Today's Word Radio

Brett Meador: Now, one thing to remember: the church is not Israel. The church doesn't replace Israel. But the church certainly parallels Israel.

Kurt: Pastor Brett Meador with a message to the New Testament church, confronting believers today.

Brett Meador: When you read the story of Israel, one of the things we can learn is that we do the same things the Jews did. We can learn from their mistakes. We can learn from their blessings. The same things we see Israel do against the Lord, the same things we see the church do in modern times against the Lord.

Kurt: Stephen concludes his sermon in Acts chapter seven with bold accusations against the religious leaders for continually failing to truly follow God's law, turning to idolatry and missing his glory. But Pastor Brett Meador can't help but note how this centuries-old sermon has applications to the heart of man still today. Let's join him in today's word, continuing a study in Acts.

Brett Meador: There was an explorer in the jungles of South Pacific. He found himself surrounded by bloodthirsty cannibals with spears pointed at him. He thought to himself, "Oh no, I'm doomed." And then a ray of sunlight beamed through the clouds and a voice coming from heaven said, "Pick up a rock, the rock at your feet, and bash the chief's head in."

And he thought, "Wow, okay." He reached down, picked up the rock, and he bashed the chief's head in. He died right in front of everybody. All the cannibals were standing there bewildered with spears and everything. The explorer looked back at the sun and said, "Okay, now what?" And he said, "Okay, now you're doomed."

I love that story. Sometimes you think the Lord's going to save you in a certain way, but often he does it in very different ways. Sometimes it might even appear that he's not saving you at all. But he does deliver you, just not necessarily the way you thought.

I wonder if perhaps Stephen—I don't know, this is just conjecture—but do you think Stephen wondered, "Is the Lord going to get me out of this predicament?" Because, remember, we had Peter and John. They were in prison and the Lord just opened the doors and they got them out of prison. They already had seen some miracles that way.

I wonder, but you say, "No, Stephen's doomed." He's doomed. But the Lord is going to save Stephen, but in a way that we wouldn't really even think is saved. Being stoned to death doesn't sound like very much being saved. But when you're the Christian in the story, the day of your death is the day that you can rejoice and know that you're going to be in heaven with the Lord.

Sometimes he doesn't save you from something. You say, "But Lord, I thought you'd never leave me or forsake me." You told me, Lord, in Matthew 28, that "I am with you even to the end of the world." Lord, I thought you were going to supply all my needs according to your riches and glory.

Lord, your promises of your word. But the Lord has a timing and purpose in all things. Sometimes his plan doesn't match up with yours. But you've got to remember what Isaiah the prophet said in Isaiah 55, verses eight and nine. He talked about how the Lord's thoughts are wiser than our thoughts and his ways are actually higher than our ways.

He knows all things, so he knows what's good. He knows what's bad. Some of us have lived long enough to realize that the Lord really does know what's best. Maybe it's that high school relationship you thought was the one. Oh, Lord, I want this. I want this. And the Lord says, "Nope," and she dumped you, or you dumped her.

How did all this happen? What's going on? But the Lord knows that maybe that wasn't the one and it might seem tragic and horrible at the time, but actually, it's the Lord just orchestrating events. His ways are wiser, his thoughts are higher. So as Christians, we have to be careful with preconceived ideas of how the Lord's going to deliver us or how the Lord's going to save us.

Peter and John before the Sanhedrin were saved, but they were first beaten and then released. And then the prison doors opened up. So is it Stephen's turn to be saved now from the perils of the Sanhedrin? Well, this is where we are thus far in the story.

Stephen, of course, was picked as a deacon in the book of Acts, one of the seven deacons chosen by the church. He did many great wonders and miracles. We learned that earlier. And then we see him debating theology with Jews and some Grecian-type Jews. But then they started accusing him falsely and accused him of speaking against the law of Moses and against the temple.

That was their big accusation. He speaks against the temple and against the law of Moses. So the high priest at the end of chapter six said, "Is this true? Is this true that you speak against the law of Moses and against the temple?"

Now, this is where chapter seven picks up. Stephen answers that question and he's going to preach this sermon. This whole chapter for the most part is really given to the idea of this sermon that he preaches. So everything is set to be great. But we know how it's going to end.

We have to remember that Ecclesiastes 7:1 says that the day of one's death is better than the day of one's birth. So when you kind of think about this from God's perspective, this is going to end happily ever after for Stephen. So we have to remember that. When we die, we're going to see face to face.

Second Corinthians talks about how if you're absent from this body, where will you be? Present with the Lord. That's a good thing. And that's why Paul said in First Corinthians 15, "O death, where is thy victory? O grave, where is thy sting?" that kind of thing.

So this is what we're going to see. The story does end well. We're going to be happy at the end because he's going to be in heaven. But so far, what have we seen in the sermon that he's preached? We kind of covered the first half. Stephen technically's on trial before the Supreme Court, or the Sanhedrin.

But really, Stephen is turning the tables. It's really the Sanhedrin. They're the ones who are actually on trial and Stephen's indicting them. How is he going to do that? He's going to give a logical argument, but he's also going to give a profound prophetic argument.

He appeals to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the twelve tribes of Israel and talks about the story. Then he refers to Joseph. But one of the things that Stephen really camps out on is how Jacob's sons, the twelve tribes of Israel, rejected Joseph. Joseph was sold as a slave by his brothers, but he ended up the second most powerful man in the world, unbeknownst to the brothers.

He was there in Egypt. The Bible says he looked like an Egyptian. He shaved all this hair. The whole Yul Brynner on the Ten Commandments movie—he was perfect for that role because the Egyptians really did shave all the hair off their bodies. That was hip in those days.

And so Joseph's shaved his hair and his beard. He spoke the Egyptian tongue, the Bible tells us. So he looked like an Egyptian, talked like an Egyptian, walked like an Egyptian. The Jews didn't recognize their own brother there in Egypt. And it would be their second time that they'd meet him.

The first time they were horrified and remember he accused them to test them. But the second time they would meet him, they would realize he's the one. Let me use some language that might spark some ideas. He's the one that they despised and rejected. The father sent Joseph to seek and save his brothers, but his brothers despised and rejected him and they killed him.

They left him for dead in the pit. They almost killed him, but then he emerged out of the pit. You see the correlations here. We looked at some of the similarities of Jesus as it's shown in the story of Joseph.

But notice it would be the second time the brothers would meet Joseph, they'd realize he's our brother. Just like it's Christ's second coming that the Jews will realize that Jesus is their Messiah. It's a great, profound, really prophetic way that Stephen is talking about.

He's saying you rejected Jesus the first time, just like our tribes rejected Joseph. He used that as an example. Prophetic implications, rejection of his brothers, rose to power, that whole thing. And then after that, he talked about how Joseph was gone and then Moses came along and was raised up to lead the children of Israel.

But remember the Jews, what did they do to Moses when he said, "I'm ready to lead"? They rejected him. Remember they said, "Are you going to kill us like you killed the Egyptian?" Again, Stephen's making the case. You guys, the Sanhedrin that Stephen's on trial in front of, you guys rejected all the ones, the messengers that God sent to you, all the prophets.

You killed them. You rejected them. And so Stephen's using their own stories basically of their national past to paint a picture of Israel rejecting the one God sent to deliver them on their first encounter.

Jesus was rejected the first time. The Jews will clearly see that he's the Messiah in his second coming. So that's kind of the story we're picking up. We're going to back up a little bit just because we hurried through some of the last verses. So let's pick it up in verse 37.

It says, "This is that Moses, which said unto the children of Israel, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear." How similar would the prophet be to Moses? Well, Moses led Israel out of bondage from Egypt, just like Jesus will lead the whole world out of the bondage of sin. So there's a similar role in this prophet that Moses was referring to, which would be Jesus himself.

Verse 38. "This is he, that was in the church." The word there for church is the word ekklesia, which can mean church like in the traditional term, but in here it means just an assembly of people, the gathering or the assembly of Israel. That's kind of the idea here.

"So this Moses is he that was in the assembly of the Israel in the wilderness with the angel which spake to him in the mount Sinai, and with our fathers: who received the lively oracles to give unto us." What are the lively oracles? Well, that would be the law of Moses received on Mount Sinai.

Now, one thing to remember: the church is not Israel. The church doesn't replace Israel. We've talked about that exhaustively. But the church certainly parallels Israel. Like when you read the story of Israel, one of the things we can learn is, "Boy, we do the same things the Jews did." Like we can learn from their mistakes, we can learn from their blessings.

The same things we see Israel do against the Lord, the same things we see the church do in modern times against the Lord. In fact, we're given a warning about not making the same mistakes Israel made. In Romans chapter 11, it says this in verses 20 and 21. It says, "Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not highminded."

Now, this is again reminding Gentiles not to be prideful against Jewish people. Paul is talking about how the Jews, because of their unbelief, some of their branches were broken off, not at the stump, but some of their branches were broken off, and "thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear: For if God spared not the natural branches, the Jews," is the context here, "take heed lest he also spare not thee."

In other words, if we rebel against the Lord and fight against the Lord and go against the work of the Spirit, we can find ourselves not really part of his kingdom as well if we reject and despise. Some people say, "We're not as bad as the Jews were." Well, be careful because we have the same propensities, the same sins, and don't be highminded about that.

So we see the parallels of what happened to the Jews with the church. And really, Stephen's going to do that. We're going to see more of that as we keep reading. Look at verse 39. It says, "To whom our fathers would not obey, but thrust him from them, and in their hearts turned back again into Egypt."

Saying to Aaron, "Make us gods to go before us: for as for this Moses, which brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him." And then it says, "they made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice unto the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their own hands."

"Then God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven." That's astrology, the stars. "As it is written in the book of the prophets, O ye house of Israel, have ye offered to me slain beasts and sacrifices by the space of forty years in the wilderness?"

"Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon." That's exactly what happened. Israel turned to idolatry, of course, with Moses on Mount Sinai, the golden calf.

They got the idea from Egypt. So really, Stephen's referring to this as, "You guys rejected Moses when he was up on Mount Sinai when you said, 'We're going to go with the golden calf thing' instead of God." He's reminding them of their history.

It's interesting because a lot of times people like to clean up their history. There's a rewriting of history that happens in our days, but people want to clean up their history from things that really did happen if it's a black eye on our history. These Jews wouldn't really want to remember this part of their behavior.

Stephen is very strong, though, to remind them. Are you kidding? You guys rejected Joseph, you rejected Moses. Remember they're saying, "He speaks against Moses," like they esteemed him so well. Stephen's saying, "You guys rejected Moses. That's what our people have done."

Now, back to the parallel. What does the church do? We don't worship pagan deities. We don't worship the stars. By the way, we do in astrology. Some Christians don't realize that there's kind of a pagan—astronomy is okay to study the stars, outer space, the solar system.

But when you get into astrology and the zodiacs and the signs and stuff, that's where you have to be careful. I see Christians on their social media posting things about their astrology. I'm like, "Oh man, somebody didn't get the memo." That's not a good thing to be into. That's what the Jews got into.

That's what ancient people were really into, studying the stars. It's amazing all the archaeological ruins that we've found where these people were quite advanced. And we think, "Wow, they knew where all the stars were and they built these buildings and structures based on the stars and the way they spin at nighttime around the North Star."

And like, there are some incredible things that they did, but it was all because they were worshipping the stars. That's something that human nature would do. But perhaps even more sinister than that is spoken of specifically: Moloch.

This one is particularly a problem. Whenever you talk about the old gods and goddesses of the Bible, keep in mind there's really the same corresponding paganism going on today. We may not have gods of gold and silver where we put them on our mantle. Hopefully we don't. If you do, you should probably repent of that.

But we have the same notions. The goddess of Diana or Ashtoreth was a multi-breasted goddess that had to deal with sexuality and fertility. People would go to the Temple of Diana there in Ephesus and they would sleep with the temple prostitutes and that was their way to worship the goddess. And they'd pay big money to go to Ephesus and worship Diana.

Baal, Asherah: fertile land and crops, they would worship basically for success and for wealth and stuff like that. But Moloch was also the god mentioned here that dealt with prosperity. But it sadly, as we often mention, this one is the most audacious one in some ways in my mind because what they did is child sacrifice, like human sacrifice of babies and children.

And that's tragic. If you believe the Bible, the unborn child is a life and a person, a baby that God loves and cares for. And our world just says, "Now we're going to kill that." And so if you believe the Bible, if you're mad at me talking about abortion and stuff, you have to understand: what we believe is that the life in the mother's womb is a child. It's a baby. It's not a blob of fetal tissue.

That's just lies that you hear. If you've ever seen some of the imaging now they do in the mother's womb, some of that 3D imaging, good night. Little baby's giggling in their mother's womb when they interact with Mom or hear the voice of Dad. It's profound that even with all the science we have, that people are still falling for that dumb line that it's just a fetal tissue blob.

And yet why do we abort babies? The same reason they put babies on Moloch's arms. Exactly the same. It's not different really at all. We do it for various reasons. In fact, there's some interesting statistics on abortion. Reports from the CDC and Guttmacher and another source kind of put this together, Pew Research, 2020 and 2021.

About 930,000 babies were aborted each of those two years. Almost a million. That's about 2,500 to 3,000 babies a day in America aborted. If that doesn't hurt your heart, you might want to check your pulse. That's something that we should be grieving, really.

At its peak in the United States, abortion rates were in 1990. It had an annual number closer to 1.6 million per year. The current global estimates are 73 million babies a year. That's over 200,000 babies aborted every single day in the world.

200,000 babies every day. Some reports even suggest the number could be higher when factoring in undocumented procedures. Also, the CDC admits they don't count some of the states. In fact, some of the states don't turn in their numbers to the CDC, like the little tiny state called California.

So the statistics I just gave you don't even include California, so the numbers are much higher than what I'm even saying. China: eight to 13 million abortions annually. India: 10 to 15 million abortions annually. Estimates for abortions globally from all of recorded history?

Pre-20th century, they estimate 11 million. It's really a rough estimate. Not a lot of data, but it was documented to some degree. So the pre-20th century, 11 million babies. 20th century, during the whole 20th century, meaning the 1900s, 1.6 billion babies.

The 21st century, we're already at 1.75 billion babies aborted. The grand total in history from what we can gather is around 3.35 billion abortions globally throughout all of history. You say, "Brett, how is abortion like Moloch?"

Moloch, the reason you'd sacrifice your baby was for prosperity, convenience, to be more comfortable. It's the same reasons we get. We're not just ready to have a baby yet. It's not convenient. Or selfishness: I'd rather—I want to have a career path instead of a baby.

For financial security. It's manipulative to control your own future. Or wanting a boy instead of a girl. Or it's amazing to me how some of these doctors will say, "Well, there's a possibility that you have the likelihood of Down syndrome and so we would recommend to abort."

If I had a dime for every time one of our Athe Creek couples were told by their doctor that their baby was possibly Down syndrome but wasn't—it came out perfectly healthy—I'd actually be able to go on vacation. It's incredible how many times I hear these doctors saying, "Oh, we think—we recommend abortion."

As a Christian, the Christian worldview says Down syndrome babies are important too and created by God. And frankly, some of the Down syndrome children and people in our church are some of the biggest blessings in this congregation. So our world has become so wicked and evil that we really don't believe in the sanctity of life and God's creation.

They've done studies. The NIH, National Library of Medicine, studied the reason people mostly seek abortions. This is kind of interesting because if you follow the politics and the rhetoric out there, most people are getting abortions because of incest or rape or the mother's life is in danger.

That's the reason abortion exists. And there's people voting, "Yeah, well, rape, incest, or the mother's life, yeah," and everybody gets all into that. But do you realize how tiny of a group that really is? Tragically that is, but here's the percentages. Some women report more than just one reason, but this is the number one reason: having a baby would dramatically change my life, would interfere with education and work: 74%.

73% of the women said they can't afford a baby right now. 48% don't want to be a single mother, having relationship problems. 38% are done having children, not ready for motherhood or to have another child. 25% don't want people to know that they had sex or got pregnant.

Citing health-related issues to mother or fetus? By the way, this is interesting because a lot of doctors would challenge this, but 13% citing health-related issues to the mother or to the fetus. Professionals state that this is really actually rare. Dr. Landrum Shettles, a pioneer in the field of in-vitro fertilization, wrote less than 1% of all abortions are performed to save the mother's life.

Less than 1%. 1% of the victims were victims of rape. Pregnancy resulting from incest: 0.5. It's actually less than 0.5. So this narrative is so put out there, "Well, we need to legalize abortion because of the 1% or the 0.5%."

What does the Bible actually say about abortion? Some people say, "We biblical-thinking Christians don't really have any Bible verses that are anti-abortion." Well, it doesn't say, "Thou shalt not commit abortion." If you're looking for that, you won't find that.

But here's what the Bible says: God knows us before he even forms us in the mother's womb. That's part of our understanding of what God is. It's Jeremiah 1:5: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations."

God is saying he knows us as he's forming us in the mother's womb. So with all that said, for every Old Testament idol, there's a modern-day equivalent and I think this is the one we're worshipping maybe the most today is Moloch because of that.

Kurt: Pastor Brett Meador pausing in our verse-by-verse study of Stephen's sermon to the Sanhedrin, discussing some of the unfortunate parallels of idolatry then till now. And Pastor Brett is not quite finished as he'll continue in Acts chapter seven next time in Today's Word. And I invite you to stay right there as Pastor Brett will also join me here in just a moment to talk a little bit more about the church he pastors in the Portland, Oregon, area. But first, if you've missed any portion of Pastor Brett's studies, you'll find all of his messages online at todayswordradio.com. That's todayswordradio.com.

Okay, I have Pastor Brett with me now. Brett, can you tell us a little bit more about your church, Athe Creek, in West Linn, Oregon?

Brett Meador: Sure, Kurt. Athe Creek is a church here in the Portland area. And really, our heart is pretty simple: we just want to teach the Bible verse by verse and help people grow in their walk with the Lord. We really emphasize going through the scriptures because we believe that's where the real strength and stability comes from. For us, this means keeping it really simple.

We use our Acts 2:42 scripture as an outline as it was really for the early church. They continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayers. We take this verse to heart and it really makes us follow kind of the pattern of ways to minister.

So we look at Athe Creek as a church where we want it to be a hospital, a refuge, where people who are lost and worn out and hurting, that they can come and feel not only welcome but also hear the good news of the gospel so that people really are healed.

I'm not the doctor, I'm not the great physician at the hospital at Athe Creek. I've just been in the hospital longer than some people. I know where the jello is. But Jesus is the great physician and when people come to Athe Creek, we want them to meet him and see the healing that comes through Christ. So that's really what Athe Creek's all about.

Kurt: Thank you, Pastor Brett, for that explanation of how the church should function based on that passage in the book of Acts. Well, more information about Athe Creek Church is available, including locations of all the campuses in the Portland, Oregon, area. You can find those at todayswordradio.com and clicking on the link "Locations."

Well, next time, Pastor Brett will continue our study of the Acts of the Apostles and highlight how Stephen's witness would become the catalyst for the spread of the gospel.

Announcer (Male): Today's Word with Pastor Brett Meador is an outreach of Athe Creek Church in West Linn, Oregon.