Acts 7:36

Acts 7:36. He brought them out, after that he showed wonders and signs. Drawing the noble picture contained in this and the preceding verses of Moses ‘our Rabbi,' as the Jews love to call him, of whom they are so proud, Stephen shows how utterly absurd was any charge brought against him of blasphemy against one whom he admired with so ungrudging an admiration, and loved with so deep a love.

Thus, each of the first two epochs into which Stephen had divided Israel's eventful story, in spite of the stubborn hard heart of their forefathers in rejecting

(a) Joseph,

(b) Moses,

had ended in their being delivered by their Divine Protector

(a) By the hand of Joseph,

(b) By the hand of Moses,

out of all the troubles and afflictions which surrounded them.

In the first epoch, the origin of the chosen people is recounted, and how the Lord God came to choose them out of all the tribes of the earth; but in it they never became more than a large family of wandering shepherds, and their difficulties and dangers were only those incidental to nomad shepherd life in the East.

In the second epoch, the ‘shepherds' are settled in a rich and fertile country. In the course of a couple of centuries they multiply with a wonderful (perhaps a supernatural) rapidity, and become, in numbers at least, a mighty people. Owing to political convulsions and other causes to us unknown, the whole race is reduced to a state of miserable slavery by the warlike caste then in power in Egypt; but their Divine Protector through all has not lost sight of them, and, literally against their will, by a mighty exercise of power, delivers them out of all their misery by the hand of His servant Moses.

The third and the greatest epoch in the history of the chosen people commences in the wilderness. The children of Israel, now free and strong, are united under the supreme command of that Moses whom they had so repeatedly refused to obey. The history of this epoch lasting from the hour when Moses led the armies of Israel out of Egypt until that present day when Stephen was telling before the Sanhedrim the wondrous story would have been closed, as were the first and second, with the recital of another but far grander Divine rescue, and that, too, in spite of all hard-hearted rejection by the people whom God loved with a love, as Stephen wished to show, that nothing could quench.

But this, as we shall see, was never destined to be told. We have, then, only a splendid fragment of the last and greatest portion of Stephen's speech.