Thursday, November
22, 2018
Saul was one of the witnesses, and he agreed completely with the killing of Stephen. A great wave of persecution began that day, sweeping over the church in Jerusalem; and all the believers except the apostles were scattered through the regions of Judea and Samaria. Acts 8:1(NLT)
When you’re in eleventh grade and your
life revolves around football practice, games, math tests, and wondering if you’ll
get into college, it would hardly dawn on you that something history-shaping is
happening 1600 miles away in Dallas.
Today
is the 55th anniversary of the assassination of President Jack Kennedy. There have been volumes written by the press,
investigators and conspiracy-theorists, about this event. But that day, I just thought it was strange
that football practice had been cancelled. In the upcoming days I watched the funeral and
unfolding drama of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack
Ruby, live, on-camera. All of it was
bewildering and incomprehensible to a 16-year-old whose depth of thought didn’t
reach past watching Andy and Opie make sense of Aunt Bea and Barney every
Monday evening.
Digress about 1800 years and you
have Tertullian, 2nd century Christian author who wrote of the overwhelming
persecution of believers that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of
the church.[2] Trying to make sense of the stoning of
Stephen a century after the fact, Tertullian had the hindsight perspective of the
wave of persecution that swept over Jesus’ disciples, and how that blood-bath
scattered believers everywhere. And in
the flight to avoid torture and death, the Gospel was carried around the world.
And this is a scenario that has
been played-out over and again in history.
Every time there is a move to stamp-out the church it is like pouring
water on a grease fire; the Kingdom of Christ spreads with ferocious faith,
despite the threats.
It’s strange to think how such
events as the stoning of Stephen, as well as the modern-day assassination of a
president can inspire movements. Kingdoms
topple, paradigms shift, hearts are rearranged – all because evil wants to
strut, but God shouts back with calm resistance.
In the case of Stephen and the
early church, Saul was part of the mob; he was given the coats of the execution
mob to hold. But he probably yelled
encouragement to inflict death on Christ’s witness, Stephen. Sometime later it was Saul who would have his
heart and life rearranged after a meeting with Jesus on the Damascus Road. Jesus gave him a new name, Paul, and we have
that name affixed as author to roughly one-third of the New Testament
scriptures as evidence of just how drastically a life can change when the blood
of a martyr becomes a seed in your history.
Jack Kennedy was not a martyr for
the cause of Christ; he was hardly what you’d call “a saint”. He was a politician…beloved and despised by
political types, but a fallible human being with a reputation of infidelity. We don’t know much about Stephen, other than
he was a well-respected leader in the early church, who didn’t keep his mouth closed
when he had the opportunity to be a witness for Christ; neither did he keep
silence when they threw the stones to knock the life out of his body. Stephen died begging God to forgive his
killers.
For You Today
A question that comes to mind for us all is to what star would you hitch
YOUR wagon? Would you leap
into a movement for a president, gunned-down, heroically-promoting his
political agenda? Or would it be to join
Stephen, a nobody, erased by an angry mob, simply proclaiming the agenda of a
Heavenly Kingdom?
Which seed would you plant?
Go to VIDEO
[2] Apologeticus, Chapter 50
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