Alright, a little bit of American history on the front end here. Some of you are going to know this like the back of your hand. Some of you from other parts of the world, I don't expect you to know American history. So we'll fill in the gaps here a little bit. Abraham Lincoln, he's a pretty famous one. If you ask someone who isn't an American to name an American president, other than the recent ones, that's one of the ones along with Washington, they're probably gonna know. Because he's the guy who presided over the American Civil War, fought in the 1860s between, if you look at a map of the United States now, what would basically be the Northeast quadrant of the country versus the Southeast quadrant of the country? In the end, the North won. And Lincoln was trying to figure out then, all right, how do we put all of this country back together? Civil wars are real tough. And he decides that it's not a time for fighting anymore, it's a time for healing. He takes a very conciliatory tone, and he's initiating policies that are going to make it possible for the South to come back with a degree of dignity and hopefully patch things up. But before he could implement all of that, Lincoln got shot. He was watching a play called Our American Cousins. The only reason I've ever even heard of that play, so I can't imagine it was even a very good play. But he was there at Ford's Theater in DC, he got shot by a guy named John Wilkes Booth, who's a Southern sympathizer. And Lincoln died shortly thereafter, across the street where he was receiving care. So now you got a chaos situation. You got a succession issue because, well, who's president now? In our country, the vice president takes over. But in our country, vice presidential picks aren't really done with excellence in mind. No president is thinking, oh man, I really would want this person to be president if I died. No, people who want to be president are thinking about the best way for them to become president. No, instead, vice presidential candidates tend to get picked to get votes and as olive branches politically to certain parts of the electorate or different parts of the government to make people happy. Well, that's exactly what had happened with Lincoln. He had a guy with the awesomest name ever, Hannibal Hamlin. Hannibal Hamlin, Hammer in Hannibal Hamlin. I don't think that's his nickname, but it should have been his nickname. But he was from Maine. And that means you got a northern guy in Lincoln, you got a northern guy in Hamlin. I don't actually know why Lincoln canned Hamlin or what the deal was there. Canned Hamlin. I see that wasn't intentional. I just kind of worked it was almost a pun. But for whatever reason, I'm historically totally ignorant on this point. Hamlin's out, and Andrew Johnson from Tennessee, a place to be from, that is maybe a little more strategically advantageous for what Lincoln was trying to accomplish. He's in. Well, now Lincoln's dead. And something nobody wanted to have happen has happened. Andrew Johnson is president, and he robes himself in the reputation of Lincoln. He holds himself out as a Lincolnite, but the proof's in the pudding, homie. He went a different route with how he conducted business around Washington, with some of the details of how he handled things, with putting the country back together. And ultimately, he wasn't powerful enough. He hadn't earned it like Lincoln had. So his principles moved around a little bit and he got in trouble with everyone. He couldn't carry through on the themes of Lincoln's presidency. And eventually, even though he robed himself in Lincoln, he could not be Lincoln, and it led to his political downfall. He got impeached and he barely escaped getting convicted and removed from office. Only missed it by one vote, if I recall correctly. Why am I bringing all of this up? One, because I think it's a very interesting story, as is always the case. And two, because lots of people in history play the role of the successor, the disciple, the one who comes after the big name. They try to carry forward the legacy. Some examples of times when this has worked. How about Plato carrying forward the impulses toward how to teach and think about virtue of his mentor, Socrates? Well, yeah, they didn't agree on everything, but the themes came through and it pretty much worked. How about Joe Biden carrying forward the themes of the Obama administration? You may or may not like those policies, but it seems like Biden has been more or less on track with his predecessor, a guy he was vice president under. But for every example you have of a successor coming along and being able to carry the thing forward, you've got a whole bunch of other examples like Andrew Johnson and Abe Lincoln of it just not working out. It didn't survive the succession, and that's evident because thematically nothing carries over. Well, one of the questions we've been grappling with here is we're running up to Galatians, looking at the book of Acts, is is the Jesus stuff gonna carry over? Or was that a one-time thing? And now the people who are doing stuff ostensibly in the name of Jesus are just gonna run off and make it into whatever they want, and it's gonna morph into a totally different thing now that Jesus is, you know, quote unquote, out of the picture. And in the couple of chapters of Acts that we're gonna lightning summary today, I think we're seeing that the succession is actually going really well. It is thematically on point from the stuff Jesus said and did and how he lived to how his followers are acting. They're not deviating from the message or the vibe of the whole thing. So in Acts chapter six, we're gonna meet a whole bunch of new people. We're kind of getting into the second generation of Christian followers. The first generation were the disciples of Jesus and the people they immediately reached with the day of Pentecost and the stuff we were talking about there in Acts chapter two. Well, the next generation are the people who heard about Jesus from all of them. And apparently that was getting to be a huge amount of people. And meeting the needs of everybody is becoming difficult. It's becoming hard to scale this spontaneous outpouring of generosity among all of these Christians to a much larger scale now that you have a whole bunch of other people signing up. The original disciples in Peter, John, and that crowd, they're like, dang, we're gonna have to organize up. We have to turn this into a little bit of an institution with a plan and some ground rules. And we're gonna have to pick some people to execute this, particularly to make sure that nobody gets overlooked. And if we're trying to meet each other's needs, we need some people to be attentive to those needs. And we, the 12 disciples, that isn't what Jesus told us to do. He told us to go and be his witnesses to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And we're not done with that, so we got to go do that. We got to bring in some other people. So they do. So in Acts chapter 6, they bring in a bunch of dudes who are known to be, quote, full of the spirit and wisdom, and they decide to, quote, turn the responsibility over to them. And apparently these dudes who they pick do a pretty good job. But there's also a second generation of Christians coming along here who are doing things more like the 12 disciples do. They go out and tell other people, travel around, they talk in public in the temple and take that risk and put that bullseye on their back. And one of these guys is named Stephen. And Stephen is apparently razor sharp. He is really good at the Bible. He's really good at thinking on his feet. He's really good at not losing his head when people start yelling at him. And he's winning these arguments with all of these impressive teachers of the law and the people who don't like Jesus. And his teaching bears all of the hallmarks of the Jesus stuff. The themes are carrying forward. This is very exciting. And basically what we get here in Acts chapter 6 and chapter 7 is sort of the same arc we get with Jesus. The same religious leaders couldn't defeat what Jesus was saying. He was making too much sense and God was behind it. So eventually they're like, we just got to make up false accusations and get him arrested and get him killed. The same deal happens with Stephen, only instead of it taking four or five chapters like it does in the book of Matthew, it only takes a couple of paragraphs here at the end of chapter six. But ultimately, Stephen gets accused the same way Jesus got accused or of the same thing. They say, Oh, you know, this speaking blasphemy against the temple, against Moses, against God, he said he's going to tear down the temple. And these are false witnesses against Jesus, and now these are false witnesses against Stephen as well. But if somebody has all the power in a legal system and they have a lack of character or can lie to themselves into believing that their illegal action is what is needed to uphold the law, if they have that kind of power and that kind of mentality, they'll find a way for you to be guilty. It happened to Jesus. It can happen to Stephen. And ultimately, that's what we see play out in chapter 7. It does happen to Stephen. He gets brought in in front of Caiaphas, the high priest. This is the same high priest who oversaw the trial and execution of Jesus. And immediately Caiaphas had to recognize, ah, bummer, this is a worthy successor to Jesus. We didn't kill those themes of Jesus and the Jesus movement. They're all carrying forward. It's kind of like poetry. It rhymes. We're hearing all of this again. So the high priest brings him in and he's like, Are these charges true? And Stephen goes into this big, massive speech that mostly focuses on Moses. Now that makes sense that Stephen would pinch zoom in on that, because remember, the accusation against him was that he was blaspheming against Moses. Well, then for pretty much all of chapter seven, it's just one big, uninterrupted speech of Stephen pointing out that Moses was always pointing to Jesus, and that who Jesus was, and that what Jesus did, and all of the themes from Jesus' teaching and ministry and all of that were absolutely in fulfillment of everything that Moses was. So Stephen is kind of defending himself against the accusation of blasphemy by saying it's not blasphemy. I absolutely celebrate Moses because of who he is and what God did through him and how God used him to point to Jesus. It's actually you guys who are blaspheming against Moses and missing the point. There's a little bit of paraphrases mine there. And really, I don't think I'm going to apologize for that paraphrase. That is the gist of what Stephen is saying. You accused me of blaspheming Moses, but you're the ones who actually are missing the point of Moses. Stephen seems to be drawing straight up on the teachings of Jesus. He draws on a reference that Jesus made to David and to the Psalms as well. And if Stephen was as good at reading the room as he apparently seems to be, he could tell the temperature was rising in front of the religious leaders as he's given this speech about Moses and Jesus. And so it's almost like he realizes I kind of got to rush to the end here at the end of the speech. And so he fires off a shot at them that is very reminiscent of how Jesus told off the religious leaders as well, late in the book of Matthew before he got arrested and executed. Jesus said that all the blood of the prophets is on you guys, you and the people you are intellectually descended from, you religious leaders, you are a stiff-necked people who have resisted God at every turn and persecuted the people God has sent to do his will. And so Stephen says the same thing here. He says, You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears, you are just like your fathers, you always resist the Holy Spirit. Was there ever a prophet your fathers didn't persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the righteous one. And now you've betrayed and murdered him, you who have received the law that was put into effect through angels, but have not obeyed it. And it says that when they heard this, they were furious and they gnashed their teeth, and things are about to turn violent. We'll look at that next time around. But the point for today is we've seen in the last few conversations that all of the themes and teaching and even styling of Jesus in terms of how he held himself out, all of that seems to have been faithfully carried forward into the work of the disciples, Peter and John being featured most heavily so far in the book of Acts. But now we're seeing that all of that stuff is being carried forward even another spiritual generation into Stephen, who just appeared on screen one page ago and is already crushing it in terms of articulating what the Bible says about pointing to Jesus and is already willing to stand up and face the very people who killed Jesus not too long ago with total courage. Best as we can tell, Stephen didn't even see any of this stuff happen. It's one thing for the disciples to do it. They were there, they saw it all go down. Did Stephen? Maybe. I guess we don't know totally for sure. Maybe he was adjacent to a lot of this stuff, but what we do know is that he seems to be representative of this next generation of followers, and they're not letting off the gas pedal. It's almost as though the old dogs that were metaphorically chewing on the cord, see yesterday's episode, are teaching the new dogs to metaphorically chew on the cord. And that is causing the religious leadership to really start to come unhinged and even violent. And crazy stuff is gonna happen in the next chapter and change that we look at tomorrow. Stuff's playing out for Peter and John a lot like it played out with Jesus. Stuff's playing out now with the next generation, Stephen, a lot like it did for Jesus. And I think we're gonna see this cycle go on and on and on as we finish this run-up to the book of Galatians. Hey, all of you support the program over at patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast. I put up the picture of that rascally puppy, speaking of cord chewing yesterday. It's there. She's cute. Be careful. Don't show your loved ones. They're gonna want to get a puppy. I warned you in advance. And everybody who supports the program on other platforms, I'm gonna fire off an email and not too long, and you will get the picture of the puppy too. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.