GOSPEL MEDITATION # 23
Acts 7:23-43
Stephen’s Speech, part 2
- Find a quiet place, alone and apart from distractions.
- Be comfortably alert, still and at peace.
- Say the Lord’s Prayer. Sing or cant the Jesus Prayer
- Pray for family, friends, neighbors, and yourself.
- Slowly and carefully read the passage of Scripture.
- Reread it. From memory, determine the central points.
- Stephen turns to Moses now, and like Jesus, he was rejected by his fellow Hebrews. Moses then fled to the land of Midian.
- Moses lived there for forty years, raised a family; his father-in-law was Jethro. He had two children born there.
- While in the Sinai desert, via an angel or messenger, Moses encounters a burning bush, and God speaks with Moses. This story is found in Exodus 3. It is unknown why Stephen mentions an angel rather than the Creator God, who reveals His name as Yahweh.
- God sends Moses back to Egypt for the purpose of leading the Israelites out and into the land promised to them, the land of Canaan.
- Stephen makes it clear that the one previously rejected, Moses, did in fact lead the people out of slavery in Egypt.
- Stephen quotes the words of Moses from Deuteronomy 18:15 where the promise that a Messiah would be sent to the people of Israel.
- Moses, while in the desert, was again rejected by the people who yearned for the false gods of Egypt.
- Strikingly, God’s response was to turn away and give the people up to the worship of idols.
- Then Stephen quotes a passage from Amos 5 where God says that the people of the promise turned from Him to follow false gods and the result would be banishment from the land promised to Abraham and his descendants.