I invite you to turn to Act Chapter 7. Last week, we began to look at Stephen's speech and his martyrdom. Stephen had been going around teaching about Jesus, which raised the ire of the Jewish leadership. They do not want to hear the name of Jesus spoken. And we saw last week that they drummed up two charges against Stephen. Those charges are summarized in Acts 6 verse 14. And there it says, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us. So their first charge was that Stephen claimed Jesus was going to destroy this place, which means the temple. And we looked at that first charge last week. Stephen reminded the Jewish leadership of their own scriptures, which says that the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands. Stephen wanted them to understand God does not live in a box that is guarded and tended by our own human ideas about what kind of God he should be. God is not, we saw last week, he's not a pet on a leash. Stephen quoted Isaiah 66 in which God says, heaven is my throne. The idea is you cannot contain God. And then as Stephen continued to speak, he looked up to heaven and he saw Jesus standing at the throne of God, proving his point. And for this vision of Jesus ruling from heaven entirely unconstrained by the whims of man, they stoned Stephen. They stoned him. That was their first charge, that's what we looked at last week, that Stephen was speaking against this place, the temple. The second charge was that he was speaking against Moses, the customs and laws of Moses. Let's think about that second charge this morning, and we're gonna pick up Stephen's speech in chapter seven, in verse 30, as he really starts to speak speak about Moses calling from God. There's a lot happening here. Chapter 7 is an enormous chapter. We're not going to be able to cover everything. And so I want to zero in on this second charge that they brought against Stephen, that he's speaking against Moses. And let's look Starting in verse 30 at what Stephen has to say about Moses, I'm gonna read right now verses 30 through 43 as Stephen addresses the council bringing charges against him. Stephen says this, now when 40 years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, he's speaking of Moses here, in a flame of fire in a bush. When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight. And as he drew near to look, there came the voice of the Lord. I am the Lord, I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. And Moses trembled and did not dare to look. Then the Lord said to him, take off the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I've surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their groaning, and I've come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send you to Egypt. This Moses, whom they rejected, saying, who made you a ruler and judge, this man God sent as both ruler and redeemer by the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush. This man led them out performing wonders and signs in Egypt and at the Red Sea and in the wilderness for 40 years. This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. This is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai and with our fathers. He received living oracles to give to us. Our fathers refused to obey him, but thrust him aside, and in their hearts they turned to Egypt, saying to Aaron, make for us gods who will go before us. As for this Moses who led us out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. and they made a calf in those days and offered a sacrifice to the idol and were rejoicing in the works of their hands. But God turned away and gave them over to worship the host of heaven. As it is written in the book of the prophets, did you bring me slain beasts and sacrifices during the 40 years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? You took up the tent of Molech and the star of your God Rephan, the images that you made to worship. and I will send you into exile beyond Babylon. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever. So I've just read a portion of Stephen's sermon or speech here in Acts 7. And remember, the Jewish leadership has put Stephen on trial for speaking against Moses. And the presumption from which they're operating is that Moses is on their side. And since they've got Moses on their side, they're presuming that God is on their side. The logic was simple. So long as we've got Moses in our pocket, we've pretty much got God in our pocket, was their logic. And anyone who waltzes in here like Stephen has done, subordinating Moses to this Jesus figure, Well, clearly they reasoned God is not on his side because he's not on Moses' side. So the debate is very much about whose side is God on? And for the Jewish leadership, the answer is so blazingly obvious. It's beyond debate, really. God is on our side because we have Moses. Isn't this something we can relate to ourselves? Isn't always the assumption that we sort of operate out of, no matter what, is that God is on our side. Whatever view I have on this particular issue over here, whatever my thoughts are about this event going on here, or however my approach is to this problem I'm facing in life, and I'm going to go about it this way, we sort of kind of have a default mode that, you know what? I'm a decent person, I'm a good Christian. God is on my side. And it just becomes a kind of a default mode and something that's so blazingly obvious to us that we can't possibly think that it would be any other way around. And that's where the Jewish leadership is. Moses was the key for them. Moses was important, and they were reasoning as long as we claim a genuine attachment to Moses, God is basically obliged to us. And since they're claiming to have God almost in their pocket, really, through this authentic attachment to Moses, this is where Stephen presses his message with them. You want to talk about Moses, Stephen says, okay, fine. Let's talk about Moses. And so Stephen affirms, he goes, and we've seen, we've read much of what he says about Moses. Stephen affirms Moses is God's chosen and genuine messenger in the Old Testament. Verse 32, it was the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob who personally spoke to Moses and called him into his service. Verse 35, this man God sent as both ruler and redeemer. This Moses, God sent him. Verse 36, this man led them out performing wonders and signs in Egypt. Verse 38, this is the one, Moses. He received living oracles to give to us. And so far, Stephen has highlighted what everyone would agree on. Moses is a man of God, on a mission from God, with the message of God, doing the ministry of God. Moses' ministry, Stephen is letting us know, is authenticated and approved by God, personally and directly. Stephen saying to his accusers, yes, I agree with you on this point. Moses really is God's man. No question about that. But then Stephen makes a stunning move as he continues his speech. Okay, we've talked about Moses. We've all agreed on Moses. But then Stephen says to those judging him, let's talk about your hearts in relation to Moses. Let's talk about that. Now, I'm not a courtroom expert, but I have seen all of the courtroom dramas, and you know how they go, right? And typically, the judge is the one who commands absolute respect. He represents the law, he's to be called your honor, or she, And when he enters the courtroom, everyone stands in a kind of veneration to the weight and power of the law. And you don't speak casually to the judge. You don't say, hey, judge, what's up? What's going down? You certainly don't make it personal toward him. If you're on trial facing a judge, if you have a speeding ticket, and for some reason you have to go before the judge because of this ticket, you don't say to the judge, let's talk about your driving record, Mr. Judgey Judge. But Stephen does something like that here, not Mr. Judgey Judge, I just made that up. Stephen turns the spotlight on his judges. And the first thing he does is he goes back to Moses' day to look at how Moses was treated by his own people. Okay, you wanna talk about Moses? Stephen's saying, let's talk about Moses, but let's talk about how we, as God's people, have related to Moses through history. Verse 39. Our fathers refused to obey him, Moses, but thrust him aside, and in their hearts they turned to Egypt. Verse 40, as for this Moses, we don't know what's become of him. And then verses 41 and 42, instead of following Moses and Moses' God, let's make a calf. So they make a calf and worship the calf in rebellion and rejection of everything that Moses stood for. Stephen is saying, let's look at our so-called godly heritage. Remember, that's what they were claiming. Let's look at that godly heritage. And can we really claim to have God in our pocket because we lay claim to Moses? And this is where Stephen is pointing out, look, consistently, we rejected Moses. And in rejecting Moses, look at what's happened. Verse 42, it says, but God turned away and gave them over to worship the host of heaven. Stephen is challenging the Jewish leadership. And he's kind of, he's pressing this question. Is there really a legacy of godly devotion to the teaching of Moses that you can cling to? Or is the legacy better described as a persistent rebellion? What Stephen is doing is he's accusing them of rewriting their own history for their own ends and ignoring the actual heritage of persistent idolatry. And so then after going back to Moses' day, Stephen brings us forward to his own day, and he says to his judges, Acts 7 verse 51, skip ahead to verse 51, he says, you stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Stephen, With this language, stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears. He's using the language of the Old Testament, judicial language from the Old Testament, to describe a covenant-breaking and rebellious people. He's saying this is your history, this is your legacy, this is your heritage, this is your identity. It's an extraordinary turnaround as the judges become the judged as Stephen speaks to them. You've maybe experienced this kind of turnaround sometime in your own life in different ways, I assume. I remember when I was in seminary, I was at a grocery store. I've probably told you this years and years ago, but I was at a grocery store, in line at a grocery store. We called the grocery store Market, it was named Market Basket, but we called it Market Bucket, because it's this kind of, of bottom barrel discount grocery store that a seminarian would go to. Lacey just called it The Bucket. And you stand in line, and my line's moving really slowly, and there's a book for sale there that they're trying to get you to buy at the checkout with all the other books. And this book was a Bible trivia book. And I'm in seminary, so I'm, you know, a Bible trivia book at the checkout counter of the grocery store, and I stood in judgment over this Bible trivia book, and the line's moving slow. I pick it up, and I'll just ace a few of these questions while I'm waiting for the line to go down. And, you know, and the questions were like, I don't remember the questions specifically, but they were like, what is the name of Joab's mother? And then, okay, all right. What were the two columns in Solomon's temple called? What were their names? How many verses are in the book of Jude? And that's the kind of questions that were in this Bible trivia book. And I didn't know a single answer to the stupid Bible trivia questions they were asking. So this book is mocking me right there in the grocery line of Market Basket. And the book I stood over is Judge. was now judging me, right? You've had that experience before, right? You stand over something or someone or something else and judge, and then the next thing you know, things are reversed, and you're the one being judged. And that's what happened here. These men were judging Stephen, guilty of despising Moses, only to find They are the ones guilty under the Word of God as Stephen brings it to them. When Stephen calls them stiff-necked, that is language reserved exclusively for idol worship. It's reserved exclusively for the moment in the Old Testament that Stephen has described here when the people under Moses make and worship a golden calf. It's a deadly serious charge of idolatry. It's language, stiff-necked, is language that deliberately calls to mind a stubborn animal, a cow that won't bend its neck and go the way its master desires. Stephen is calling them stiff-necked, idolatrous cows, just like the cow they tried to worship in Moses' day. It is a stunning reversal in which the judges become the judged. Stephen goes on, verse 52, he says this, which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and murdered. You who receive the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it. Stephen is saying, listen, you do not have bragging rights over God. You cannot claim God as your own, as if he owes you something. You cannot claim a heritage or legacy of godliness. You don't own a position of privilege merely by means of clinging to Moses' name. Stephen makes it clear. The only legacy they possess is a legacy of hard-hearted rebellion. Now, we need to be careful to make the observation here that Stephen's point is not an anti-Semitic tack against the Jews. That would be precisely the wrong way to read what he's doing here in a great evil. Stephen's point is that this is the heritage, not only of the Jewish people, but of all people. It's not that the Jews were particularly bad. It's just that they were no better than the idolatrous nations around them. This is the legacy of all humanity in rebellion against God. And what Stephen wants them to see then is that to claim a privileged position before God because of your heritage, because you are willing to toss around the name of Moses, to claim to have God in your pocket because of how you've read history, as they were claiming to have done through Moses, What Stephen is saying is this is more a mark of idolatry than a mark of true godliness. This is where we need to bring Stephen's message now all the way forward into our own day. And we have to ask, remember, I think we all related here, we all just by simple default, don't we? We claim to have God on our side almost no matter what, almost without question. God is on my side as I'm doing this or facing this or being challenged by this problem. So we have to ask ourselves, what are the reasons we tend to give when we claim God on our side. Probably, if you're like me, you have almost an endless list, right? Endless list of reasons God is on our side or my side. Come on, Pastor Aaron, isn't it obvious we have God on our side because we are decent, Bible-believing, conservative Presbyterians And there's often a real sense of pride. And with that pride, there is this expectation almost that God is in our pocket. Because he's gotta be on our side. We are a church that takes Moses very seriously, right? We take scripture seriously. Our doctrine is immaculate. Our preachers are really good looking. Our children are above average. We have a claim over God that not every church can cling to, right? Or we might say God is on our side because of the Christian heritage of this nation. We're evangelical Americans. God's always on our side. It's just beyond debate. It's written into our nation's history. We might say God is on our side because we've We've always been hardworking, decent people. We've always carried our own weight. We have a proud tradition of just getting things done. God kind of owes us. God is on our side because how much money, how much money we've given. God is on our side because of how much scripture we know. God's on our side because of how we've raised our kids. And we've kind of mostly got it right. Not me, but Lacey and the rest of you. I mean, that's sometimes, we've mostly got it right. And actually there is a very common claim in reform circles today that if you raise your kids a certain way, God is bound to bless them and you as long as you do it a certain way. So you'll see certain, in Reformed circles, boasts, all of my children are walking with the Lord. And why are they boasting in that way? The underlying, well, often it is an explicit assumption that, and they're doing that because of how I've raised them. And you hear the idea there, God is in my pocket. I control what God is doing. He answers to me, in a sense. He's bound to you. Or this is very common, God is on our side because, I mean, just look, just look at how he's blessed us. Look at our wealth. God's on our side because we are way better off than most people in the world. Certainly if anyone had a claim over God, it would have been these people putting Stephen on trial. They were the ones charged with guarding the laws of Moses in Stephen's day. But Stephen makes it abundantly clear, no human being can lay a claim over God. Not even this judicial council of undoubtedly quiet, decent, hardworking, respectable, and deeply religious men who are sitting over him. Good people, generally speaking, we would have recognized them as. The heritage of humanity is rebellion and stiff-necked idolatry. So there is this raw offense at what Stephen is speaking here. Maybe you feel that a little bit as your own ideas about what God owes you are being challenged. There's this raw offense at what Stephen is saying. And in the crowd's response, look at it in verse 54. When they heard these things, they were enraged, and they ground their teeth at him. If a preacher were to come along today and suggest to a decent, deeply religious people like ourselves, who might be tempted to point to our godly heritage, we have a godly Presbyterian heritage, which really makes up so much of our status before the Lord, if a preacher would Come along and challenge that. We should doubly feel this offense ourselves, I think. We need to feel the thrust of Stephen's message here. And if it angers us, if it sort of touches a nerve, then maybe it's something we need to hear for ourselves, this idea that nobody, nobody, not even the good, decent people at Calvin PCA can lay a claim over God as if they have God in their pocket. So if you were to ask me, Pastor Aaron, what then is your Christian heritage? What's your Christian heritage? Well, I might be tempted to list off a lot of the things I'm proud of, which would not be the market bucket trivia book. I might be tempted, what's your Christian heritage? List off a lot of the things I'm proud of, we could be proud of as a church. But if I'm gonna be honest, I would have to say my heritage, my heritage is mostly rebellion, stiff-necked idolatry. What I have accomplished, what I have done and accomplished in my own strength is a rubble heap of worthless failures. And so when I look at my heritage, I have to recognize I can lay no claim whatsoever over God. I would have to say the most important part of my Christian heritage is that although I can lay no claim over God because of who I am or what I've done, God has laid a claim on me because of who He is and what He has done as an astounding, scandalous act of grace poured out on me through the person of Jesus Christ. And we know that Stephen's message, ultimately focused on Jesus, causes such great offense that he's stoned, he's put to death. He's pointing them to Jesus. Their whole heritage is bound up, not in what they have done, not in what they claim for themselves, is bound up in the person of Jesus. My heritage is bound up in Him. Your heritage is bound up in Christ and Christ alone. And so they don't want to hear that and they silence Stephen with their stones, putting him to death. And then we move into chapter eight, where we're introduced for the first time to a man who really embodies this pride, this religious pride, that is captured partly by the council here. And that man is Saul. We know Saul. You know who he is. We're told in chapter eight, verse one, that Saul approved of his execution, the execution of Stephen. And then again in 8.3 says, but Saul was ravaging the church and entering house after house. He dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. Saul is leading the persecution of Christians. He's on a war path against the Lord Jesus and his church. And no one is more zealous for Moses than Paul. Saul's heritage of religious righteousness is impeccable. He keeps a list, everything he's accomplished of his status as a religious leader. If anyone has a claim over God, say, God owes me this because look at my heritage. Look at what I've done. It's Saul. It's Saul, but we know Saul's story. We know Saul's story. Just one chapter after we're introduced to him here in chapter eight, just one chapter later, Saul will meet the resurrected Jesus and he'll be converted to Christianity. His name will change to Paul. And what does Paul do with his heritage upon his conversion? What does Paul do with his accomplishments and his background and his experiences? What does Paul do with everything that he's done, everything that has defined him upon his conversion? Paul tells us in Philippians three, he says this, Philippians three, verse four. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. This is Paul saying, I'm gonna give you my list why God should be in my pocket. circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless, blameless, not a speck. This is Paul's godly heritage. And it is impeccable. No one can touch it. There's a lot to be proud of here for Paul. And so what does Paul do with this background and experience and heritage once he meets Jesus? He goes on and he says, but whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ. The righteousness, he says, from God, that depends on faith. So there it is for Paul. He has this heritage of godly zeal, this heritage, this lineage that takes him all the way back to Moses and ties him to the history of this people so tightly. If anyone could claim a place of privilege in the kingdom of God, it's Paul. And Paul says, all of that is rubbish. means nothing to him anymore. He doesn't claim it for himself as if God is in his pocket. Whatever heritage he might have boasted in is lost to him. Now, this is Paul's heritage. Here it is. It's that he has a righteousness that is not his own. It's a righteousness that comes through faith in Christ. It's a righteousness not from something special in Paul, but it's a righteousness that comes from God. And Paul's saying, I don't have a claim on God. I don't have a claim on God. Instead, by grace, God has a claim on me. And so this is our heritage as Christians. This is what we boast in. How do we know God is on our side? We know God is on our side when we are finally willing to receive God's grace, even as we count all of our former boasting as rubbish. We know God is on our side when we can finally see the righteousness we have is not of ourselves. It's from Him entirely. It's given to us as a free gift, a gift of grace through Christ alone, which is the very thing we celebrate as we come to this table. Let's pray as we do so. Heavenly Father, we thank you this morning for your word. We thank you for how your word speaks to us and challenges us and how it washes over us and cleanses us and hopefully for all of us, how it orients our hearts to Christ as the one who is our heritage and our righteousness, as the one in whom we boast as our strength. And I pray, Lord, that as we come to this table then this morning, that you would grant us the grace to come with humility, to come in repentance, and to come with full assurance that Christ really is our righteousness as we receive him in faith. And it's in the name of Christ we pray these things, amen.