God's True Address: The Uncontainable Glory Text: Acts 7:44-50
Introduction: Prosecuting Idolatry
We come now to the very heart of Stephen's sermon, which as you know by now, is not a defense at all. It is a prosecution. Stephen has been hauled before the Sanhedrin on the trumped up charge of blaspheming "this holy place," meaning the Temple. His accusers, puffed up with religious pride, saw themselves as the guardians of God's house, the curators of the museum of true religion. They believed God was a home-body, and that they were His exclusive landlords. And so Stephen, under the power of the Holy Spirit, decides to give them a history lesson, not to exonerate himself, but to indict them.
What Stephen does here is masterful. He is not attacking the Temple as God designed it, but rather the Temple as they had idolized it. He is drawing a sharp, clean line between the God who condescends to dwell with His people and the idolatrous impulse of men to put that God in a box of their own making. This is a timeless temptation. Men are always trying to domesticate the Almighty. We want a God we can manage, a God with a fixed address, a God who is confined to our systems, our buildings, our traditions. We want a pet lion, not the Lion of the tribe of Judah.
Stephen's argument is that God has always been a pilgrim God, a God on the move, whose presence defines holy ground, not the other way around. He was with Abraham in Mesopotamia, with Joseph in Egypt, and with Moses in Midian. The central point of Stephen's speech is that God's presence cannot be localized or contained. To believe that it can is to fundamentally misunderstand who He is. It is to commit the primal sin of idolatry, which is to shrink the Creator down to the size of the creation. And as Stephen builds his case, you can feel the temperature in the room rising. He is not just correcting a minor theological error; he is taking a sledgehammer to the central idol of first century Judaism.
The Text
Our fathers had the tabernacle of testimony in the wilderness, just as He, who spoke to Moses, directed him to make it according to the pattern which he had seen.
And having received it in their turn, our fathers brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations whom God drove out before our fathers, until the time of David.
David found favor in the sight of God, and asked that he might find a dwelling place for the God of Jacob.
But Solomon built a house for Him.
However, the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands, as the prophet says:
'HEAVEN IS MY THRONE, AND EARTH IS THE FOOTSTOOL OF MY FEET. WHAT KIND OF HOUSE WILL YOU BUILD FOR ME?' says the Lord, 'OR WHAT PLACE IS THERE FOR MY REST?
WAS IT NOT MY HAND WHICH MADE ALL THESE THINGS?'
(Acts 7:44-50 LSB)
The Pilgrim Tabernacle (vv. 44-45)
Stephen begins his argument by appealing to their shared history, starting with the tabernacle.
"Our fathers had the tabernacle of testimony in the wilderness, just as He, who spoke to Moses, directed him to make it according to the pattern which he had seen. And having received it in their turn, our fathers brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations whom God drove out before our fathers, until the time of David." (Acts 7:44-45)
Stephen starts on common ground. The tabernacle was glorious. It was God's idea, not man's. And it was made "according to the pattern," a copy of the true heavenly sanctuary. This was the authorized place of worship. But he subtly includes two key characteristics in his description that build his case. First, it was a "tabernacle," which is to say, a tent. It was not a permanent stone edifice. Second, it was "in the wilderness" and was "brought in with Joshua." It was portable. It moved.
This was a profound theological statement. God is not tied to a particular geography. He is not a local deity. He is the Lord of all the earth, and He travels with His people. The Holy of Holies was not fixed to a plot of land; it was wherever God led them. This pilgrim nature of God's dwelling place was essential. It taught Israel that their security was in God Himself, not in a place. Their identity was found in their relationship with the covenant-keeping God, not in their proximity to a religious building. Stephen is reminding the Sanhedrin of their roots. Their fathers worshipped a God who lived in a tent, a God who was on the march.
The Stationary Temple (vv. 46-47)
Next, Stephen traces the transition from the mobile tent to the fixed house.
"David found favor in the sight of God, and asked that he might find a dwelling place for the God of Jacob. But Solomon built a house for Him." (Acts 7:46-47)
Here we see a crucial shift. David, a man after God's own heart, desired to build a permanent house for God. The desire itself was not sinful; it came from a good motive. But it represented a significant change, and one fraught with spiritual danger. The move from a tent to a temple is the move from a pilgrim mindset to a settled mindset. It is the beginning of the temptation to think that God has finally "arrived" and can be contained.
It was Solomon, not David the warrior, who ultimately built this house. And it was magnificent. But the danger of any gift from God is that we can begin to worship the gift instead of the Giver. The Temple, a good thing, could become a very bad thing if it caused Israel to forget the God of the Temple. It could become a religious talisman, a source of false security. The people could begin to think, as they did in Jeremiah's day, "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these," assuming that God would never judge them as long as His house was in their midst. This is exactly what happened. They began to confuse the symbol with the reality.
The Uncontainable Creator (vv. 48-50)
This brings Stephen to the pivot of his argument, the theological knockout punch.
"However, the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands, as the prophet says: 'HEAVEN IS MY THRONE, AND EARTH IS THE FOOTSTOOL OF MY FEET. WHAT KIND OF HOUSE WILL YOU BUILD FOR ME?' says the Lord, 'OR WHAT PLACE IS THERE FOR MY REST? WAS IT NOT MY HAND WHICH MADE ALL THESE THINGS?'" (Acts 7:48-50)
The word "However" is the hinge upon which the whole argument turns. Yes, Solomon built a house. However... and here Stephen detonates their entire theology of place. He states plainly: "the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands." This would have been utterly scandalous to his hearers. Their whole religious, political, and economic system was built on the premise that He did.
To prove his point, he doesn't appeal to some new revelation. He appeals to their own Scriptures, quoting from Isaiah 66. This is the ultimate statement of God's transcendence. God is the Creator; everything else is creation. Heaven, the highest place we can imagine, is merely His throne. The earth, the sum total of our reality, is just a stool for His feet. The question is rhetorical and dripping with divine irony: "What kind of house will you build for Me?" The answer is obvious. You cannot. It is a category error of cosmic proportions. It is like an ant offering to build a vacation home for a whale. The creature cannot build a container for the Creator.
This is the fundamental Creator/creature distinction. God made all things. He is not a part of the system; He is the author of it. Therefore, no part of that system can possibly contain Him. Solomon himself understood this at the dedication of the temple, when he prayed, "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You, how much less this house which I have built!" (1 Kings 8:27). The Sanhedrin had forgotten what their wisest king knew from the beginning. They had taken a condescension of God, His willingness to meet them in a particular place, and turned it into a confinement of God.
The True Temple
So if God does not dwell in buildings made by hands, where does He dwell? This is the unspoken question hanging in the air, the question Stephen's entire sermon has been constructed to answer. The old symbols were always pointing to a greater reality. The tabernacle and the temple were shadows, patterns of the true thing.
The true temple, the true meeting place between God and man, is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one who "tabernacled among us" (John 1:14). When He spoke of the temple, He said, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." He was speaking of the temple of His body (John 2:19-21). Jesus is God's true address.
And now, by the Holy Spirit, God has a new temple, one not made with hands. That temple is the Church. "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" Paul asks the Corinthians (1 Cor. 3:16). We, the people of God, are living stones being built up into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5). The Sanhedrin was fanatically defending an empty building, a shell from which the glory had departed, because they had rejected and murdered the true Temple of God, the Lord Jesus. And in persecuting Stephen and the church, they were persecuting the new temple that God was building in the world.
Stephen's message is a severe warning to us. What are our modern idols of place and structure? Is it our beautiful church buildings? Our denominational headquarters? Our political institutions? Our carefully crafted traditions? All of these can be good things, just as the Temple was. But the moment we begin to think that God is contained by them, that our security lies in them, that they cannot be shaken, we have committed the same sin as the Sanhedrin. We have built a box for the uncontainable God.
Our faith is not in a place, but in a Person. God's true address is His Son, and by grace, all who are in His Son. We are the temple now. We are the place where the living God dwells on earth. And we, like the tabernacle of old, are to be a pilgrim people, on the move, carrying the presence of the living God into every corner of a world that desperately needs to know Him.