#560 Acts 7: The Call Of Abraham

ACTS 6:15; ACTS 7:1-3; ACTS 7:51-57

And all who sat in the council, looking steadfastly at him, saw his face as the face of an angel.
ACTS 6:15

Then the high priest said, “Are these things so?”
And he said, “Brethren and fathers, listen: The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran,
and said to him, ‘Get out of your country and from your relatives, and come to a land that I will show you.’
ACTS 7:1-3

”You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you.
Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers,
who have received the law by the direction of angels and have not kept it.”
When they heard these things they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed at him with their teeth.
But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God,
and said, “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”
Then they cried out with a loud voice, stopped their ears, and ran at him with one accord;
ACTS 7:51-57

His persecutors saw Stephen as with the face of an angel when he began his ‘defence’ of the Christian Faith, and what a marvellous and remarkable statement we have set out in Acts 7, as Stephen takes his accusers through a history of the nation set out in the ‘Old Testament’. Each element in the story he tells points to Christ — without mentioning Jesus Christ by name — and yet the accusation is clear. These Pharisees, Stephen’s accusers, are as guilty as their forebears in not recognising the Man of God in their midst.

• Each person or place mentioned in Stephen’s word are remarkable ‘types’ of Christ.
  
• Each person experienced in their lives a very similar pattern to that experienced by Christ, in that each was called or sent by God; each was rejected by their brethren the first time, and experienced rejection and humiliation by others; each were subsequently exalted by God and accepted by their brethren the second time.
  
• All reveal the failure to hear God’s voice speak through ‘the sent one’, and so each was prophetical of Jesus Christ.
• The ‘key verse’ here is verse 13…

And the second time Joseph was made known to his brothers, and Joseph’s family became known to the Pharaoh.
ACTS 7:13

The first time we see rejection, humiliation, hardness of heart and spiritual resistance; but the second time we have spiritual blindness replaced with life, exaltation and glorification. This second time comes up several times in the Bible — Isaiah 11:11; Jeremiah 1:13, Hebrews 9:28 among others. This is an important principle in Scripture where the second time, the second son, the second occasion reveals the true, God-inspired, God-created, God-breathed pivotal point of change.

The prophets foretold Christ’s appearing — The Son of God — the second part of the triune God who was rejected and now accepted.

Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God: on those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness. Otherwise you also will be cut off.
And they also, if they do not continue in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again.
For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, who are natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?
ROMANS 11:22-24

This passage tells us that the Jews will accept Christ as Messiah in ‘the second time’, just as we are assured that Jesus Christ will return ‘the second time’ without sin and unto salvation.

so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation.
HEBREWS 9:28

This is ‘the call of Abraham’.

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YOU TUBE PRAISE: STANDING ON THE PROMISES OF GOD

A CLOSING WORD from… ST AUGUSTINE

Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.

LISTEN TO THIS MEDITATION BY CLICKING ON THE LINK BELOW…

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COMING NEXT… #561 COME FORTH AS GOLD