Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

STEPHEN’S MINISTRY.
8-15. Though Stephen was but a poor, uncultured layman, honored with the office of deacon, i.e.,
permitted to sweep the floor, and light the lamps, and collect money to support the evangelistic
widows, they complimented him with this office because he was “full of the Holy Ghost and
wisdom.” Yet, like all of the disciples in the Apostolic age (Acts 8:4), he preached the living Word.
He did not have to get a license; the apostles had none for themselves nor anybody else. Thus far the
plug-hatted clergymen who invented license had not been born. As Stephen is identified with those
Hellenistic synagogues in which the Greek language is spoken, he goes to preaching in them with
all his might. The representatives of these synagogues, dispersed in all heathen lands, had come to
Jerusalem to attend the great Jewish feast of Pentecost, which so miraculously and unexpectedly by
divine intervention was transformed into the most memorable revival the world ever saw and
memorialized with the incarnation of the Holy Ghost, and the embarkation of the gospel ship. These
synagogues, here represented by their delegates, were the Libertines, i.e., the freed people, consisting
of Jews who had been carried to Rome as slaves, but afterward liberated by the Emperors; the
Cyrenians from Cyrene, a large city in northern Africa, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, where
there were many Jews; the Alexandrians, from the city of Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, where
the Jews dwelt in great numbers and were much encouraged by Ptolemy Philadelphus, who had the
Hebrew Bible translated into Greek, known as the Septuagint, for the benefit of his Jewish subjects;
and the Greek-speaking Jews from Cilicia and Asia. Here we find the first indirect mention of that
celebrated man, Saul of Tarsus, destined in two more chapters to come to the front and prove the
hero of this inspired history. Since he was born to rule, depend on it, he was the speaker of the
opposition against Stephen, with the delegates from all of these prominent cities holding up his
hands while he pressed the battle to the awful ultimatum of Stephen’s martyrdom.
10. “And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke.” Oh! what
a contrast we here have between the wisdom, intellect, learning and resources of the world and the
wisdom of God! Here, with the greatest intellectualist and scholar the world could produce,
surrounded by a platoon of preachers, one humble, uncultured layman proves more than a match for
them all; as the Holy Ghost says they were “unable to resist the wisdom and spirit with which
Stephen spoke.” See the whole crowd with their mighty leader, Saul of Tarsus, put in total eclipse
and literally snowed under by a solitary layman. Therefore, to their ineffaceable shame, they resort
to bribery, raising up false witnesses that they may bring an accusation against him. Stephen
preached the perfect sufficiency of Jesus, His vicarious atonement and cleansing blood, received and
appropriated by the Holy Ghost, of course relegating the types and shadows of the Mosaic
dispensation to bygone years, no longer significant because superseded and verified by the great
Antitype. This they construed as inveighing against the law of Moses. This notable history has a
thousand parallels at the present day. We can not preach the perfect sufficiency of Jesus only and the
omnipotence of the present Holy Ghost in full salvation and the perfect sufficiency of God’s Word,
doctrinally, institutionally, legally and every other way, without at least indirectly reflecting on the
human institutions and bogus legislation of fallen ecclesiasticisms. Then they cry out that we are
inveighing against the church, whereas we are defending the church of God with all our might,
precisely as Stephen did, when they charged him with disloyalty to the church and killed him for it.
He was the first martyr, leading the way and showing the people how to die for the truth. Two
hundred millions have followed in his bloody track, like Stephen, dying under charges of disloyalty