Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
The tent, the house, and hearts uncircumcised
Acts 7:44-53
44 “Our fathers had the tabernacle of the testimony in the wilderness, even as he who spoke to Moses commanded him to make it according to the pattern that he had seen; · WEB
The tabernacle was portable and given by pattern; the temple was a house someone decided to build — and the prophets had already said God does not live in one.
Stephen turns at last to the holy place, and he begins by defending it. Our fathers had the tabernacle of the testimony in the wilderness, even as he who spoke to Moses commanded him to make it according to the pattern that he had seen. Two things are conceded at once: God commanded a sanctuary, and its design was not invented but shown. The man accused of speaking against the holy place opens his treatment of it by affirming its divine origin.
But he affirms the tent. And the tent's defining feature is that it moves. It came in with Joshua, it went through the dispossession of the nations, it lasted to the days of David — a structure of poles and curtains that traveled wherever the people traveled, for four hundred years.
The transition to the building is handled in two sentences with a conjunction between them that carries the whole weight. David asked to find a habitation for the God of Jacob. But Solomon built him a house. David, who found favor, asked. Solomon built. Stephen does not condemn the temple and he does not credit it to a command either; where the tabernacle came by pattern from God, the house came from a request and a construction project.
Then the doctrine, and it is not Stephen's own: the Most High doesn't dwell in temples made with hands, as the prophet says. The quotation is Isaiah, and it is unanswerable in that room because it is Scripture. Heaven is his throne and the earth his footstool; what kind of house will you build me, and what is the place of my rest? The final line closes the argument the speech opened with — Didn't my hand make all these things? A God who made the material cannot be accommodated by an arrangement of it.
The phrase made with hands is the one that stings, and it stings because Stephen used its twin nine verses earlier for the golden calf: the people rejoiced in the works of their hands. He has not said the temple is an idol. He has placed the two phrases close enough that a listener can hear what happens when a good thing given by God becomes an object of confidence in itself.
At this point the speech stops being a history and becomes a charge. You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit! As your fathers did, so you do. The insult is not his invention either; it is what God called Israel through Moses himself, so the accusation of speaking against Moses collapses in the moment it is most sharply confirmed.
The indictment ends with three strokes. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute — the pattern of Joseph and Moses run forward through the whole prophetic line. They killed those who foretold the Righteous One, of whom you have now become betrayers and murderers. And the last blow answers the charge about the law with its mirror image: they received the law by angelic ordination, and didn't keep it. He is accused of speaking against the law; he replies that his accusers have broken it, and that the man they broke it over is the one the whole history was pointing at.
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