Acts 6:1-6
Chosen to serve tables
A complaint about food distribution produces the first appointed office in the church. Seven men are chosen and Stephen heads the list.
People of the Bible
Stephen
Was appointed to hand out food, and gave the longest speech in Acts before anybody could stop him.
The job he is given is administrative. The Greek-speaking widows are being overlooked in the daily distribution, so seven men are chosen to handle it, and Stephen is named first, full of faith and of the Holy Ghost. The text will not leave him at the tables. Within a few verses he is doing great wonders and miracles among the people, and men from a synagogue of freedmen dispute with him and are not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spoke.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Stephen
- 01
- 02
Acts 6:8-15
His face as it had been the face of an angel
Losing the argument, his opponents suborn witnesses. The council looks at him, and the last thing recorded before the speech is what his face looked like.
- 03
Acts 7:2-50
The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham
The defence is a history lesson, and every episode in it happens somewhere other than the temple. The most High dwells not in temples made with hands.
- 04
Acts 7:51-58
I see the heavens opened
He turns the charge around, they stop their ears, and he sees the Son of man standing rather than seated. They cast him out of the city and stone him.
- 05
Acts 7:59-8:2
Lay not this sin to their charge
He dies with two prayers, both of them echoing the cross. Saul is consenting unto his death, and the persecution that scatters the church starts that day.
Why it matters
So they bring false witnesses instead, and the charge is about the temple and the customs of Moses. The answer is fifty-two verses of Israel’s own history, told as the story of a God who kept meeting people outside the land and outside the house: Abraham in Mesopotamia, Joseph in Egypt, Moses in Midian, the tabernacle in the wilderness. Only at the end does he turn it on the council. He dies asking that the sin not be laid to their charge, and the coats of the men stoning him are laid at the feet of a young man named Saul.
2 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
