abraham's journey, highlighting a crucial point that the Sanhedrin had conveniently forgotten.
"But He gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot of ground, and He promised that HE WOULD GIVE IT TO HIM AS A POSSESSION, AND TO HIS SEED AFTER HIM, even when he had no child." (Acts 7:5 LSB)
This is a staggering reality. The great patriarch of the faith, the man to whom the entire land was promised, lived and died as a landless alien. He owned nothing but a tomb, a small plot of land he had to purchase to bury his wife. Think of the worldview collision here. The men judging Stephen were puffed up with pride over their possession of the land and the Temple. Their faith was a faith of sight, of real estate, of tangible assets. Stephen is reminding them that the father of their nation lived by faith alone. He had a promise from God, and that was all.
Abraham's faith was not in a place, but in a Person who makes promises. He was childless, yet was promised a seed. He was landless, yet was promised a country. This is the nature of true faith. It lives in the future tense. It banks everything on the Word of God, even when all the visible evidence contradicts it. The Sanhedrin had inverted this entirely. They were glorying in the temporary fulfillment of the promise (the land and the Temple) while rejecting the ultimate Seed to whom the promise pointed. They had traded the promise for the down payment, and in so doing, had forfeited both.
The Covenant of Suffering and Worship (vv. 6-7)
Furthermore, Stephen shows that the path to fulfilling the promise was never supposed to be one of unbroken earthly glory. It was a path that led directly through suffering.
"...his SEED WOULD BE SOJOURNERS IN A FOREIGN LAND, AND THAT THEY WOULD BE ENSLAVED AND MISTREATED FOR FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. ‘AND I MYSELF WILL JUDGE THE NATION TO WHICH THEY WILL BE ENSLAVED,’ said God, ‘AND AFTER THAT THEY WILL COME OUT AND SERVE ME IN THIS PLACE.’" (Acts 7:6-7 LSB)
God builds suffering, exile, and slavery right into the foundational promise. This is not a detour or a divine mistake; it is the ordained curriculum for God's people. Before they could inherit the land, they had to be crushed in the crucible of Egypt. This is the pattern of the cross, written into the DNA of redemption history. Bondage precedes deliverance. The cross precedes the crown.
The Sanhedrin operated under a theology of glory. They believed that because they were God's people, they were entitled to political power and earthly comfort. They could not stomach a suffering Messiah, which is precisely why they rejected Jesus. Stephen is showing them that a suffering Savior is the only kind of Savior their own Scriptures had ever promised. The path to true worship has always been through a great exodus, a redemption from bondage.
And notice the result: "after that they will come out and serve Me in this place." True worship is the result of divine redemption. It is not something men gin up to attract God's favor. God saves His people, and as a result, they worship Him. The Sanhedrin had turned the Temple into a place where they performed rituals to keep God happy, while their hearts were far from Him. They had the worship, but they had rejected the redemption that makes worship possible.
The Sign Before the Shrine (v. 8)
Finally, Stephen directs their attention to the foundational sign of the covenant.
"And He gave him the covenant of circumcision; and so Abraham was the father of Isaac, and circumcised him on the eighth day..." (Acts 7:8 LSB)
Why does he bring this up? Because the covenant of circumcision was given to Abraham hundreds of years before the Law was given to Moses, and over a thousand years before the Temple was built by Solomon. Stephen is systematically dismantling their priorities. They were obsessed with the Law and the Temple, but Stephen is telling them that the covenant of promise, received by faith and sealed with a bloody sign, was the foundation of it all.
Circumcision was a physical sign that was meant to point to a spiritual reality: a heart cut open for God, a heart set apart from the world. As Stephen will later make clear, these men standing in judgment of him had the physical sign, but they had "uncircumcised hearts and ears." They were zealous for the symbols of the covenant while being in rebellion against the substance of the covenant. They honored the sign given to Abraham while murdering the Seed of Abraham to whom the entire covenant pointed.
In these first eight verses, Stephen has utterly demolished the foundations of their accusations. He has shown that the God of glory is not tied to a place, that true faith is a sojourning faith that lives on promises, that the path to glory is through suffering, and that the covenant of promise long predates the institutions they idolized. He has shown them that they are the ones who are out of step with their own history. They are the true blasphemers, for they have taken the wild, untamable God of Abraham and tried to make Him into a household pet.