Acts 6:10

Acts 6:10. And they were not able to resist the wisdom. In the disputation the doctors of those great synagogues just mentioned, were fairly beaten in argument by the divinely-inspired wisdom of Stephen, who met them on their own ground, showing how marvellously the allusions and promises contained in the law and in the prophets were fulfilled in the person of Jesus.

What now was there in Stephen's preaching which so powerfully affected the rulers in Israel, which even alienated the people hitherto so favourably inclined to the new sect? Was his teaching different to that of Peter or John? There is no doubt that Stephen, with the light of the Holy Ghost shining clear and full on his early and elaborate training, saw more plainly than the older and comparatively untaught apostles how transitory after all was that law of Moses now more than ever fanatically reverenced and observed; how faded were the glories of that Temple, the object now, more than at any previous time, of a passionate love. The sacred law, the holy and beautiful house, in the days when our Lord and His apostles lived on earth, were all that remained to the Jew of his ancestral glories; their holy land was ruled by strangers, their name and fame were only a memory; so they surrounded the law of Moses and the house on Mount Sion with a strange unreasoning devotion; and when Stephen told them that these things were only shadows which were even then passing away, it was an easy matter, by a very slight perversion of his words, for the Jewish leaders, Pharisee and Sadducee, to excite among the people a storm of patriotic indignation against one who dared to teach such hateful doctrines.