The Acts of the Apostles 30

Subtitle: Stephen's Defense VI

Acts 7:44-50.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on January 8, 2023.

This is the sixth part of Stephen's defense before the Sanhedrin, Israel's high court at the time.  Stephen has reminded them of Abram's call, the Patriarchs, the first attempt of Moses to deliver Israel, God' sending of Moses back to deliver them, the events and prophecy of Moses in the wilderness, and now today, the tabernacle of witness.  The tabernacle is with them in the wilderness, but Stephen's point is significant enough to be broken out as its own point.  He is calling them to remember the Tabernacle of Witness.

Our church buildings are not simply houses of worship.  We sometimes use words without thinking through the full import of what they put across.  However, sometimes words and phrases are used to diffuse the truth of what God is doing in His Church.  We have seen in this Republic the tendency over the years to lump churches into the same boat as synagogues, mosques, scientology centers, wards, etc., with the phrase houses of worship.  Our laws are written equating all of these things, but they are not equal.  There is an intended spiritual sleight of speech that is being used to pigeon-hole Christians.

It would be more correct to call our church a house of the Lord, a house of Jesus, of Yeshua, of Yahweh.  It is a place that belongs to the God who created the universe, and to His Son, the Lord Jesus, God's Anointed Savior.

However, even this misses the greater point that we will talk about today, which is the point of the New Covenant, the New Testament.  It is not about the building, but about the people who gather there.  Everyone who has truly put their faith in Jesus has become a house of Yahweh, the place where His Spirit rests.  More than this, we are being built together into a greater house of Yahweh as a corporate tabernacle.

Think about how this would impact the Israelites of the first century A.D.  This place that was geographically located, and was restricted with laws that gave only the high priest access to the place of God's presence, would now be located within the hearts of believers, of me!  That which I had always been taught to treat as holy and sacred is now me.  I have become a special place where God wants to rest and commune.  Furthermore, the body of true believers are pictured by the apostle Peter as individual, living stones being mortared together by the Holy Spirit in order to create a group of people within whom the Spirit of God dwells.  There is something special, holy, sacred, and incredible about God's Church and their gatherings that the world cannot copy.  There is something special, holy sacred, and incredible about you when you put your faith in Jesus.

In fact, just as Leah and Rachel "built up the house of Israel," so the Church of Yahweh is built up as we walk in spiritual intimacy with God and birth new lives into the Kingdom of God.

No, we are not merely a house those worshiping the works of our hands and the desires of our hearts.  We belong to the King of kings and the Lord of lords over everything in the heavens and on the earth!

Let's look at our passage.

Remember the tabernacle of witness (vs. 44-50)

Stephen calls them to remember the tabernacle that was built in the wilderness.  The tabernacle was a portable tent structure that served as the place of sacrifice and meeting with God. 

The Bible uses several terms of the tabernacle. The first word, mishkan, simply means a dwelling place and is a reference to God dwelling within it.  The other word, ohel, also means dwelling, but at its root is the concept of skins, as in animal skins.  It most often is better translated as tent, even though it came to be used of even permanent structures as Israel transitioned from being a camping society (forty years in the wilderness) to a more established people.  The tabernacle was a tent-like structure with several layers of animal skins sheltering the Holy place, and the Holies of Holies.

Stephen uses the phrase Tabernacle of Witness, which in the Old Testament would actually be the Tent of Witness.  Incidentally, another phrase that is used is the Tabernacle of Meeting.  The word translated as meeting is hard to translate.  It refers to special appointed times, and was used of the feasts of the Lord, both as calendar dates to observe and as prophecies about special appointed times that they symbolized.  However, Stephen emphasizes the word "witness."  The tabernacle was not just the dwelling place of the God of Israel, but also represented His witness, His testimony to Israel and the world.  This word is used of the stone tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain.  He was told to place the Testimony, the Witness, into the ark of the covenant.  The ark was also referred to as the Ark of the Testimony, which was placed within the Tabernacle of Testimony.

The interesting thing about a witness, or testimony, is that it can have a warning aspect to it.  God's law and words to Israel were both a witness of the good that they should do and how God would respond, and a witness of the evil that would come upon them if they did not follow God.  Moses tells them, testifies on God's behalf, that they would be unfaithful to God and that God would kick them out of the land.  Yet, He would later restore them back to the land.  The testimony is a double-edged sword.

So, we should recognize that the testimony is that testimony that God has given of Himself, and it is connected to the place where He dwells.

Stephen points out that God appointed them to build the tabernacle, instructed Moses in how it was to be constructed, and lastly, accompanied those instructions with a visual.  Moses was God's mediator and would relay all of these instruction to them.

Stephen emphasizes in verse 44 that the Tabernacle was built "according to the pattern that he [Moses] had seen."  This comes from Exodus 25:40 where God reminds Moses to follow exactly the pattern that God had "shown him" on Mt. Sinai.

We get this picture in the Bible, and here, of God as a Master Builder.  I know that groups like the Freemasons make a big deal out of God as an Architect, but they are merely ripping off God's true nature for their own fleshly gain.  God is the builder of all creation, and He did not use random mutations to create it all.  When Chuckie Darwin introduced his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (Yes, that is the full title), he believed that the cell would be confirmed as simply a box, like a Lego® brick.  He also mentioned that this theory required all things to be reducible.  You should be able to show how complex things like the eyeball could "evolve" from less complex things that originally had other purposes.  There would be a clear path of reducing an organism from a high level back to a single-celled level and even further.  Of course, over time science discovered that the cell is more complex than a modern city.  In fact, one protein is so complex that the odds of even the smallest of them being created through random mutations are astronomical, and that is just one aspect.  Another problem is that most mechanisms within different species are so complex that we find irreducible complexity.  Several things are useless in and of themselves, but work together to accomplish a particular function.

Though I have taken some time to show the weakness of the Theory of Evolution, it is weak particularly because of the master building, master engineering, that God has done in the creation.  Like any builder, God considered all that He would make in its design, but also in whether it would be worth it or not.  In eternity past, God determined it was worth it.  Remember, the next time you feel that life isn't worth it, that God has said it is worth it, has said that your life is worth it!  Can you trust Him?  He's got this!

God is the builder of David's dynasty, and Jesus is the builder of the Church and the New Jerusalem, its dwelling place for all eternity.  Hebrews 8:5 explains to us that the tabernacle was a copy, a shadow, of the heavenly dwelling of God.  So, God had shown Moses a pattern.  I don't think He showed him blueprints, but most likely gave him a glimpse of the heavenly tabernacle.    We will deal with this point more in a bit, but humans were also built, or fit, to be a dwelling place for God as a replica of the heavenly tabernacle. 

God is the builder of history.  He is the One who tears down and builds up.  No nation rises up or falls, but at God's command.  We will all serve Him.  We will either serve him in righteousness, worthy of reward, or serve His purposes through our wickedness, worthy of destruction.

Stephen then reminds them in verse 45 that the tabernacle was brought into the Promised Land and used up through the days of David, whom God used to conquer all the land that God was giving them.

This tabernacle was more than just a symbol, or a metaphor, for God's presence.  God's presence was actually localized there.  The cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night would actually come down upon the tabernacle and could be seen by the people.  This visible presence seems to move to inside of the temple at some point.  Eventually, the prophets would speak of the Spirit of God leaving the temple and it becoming ichabod, without [God's] glory.

This is in contrast to the temples of the nations surrounding Israel and those in Canaan that they had come to dispossess.  Those temples were ornate and probably made the tent structure that Israel had seem unimpressive.  However, they were mere fictions and wishful thinking that had been taught to them by fallen spiritual beings.  God did not inhabit their temples, and if anything was there, it was a worthless fallen entity that was powerless to help them against the One True God.

It is as if God sees what the nations are trying to do and decides to authorize Israel to make a true tabernacle for Him.  I am not saying that God is reactive because He would have seen this coming and already planned to work it into His purposes.  In fact, we should note the God who created the whole universe, seen and unseen, humbled Himself to be localized in some way in a tent structure in the wilderness with the people of Israel.  This building of dead skins represents when we die to our fleshly nature and become a dwelling place of His Holy Spirit.  It is not the thing that God is wanting, but is only a stepping stone, a prototype that helps us to see.

It was perhaps looking at the temples of the surrounding nations that led David to want to build a permanent structure for God, a temple.  Or, it could have simply been recognizing that he was dwelling in a palace that he had built for himself.  Why don't I build a better place for God?  David then tells the prophet Nathan what is in his heart.  Nathan knows that God is blessing David, so he tells David to go ahead with it without asking the Lord.  Before Nathan even leaves the palace, God pulls him up short and tells him to go back and tell David that it wasn't his job to build God a house.  However, his son Solomon would do it.

In 1 Chronicles 22:8, David explains that he had too much blood on his hands from taking the land.  God did not want the violence of force associated with His dwelling place.  This does not mean that David shouldn't have done what he did.  David fought the battles of the Lord.  Yet, there is more to this than just David's bloody hands.

In 2 Samuel 7, God actually responds to David with the question, "Will you build a house for Me to dwell in?"  Think of it.  A man building a house for the One who built the Galaxies, and the atomic nucleus, whose wisdom and being is truly beyond our comprehension.  God reminds David that He has dwelt in a tent from Egypt to David's day (400+ years).  Hmm, I wonder where God dwelled before the tabernacle?  The tabernacle was not built because God was homeless.  It was built to point to a greater Truth.

Instead, God promises to build David a house (a dynasty) and his son will build him a temple.  This first temple would be built by Solomon.  Yet, Solomon fell away from the Lord towards the end of his life.  Also, the first temple itself, which was supposed to be God's "permanent house," was destroyed in 586 B.C. by the Babylonians (really by God) because Israel continued its idolatry in the face of God.  When they came back into the land later, a second temple would be built, which was in existence during the days of Jesus.  This permanent temple was destroyed in A.D. 70.  God's permanent houses are doing so well.

Solomon and the first temple were a fulfillment of God's promise to David, but they were a falling-short fulfillment that served as a shadow of the true Son of David who would build the true temple of God.  The destruction of the former two temples points to a better permanent home for God.  Jesus is the perfect Son of David who comes forth to build the perfect temple to God.  In fact, Jesus laid the foundation for the third temple while the second temple still stood (for only 40 more years).  The third temple is the True Church of Jesus Christ.  It is a physical temple in that humans have bodies, but it is spiritual in that God dwells in our hearts and minds.  Even this follows the previous template.  Our mortal bodies cannot be the permanent home of God's presence, but He humbles himself as He did in the wilderness and takes up residence within us.  The permanent Temple will also be "built" by Jesus as he resurrects the saints with glorified bodies that are incorruptible.

This brings us to our last point.  God is too great to be limited to a mere building on earth.  Stephen quotes from Isaiah 66 to drive this point home.  This greatness of God is a developing theme throughout the Old Testament.  At first the ark is spoken of as a throne of Yahweh.  The mercy seat had cherubim wings to serve as a kind of backrest.  Yahweh is spoken of as dwelling between the wings and above the mercy seat, sitting upon an earthly throne.  Later, the ark is referred to as God's footstool (Psalm 132:7-8).  Notice that God is getting bigger.  In Truth, God is not getting bigger, but He is incrementally expanding their understanding of just how great He truly is.  The Isaiah 66 passage expands this to the point where the whole earth is God's footstool and the heavens are His throne.  In fact, even the heavens fall short of the full glory of God.  All creation is truly His footstool.

Do you not see that God is not in need of us to build Him a house.  He is already building a permanent house out of us.  We do need to lean into this process and cooperate with God.  Instead of focusing on how nice our building is, we should focus on what kind of dwelling place we are for God.  Am I a shabby, dilapidated temple?  Am I a temple that has been devoid of the word of God like it was in the days of Josiah (2 Kings 22)?  God's time with Israel was a humbling of Himself and yet it was a real thing.  Through unbelief, they missed out on the fullness of what it could have been and ended up losing it altogether (as a nation). 

We too are in danger of hearing this truth and falling short.  In 2 Corinthians 3:16, Paul says, "Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?"  Perhaps, you find yourself saying, "Well, I don't feel like God's dwelling in me."  Really?  Where in the Bible does it say it is only true if you "feel it."  That would be like a husband not following through in the actions of faithfulness because he just isn't feeling it.  "I know God said we would become one, but I'm just not feeling it.  I want a divorce."  We judge ourselves by our own words.  Jesus didn't go to the cross because he was "feeling it."  While we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly!  Love has feelings, but it must never let feelings drive its actions.  It is not even duty that drives love.  It truly is love itself that becomes the driving force behind the actions of love; God is love.

You cannot make yourself a temple of God, but you can cooperate and lean into the work that God is doing, even if you don't feel it.  Walk by faith and trust God to do the dwelling.  Jesus laid the foundation for your spiritual life and the Church as a whole.  He leads us like a master builder in our personal life and in the experience of your local church up to the Church as a whole.  God knows what He is doing so we simply need to trust Him!

You are His desired place of rest for eternity.  Yes, much of life calls for trust and faith in Jesus.  Like a marriage, we come to Christ and embrace his love by faith.  We don't know what all we will face in this life, but we will face it with him for better or worse.  Of course, he promises to work all of the "worse" stuff to our good.  What a deal; what a Lord; what a Savior!  His desire to dwell in you, and within us all, should lead us to turn to Him with all of our hearts.  We are His home, and He is ours!

Defense VI