Join us as we read the scriptures and a daily devotion written by Don Crisp. We pray these messages will bless us all at this time.
Thursday 1 October: Acts 7:1-7
Categories: Don’s Daily Devotions
Thursday 1 October: Acts 7:1-7:
V1: The high priest asks if these charges are true? ( He knows they are not, but hopes to get him to condemn himself – again, just as with Jesus.)
V2: Stephen addresses them courteously and wisely, reverencing the older men ( “fathers”) and asserting his own kinship as a Jew ( ” brothers” ) .He now begins a long account of God’s dealings with His people in the OT, perhaps to refute the charge he is teaching people to depart from the law of Moses. He begins with God’s call to Abraham, when he was still a pagan in Mesopotamia – ” Ur of the Chaldees”, in Genesis 11:27.
V3-4 : God called Abraham to leave his land and launch out in faith, to a land He would show him, and ultimately brought him into the land that is now Israel. In all this, God’s sovereign grace is being emphasised.
V5: But Abraham himself received no physical inheritance in the promised land. He was called to respond in faith to God’s promise – as also in the promise of an heir when he and Sarah were old. (Compare Hebrews 11:1, 8-10)
V6-7: God then foretold Israel’s later slavery in Egypt and how He Himself would judge the Egyptians and deliver His people in His own time. ( See Genesis 15: 13-14.)