Since God Had Provided Something Better: The Faith of the Cloud of Witnesses

Sermon from April 10, 2011

Matthew 10:16-25; Hebrews 11:32-40: 12:1-2; Acts 7:54-60

Jesus understood that his kingdom ministry, his death on the cross, his resurrection, his ascension, and his sending of the Holy Spirit to his followers would spell the end of the Jerusalem temple. In the deepest sense, he himself was the new temple. Wherever Jesus was present, there people could connect to God, receive assurance of atonement and find answers to their deepest prayers. In a broader sense, Jesus was present wherever two or three of his followers gathered in his name, and so it was those followers who visibly embodied the portable living temple wherever they went. If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, it is your job in cooperation with your fellow disciples to be the temple in your interactions with people every day. Think about it. The temple is not a place you go. The temple of the living God is who you are as part of the missionary fellowship we call the church.

Jesus’ original twelve disciples were slow to expand very far upon this concept. And that was as it should have been. Their first job was to be the living temple within and near the physical confines of the original Jerusalem temple, ministering to visitors to the temple with the good news of Jesus Messiah, Son of God, Savior, and Lord, the ultimate fulfillment of Judaism’s hopes for the ages. Jesus had declared that the Jerusalem temple would soon disappear, not one stone left upon another, but it was not the job of the disciples to press for that destruction.

For Stephen, it was a different matter. He was not one of the original twelve. Like the twelve, he was Jewish. Unlike the twelve, his first language was not Aramaic, but Greek. He was part of the group of Messianic Jews known as the Hellenists, meaning “of the Greek language and culture.” They originated not from Judea or Galilee, but from further away, from southern Europe, western Asia, northern Africa, or a Mediterranean island. Unless they had sacrificed greatly to move back to Jerusalem, they normally came to Jerusalem only occasionally for one of the great Jewish festivals such as Passover, Pentecost, or Tabernacles. We could guess that Stephen was present for Pentecost and was brought to Christ on the first day that the church went public with its message about Jesus, or very soon thereafter.

When the twelve Aramaic-speaking apostles appointed seven Greek-speaking ministers (alternate translation: deacons, servants), who were Spirit-filled and with a reputation for wisdom and good character, to handle the distribution of food to widows and other needy church members, Stephen was one of the seven. In addition to distributing food, he was soon preaching and teaching in public, and making some enemies. The enemies went to some high-powered Jerusalem religious leaders and, with false testimony convinced them to seize Stephen and put him on trial. Stephen used the occasion of his trial to preach a bold and powerful sermon.

Luke reports Stephen’s sermon in which he weaves together two major themes: (1) that Israel has always resisted the Holy Spirit, and (2) that the temple was never meant to box God in. When his audience was sufficiently enraged, about to attack, Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” Of course, Jesus was that exalted Son of Man, who now exercised the authority of God in judging the world. Stephen was claiming to see the man that the Sanhedrin had managed to get the Roman government to crucify, now standing in the place of authority to judge the religious leaders who were about to kill Stephen. Stephen’s audience cried out loudly, stopped their ears, and rushed at him. They cast him outside the city and stoned him to death. So far as we know, Stephen was the very first martyr for Jesus, the first to follow Jesus all the way to the end on the Way of Suffering. I mean all the way to the end. His last words, with the pain of stoning already upon him, were, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Sounds a lot like, “Father, forgive them,” doesn’t it?

And the Lord honored Stephen’s prayer, at least insofar as not writing off forever those who had executed Stephen. In the crowd, one of the leaders of the opposition, who held the cloaks of those who threw the stones, was a man whose Jewish name was Saul and whose Roman name was Paul. The Lord Jesus later went way beyond the ways of human justice by revealing himself to this man and calling him to be an apostle to the Gentiles.

Later, Paul summed it up, “Last of all, as to one untimely born he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not in vain.” Indeed the Lord’s grace was not in vain, for no other human being in history has been more important to the mission of Christ than this forgiven and redeemed accomplice to the murder of the first Christian martyr. Paul, who had begun as a violent enemy of the early church, did more than any other apostle to spread the faith of the church and to plant new churches around the Mediterranean world. He who had been so enraged by Stephen’s sermon about the end of the old temple, is the one who put legs on the idea of the church as a portable living temple proclaiming the gospel in all the world.

The ways of God are indeed strange and wonderful! It never would have occurred to me to call Paul, one of the leading persecutors of the church, to become a leading Christian apostle. It’s a good thing I am not God!

And making Paul an apostle is not the strangest thing God has done either! I am flatly puzzled by some of the inclusions of heroes of the faith in Hebrews Chapter 11. None puzzle me more than four of the names from the book of Judges.

Barak was not actually a judge, but the general of Judge Deborah; and he was not awful, just a bit more dependent on Deborah than she thought he should be. If he were a professional basketball player, the sports writers would say that he was a good enough role player, but not an all-star, let alone hall of fame material.

Gideon came out of a family background of faithless idolatry, was compelled by God into leadership, tested God repeatedly, but at last acted bravely and faithfully and even heroically enough to win the day, but then, while declining formal kingship, began to act in the manner of a pagan monarch, with multiple wives and concubines, and making for himself a golden priestly garment although he was not a priest. The garment was worshiped and became a spiritual snare for Gideon’s family and for all Israel. Fulfilling Gideon’s move toward unauthorized monarchy, one of Gideon’s illegitimate sons Abimelech killed the seventy legitimate sons of Gideon and had himself proclaimed king. His reign lasted only three years. Gideon’s legacy is not that good, but here he is in faith’s hall of fame.

It gets worse: Gilead was a wealthy man who had several sons by his wife and another by a prostitute. The latter son was named Jephthah, and his half brothers denied him a share in the family inheritance. Jephthah became a leader of a band of guerilla robbers. But when the Ammonites threatened, his half-brothers came to Jephthah and asked him to lead the battle against the Ammonites. He accepted on the grounds that they make him their ruler. The Spirit of the LORD empowered Jephthah, but Jephthah had little understanding of the ways of the LORD. He made a rash vow that, if the LORD would give him victory, he would upon returning home sacrifice whatever came out the door of his home to greet him. How grieved he was, when returning victorious, his daughter, his only child, was first out the door to greet him. Not only did he not know that human sacrifice was completely against the will of the LORD, but also he did not know that the law of Moses provided a way out for people who made rash vows, and, apparently, no one around him knew either. Essentially, Jephthah was a spiritually ignorant man in a spiritually ignorant culture. Jephthah’s folly reached its culmination in his slaughter of 42,000 Israelites of the tribe of Ephraim at the fording place of the Jordan River. Granted, the Ephraimites were somewhat at fault, but surely inspired wisdom could have found a better way. Yet, here we find Jephthah in faith’s hall of fame.

Then there is Samson. His parents tried to raise him to keep the ways of a lifelong Nazirite vow, with strict purity of devotion to the Lord. A Nazirite refrains from any product of a vineyard, presumably the point being to avoid wine and other strong drink. A Nazirite also did not cut or shave his hair or beard during the time of the vow. Finally, a Nazirite did not touch or even go near dead bodies. Surely, these strange rules were designed to impress upon the vow-maker that he was under total obligation to the holy standards of the LORD. But Samson did not keep the rules and certainly did not keep the holy intent behind them. True, he did kill many of the Philistine enemies of Israel, the greatest number in his last act when he pulled a Philistine temple down upon himself and many Philistines. Perhaps a certain heroism can be found in Samson, but he doesn’t seem like material for faith’s hall of fame.

But Barak, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, and more are to be found on the list. And the divinely inspired writer of the Letter to the Hebrews says of those on the list, “And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.” Apart from the later work of Christ and the salvation offered to the later faithful, the Old Testament figures on this list could not have been saved for eternal life, but it is clearly implied that alongside those of us who are saved through Jesus Christ, these four men and many more come to the blessings of eternal life in the presence of God. How extraordinary!

What does God know about these four that we do not know? He sees them not just for the sorry things they did, but also for what they might have done with better upbringing, with a more spiritual cultural environment, with more models of faithful living, with more acquaintance with the Scriptures, with the advantage of knowing about Jesus. He counts such faith as they had for what it might have become with opportunity. Most of all, he knows their hearts.

Please do not think that God abandoned his holy standards out of weak sentimentality or foolish idealism. Not so. God did not give up one characteristic of the perfect future that he has planned for the faithful. He just sees that, even in these incredibly flawed figures, there is yet the basis for far more than they even dared dream within their earthly lives. What they have, I would venture to guess, is the readiness to let God reign. With that readiness to let God reign, they can enter God’s future. Without that readiness to let God reign, even the most pious churchgoer, with every doctrine nailed down, cannot enter God’s future.

Stephen is an example of a faithful person who was ready to let God reign, even at the cost of his life, even if it meant that those who stoned him to death, would also be brought around to enter the future realm with him.

People of saving faith know that there is something better ahead, and they are willing to lay everything on the line, in order to keep moving toward that better future. It is not how far we have come that counts. It is the direction that we are moving.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”