At the temple, Stephen retells the spiritual history of Israel from the perspective of the Holy Spirit. He starts with the calling of Abraham to go West from Mesopotamia to a yet unknown promised land. Then he tells of the subsequent years of slavery in Egypt and Israel’s salvation through Moses, Aaron and gift of living oracles. Instead of highlighting the commandments of stone, Stephen talks about Israel’s interaction with the Spirit of God whom they repeatedly rejected to worship the calf of gold, the tent of Molach and the star of Rephan. These were the pagan gods that people sacrificed to in order to have their needs met. Those gods did not interact with people on a personal level as their God did. 

As a result of their unfaithfulness, God let the Israelites to be taken into captivity by the Babylonians. Stephen interprets their history of the kings and tells them despite the physical temple of Solomon that they revere, God doesn’t live in human buildings because heaven on his throne. He calls the leaders out for persecuting the prophets and murdering Jesus. 

The religious leaders have had enough of Stephen and his reinterpretation of their history. They drive him out of the temple and  stone him to death on the edge of town. Unlike with Jesus, a fellow Aramaic-speaking Jew, there is no trial, no visit to Pilate or King Herod. They didn’t jail him like the apostles. They just silenced the Greek-speaking upstart under a pile of rocks. They wanted to keep God in the box that they controlled. God used his commandments, his scripture and the physical building as channels to bring people to himself, but they are not the limit of him either then or now. 

As Stephen breathes his final breath, he asks for forgiveness for his oppressors, again breaking the cycle of violence and revenge. The narrator Luke notes that there is a young man watching the coats named Saul. Even as one chapter closes a new, greater one is about to begin.