Idolatry in the Wilderness

Both the Pharisees and Sadducees, who were well represented on the first-century Jewish ruling council called the Sanhedrin, prided themselves on their faithfulness to Moses. They took it very seriously when they encountered someone who appeared to disrespect Moses by speaking of changes to the Mosaic law. The Sanhedrin charged Stephen with blasphemy because he followed Jesus, who suggested alterations to the law of Moses (see Acts 6:8–15). As we have seen, however, both Jesus and Stephen were faithful to Moses, since Moses himself had foreseen that he was not the last prophet from God (7:17–37).

In truth, those who charged Stephen with blasphemy for his supposed rejection of Moses were the ones truly guilty of opposing Moses. Stephen continues to make that point in today’s passage by reminding his audience of the Israelites’ repeated disobedience to Moses while they wandered in the wilderness after the exodus. The Hebrews’ rejection of Moses, Stephen says, was especially heinous because an angel accompanied Moses in the wilderness and gave him “living oracles”—the Scriptures of Genesis–Deuteronomy (v. 38; see Gal. 3:19). Matthew Henry comments on the significance of the reference to God’s Word as “oracles”: “The words of God are oracles, certain and infallible, and of unquestionable authority and obligation; they are to be consulted as oracles, and by them all controversies must be determined.” We have even more of these oracles today than did the ancient Israelites because we have the full canon of Scripture, so we have even less of an excuse to reject the Word of God (see Heb. 2:1–4).

In any case, the ancient Israelites did not merely reject Moses in the wilderness, for in rejecting Moses they actually rejected God. Stephen brings this out in Acts 7:39–41 when he speaks of Israel’s great sin of worshiping the golden calf (see Ex. 32). Because of this sin, the Lord turned the covenant community over to idolatry. Stephen, relying on the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, quotes Amos 5:25–27, which originally addressed a subsequent generation of northern Israel that was about to go into exile into Assyria. Stephen applies Amos’ words to the Babylonian exile, which the southern kingdom of Judah endured some 140 years later. The point is that the idolatry with the golden calf was no isolated incident but was characteristic of the entire history of old covenant Israel.