Many passages in the Bible speak of the glory of God’s creation. Psalm 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” Psalm 95 says, “The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Psalm 104 says, “How many are your works Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number—living things both large and small.” The first category we think of is nature. From the towering peaks of the Andes in Venezuela, to the great freshwater lakes of Michigan, to the parched sands of the Sahara the Lord has made a variety of breathtaking biomes for life to flourish in. The water cycle refreshes the earth with vitality. The seasons form a natural rhythm for life. The day and night cycle establishes periods of activity and rest. The stars and the moon give light by night. And the sun sheds its energy, light, and warmth by day.

Charles Spurgeon once offered a humble recommendation for how to defend the Bible. He kept it quite simple, “Let it defend itself.” His statement gets to the heart of our problem. We want to hold up the Word of God, forgetting that it holds us up. We want to cut with the Sword of the Spirit rather than have it cut us. We treat the sword like it is an inanimate object in need of the living to wield it. But our text says the word is alive and we are the ones in need of animation. We’re the ones in need of entering into rest, being prodded to enter that rest by the two-edged sword. 

After the apostles had laid hands on the seven men who were to help administer aid to the widows, two of those men come to the forefront as powerful preachers and miracle workers. We have considered the story of Stephen, who face his martyrdom with remarkable courage and grace. The story of Stephen ended with an introduction to Saul of Tarsus and his early persecuting career, but Luke’s main focus moves on to a second man among the seven, a man named Philip.Now remember the “table of contents” from Acts 1. Jesus had said they would travel as His witnesses to Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, and then to the uttermost part of the earth (Acts 1:8). The Holy Spirit was poured out in Jerusalem (Acts 2:2-3), and all the early activity happened there. In the persecution that broke out after Stephen’s death, the believers scattered into Judaea and Samaria (Acts 8:1). And then follows Philip into Samaria (Acts 8:5). 

The early church father Tertullian once famously said that the “blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” This aphorism has been proven to be true in countless ways down throughout the history of the church. And the great Augustine made the same point: “The earth has been filled with the blood of the martyrs as with seed, and from that seed have sprung the crops of the church. They have asserted Christ’s cause more effectively when dead than when they were alive. They assert it today, they preach him today; their tongues are silent, their deeds echo round the world. They were arrested, bound, imprisoned, brought to trial, tortured, burned at the stake, stoned to death, run through, fed to wild beasts. In all their kinds of death they were jeered at as worthless, but ‘precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.’”

We have already looked at the overall theme of Stephen’s speech to the Sanhedrin, which is that God’s presence is not locked in a box somewhere. He is not a freeze-dried god, and not contained or bounded by anything that we might say, do, or think. Wherever God is, that place is holy. Whenever God is in fellowship with someone, that person is holy, that person is a saint. The filthiest dungeon could be holy ground, and a saint chained to the wall of that dungeon could be someone of whom the world was not worthy (Heb. 11: 38).

One of the hallmarks of worldliness is when the curators of museums subvert the legacies of the men they are ostensibly honoring. The Lord Jesus referred to this common pattern when He said that the men who build memorials to deceased prophets are the descendants of the men who murdered the prophets. As the stage is set for the martyrdom of Stephen, we see the very same dynamics in play. 

There is a sense in which we are living in quite an unusual circumstance, in quite an odd set-up. In many ways, our church community has never had it so good. We are a growing, industrious lot, grateful for the blessing of God, and the general disposition of our community is in fact quite a cheerful one. At the same time, and in the same community, there are hardships, difficulties, and significant afflictions. Some are coping with widowhood. Some have severe medical challenges. Others have to deal with the fact of having been wronged, or treated roughly, by a brother in the faith. Still others are managing the long-term challenges of elder care.Think of a woman who lost her son in the waning days of World War 2 . . . and then three days later Germany surrendered, and her entire city erupts in joy. There is a real difference between misery spread across everyone, as in a time of famine or flood or other disaster, on the one hand, and individual affliction in a time of prosperity on the other. I bring this topic up because many of us have been in this position, and I anticipate more and more of us will need to navigate this reality as well. And so long as it continues, this will need to be done individually . . . for the most part.