Atos 7

Atos 7

Calvin adds: “But whoever studies this long speech carefully will find nothing superfluous in it. He was accused of trying to overthrow religion; therefore, he strenuously insisted that he was still true to the God their fathers always worshiped....Stephen was facing a charge of “speaking words against this holy place and the law” (Acts 6:13). He was facing a charge of denigrating the holy temple in Jerusalem and the traditions that went along with it—traditions that the governing authority, the Sanhedrin, viewed as “the law” and “the customs that Moses delivered to us” (Acts 6:14). Crucially, Stephen was charged with suggesting that the temple would be destroyed—something that they had heard Jesus himself say: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). What function, then, did the temple have in a post-Calvary world? Now that Jesus had offered up his own life as a sacrifice for sins, did the physical temple in Jerusalem, along with its rituals and ceremonies and priests, have any significance at all, other than to point to something that had now been fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ (cf Ro 10:4, Col 2:17)? So far, at least, Christians were still attending some of the rituals of the temple in Jerusalem (the morning and evening prayers, for example), though they were unlikely now to be taking part in the sacrificial ceremonies. This passage helps us understand the growing tension between the church’s roots in the temple and its emerging independence from it.” (Reformed Expository Commentary - Acts) S Lewis