Acts 6:11-15 Then they suborned men, which said, We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God.… We get in these words, in this false accusation, even through its falsehood, a glimpse into the character of St. Stephen's preaching. A false accusation need not be necessarily altogether false. In order to be effective for mischief, a twisted, distorted charge, with some basis of truth, is the best for the accuser's purpose, and the most difficult for the defendant to answer. St. Stephen was ripening for heaven more rapidly than the apostles themselves. He was learning more rapidly than St. Peter himself the true spiritual meaning of the Christian scheme. He had taught, in no ambiguous language, the universal character of the gospel and the Catholic mission of the Church. And the narrow-minded Grecian Jews, anxious to vindicate their orthodoxy, which was doubted by their Hebrew brethren, distorted Stephen's wider and grander conception into a charge of blasphemy against the holy man. What a picture of the future of Christ's best and truest witnesses, especially when insisting on some nobler and wider or forgotten aspect of truth. Their teaching has been ever suspected, distorted, accused as blasphemous; and so it must ever be. And yet God's servants, when they find themselves thus misrepresented, can realise to themselves that they are but following the course which the saints of every age have run, that they are being made like unto the image of Stephen, the first martyr, and of Jesus Christ Himself, the King of Saints, who suffered under a similar accusation. St, Paul's teaching was accused of tending to licentiousness; the earliest Christians were accused of vilest practices; St. , in his struggles for truth, was accused of rebellion and murder; the Reformers were accused of lawlessness; John Wesley of Romanism and disloyalty; William Wilberforce of being an enemy to British trade; John Howard of being an encourager of crime and immorality. Let us be content, then, if our lot be with the saints, and our portion be that of the servants of the Most High. Again, we learn from this place how religious zeal can overthrow religion and work out the purposes of evil. Men cannot, indeed, now suborn men and bring fatal charges against them in matters of religion, and yet they can fall into exactly the same crime. Party religion and party zeal lead men into precisely the same causes as they did in the days of St. Stephen. Partisanship causes them to violate all the laws of honour, of honesty, of Christian charity, imagining that they are thereby advancing the cause of Christ, forgetting that they are acting on the rule which the Scriptures repudiate, doing evil that good may come, and striving to further Christ's kingdom by a violation of His fundamental precepts. Oh, for more of the spirit of true charity, which will lead men to support their own views in a spirit of Christian love! Oh, for more of that true grasp of Christianity which will teach that a breach of Christian charity is far worse than any amount of speculative error! (G. T. Stokes, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then they suborned men, which said, We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God. |
    |