Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Stephen begins: a God who appeared before there was a land
Acts 7:1-8
1 The high priest said, “Are these things so?” · WEB
Accused of speaking against the temple, Stephen starts with a God who appeared to Abraham in Mesopotamia — outside the land, before the covenant sign, and centuries before any building.
The high priest asks a single question — Are these things so? — and receives the longest speech in the book. It is not a denial, and it never becomes one. Stephen answers a charge about the holy place and the law by retelling Israel's history, and the retelling is the argument.
His first sentence puts the case. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran. Every element of that is chosen. The title God of glory claims the very presence the temple was built to house. The location is Mesopotamia, hundreds of miles east of the land in question. And the timing is before Haran, which is before the journey has even properly begun.
The implication is left for the court to draw, and the court will draw it soon enough. If God's glory found Abraham in Chaldea, then the presence of God is not the property of a site. That is not an attack on the temple. It is a statement about the God who was worshiped there, and it is drawn entirely from the book of Moses the witnesses accused him of slighting.
The next detail sharpens it. God brought him into this land — He gave him no inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on. Abraham owned nothing in the land of promise. He was given a promise and no property, and he had no child when he received the promise about his offspring. The founder of the nation lived his whole life in the country as a resident alien holding a title deed to a future.
Then the promise itself, in God's own words, and it contains a forecast of trouble: his offspring would be aliens in a strange land, enslaved and mistreated for four hundred years. God's plan for this family included four centuries of oppression before the deliverance clause. A court that assumes God's favor is demonstrated by present possession of a temple and a city is being reminded that the promise was originally given to a landless man and immediately qualified by a long captivity.
The covenant of circumcision comes last in the sequence, not first. Abraham was called, promised, and given the land in prospect, and only then received the sign. Stephen is not disparaging the sign; he enters the sequence into the record just as Moses gave it. But the order carries the same point as the geography. Everything that makes Israel Israel was given to a man who had been met by God before any of it existed.
The paragraph ends by running the generations quickly to the twelve patriarchs, and the speed is deliberate. He is not lecturing them on facts they know as well as he does. He is laying a track, and the next station is a brother sold by his brothers.
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