Stephen Before the Council

If Solomon and Isaiah said this from the beginning, one scene still needs explaining. In Acts 7, Stephen stands before the council and says:

Acts 7:47-50 But it was Solomon who built a house for Him. Yet the Most High does not dwell in temples made by hands, as the prophet says: 'Heaven is My throne, and earth is the footstool of My feet; what kind of house will you build for Me?' says the Lord, 'or what place is there for My rest? Was it not My hand that made all these things?'

Many people read this as a declaration that the temple is finished. Read that way, however, it collides with the words of Yeshua Himself.

The Same Verb, Opposite Statements?

When Stephen says that the Most High “does not dwell,” the Greek verb is katoikeo κατοικέω kat-oy-keh'-o, which means to settle in or to take up residence. Yeshua used exactly the same verb when He spoke about the temple:

Matthew 23:21 And whoever swears by the temple, swears both by it and by Him who dwells within it.

The words “Him who dwells within it” translate katoikeo. Read flatly and set side by side, Stephen’s words and Yeshua’s contradict each other directly.

Consider, too, how Yeshua treated the temple. He made a whip of cords, drove out the merchants, and said this:

John 2:16 and to those who were selling the doves He said, "Take these things away; stop making My Father's house a place of business."

He called it “My Father’s house.” No one speaks that way about an old relic that is about to be thrown away. He was defending the holiness of that house with His own hands.

Is one of them wrong, then? Read them in the way we read Solomon in Chapter 1, and both are right. God is not held by any house, and yet He dwells in the place where He has put His name. Stephen and Yeshua were speaking two sides of the same truth. Why, then, did Stephen say what he said, and why in that place? The setting explains it.

Stephen Was on Trial

Stephen was not giving a lecture. He was on trial before the council, and his life was at stake. Luke tells us plainly how the case began:

Acts 6:13-14 They put forward false witnesses who said, "This man does not stop speaking blasphemous rhema ῥήμα hray'-mah(spoken-word)s against this holy place and the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law). For we have heard him say that this Yeshua the Nazarene will destroy this place and change the customs which Moses handed down to us."

The charge was that Stephen taught that the temple and the law of Moses were over.

One word in it deserves a close look. When the witnesses say that Yeshua “will destroy this place,” the Greek verb is katalyo καταλύω kat-al-oo'-o, which means to tear down, to dissolve, or to abolish. The same word appears twice more in this chapter. Luke also calls the men who brought the charge “false witnesses.” The charge was made up.

To read Stephen today as saying that the temple is finished is to take the side of his accusers, and to write down again, two thousand years later, the very charge that Luke recorded as a lie.

Yeshua Faced the Same False Charge

The tactic was not new. When Yeshua was on trial, the same words had been used against Him:

Mark 14:57-58 Some stood up and began to give false testimony against Him, saying: "We heard Him say, 'I will destroy this temple made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands.'"

The words “I will destroy” translate katalyo once again. In both trials, the same word came from the mouths of false witnesses.

Yeshua Himself used that same word, katalyo, in the Sermon on the Mount, to say what He did not come to do:

Matthew 5:17 Do not think that I came to abolish the nomos(law) or the prophets — I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.

“Abolish” here is katalyo. The false witnesses put that word in His mouth, but His own words were that He did not come to abolish the Torah or the prophets. When we read the temple and the Torah as abolished, we are repeating the witnesses, not Yeshua.

Setting “made with hands” against “made without hands” was the work of the false witnesses at Yeshua’s trial, and turning Yeshua into a man who would tear the temple down was the work of false witnesses at both trials. The conflict never existed. The accusers manufactured it.

Then What Was Stephen Attacking?

Stephen’s defense, read to the end, does not close with an attack on the temple. It closes like this:

Acts 7:53 you who received the nomos(law) as ordained by angels, and yet did not keep it."

What Stephen rebuked was not the law but the failure to keep it. Look, too, at where the work of human hands first appears in his speech:

Acts 7:41 And they made a calf in those days and brought a sacrifice to the idol, and were rejoicing in the works of their hands.

It appears with the golden calf. To bow down to what our own hands have made is to give it the place of an idol. Once people begin to treat the temple in that way, even the house where God put His name sinks into that place. That is why Stephen speaks of “temples made by hands,” in the plural.

Stephen was not the first to say this. Centuries earlier, Jeremiah stood at the gate of the temple and cried out the same warning. In his day the people repeated the name of the temple as though it were a spell:

Jeremiah 7:4 Do not trust, for yourselves, in lying words, saying: The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD are these.

Jeremiah 7:9-11 Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear to falsehood, and burn incense to Baal, and walk after other gods whom you have not known, and come and stand before Me in this house, upon which My name is called, and say: We are delivered—in order to do all these abominations? Has this house, upon which My name is called, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I also, I have seen it, declares the LORD.

The Lucky Charm

Picture a man who carries a lucky charm in his pocket and believes that, because he has it, he may do as he likes and nothing will touch him. That is how the people of Jeremiah’s day treated the temple. In the streets they stole, murdered, and served other gods. Then they walked into the temple courts, said, “We are delivered,” and felt entirely safe. They had turned the house of God into a hiding place for their sins, and God called it “a den of robbers.”

Centuries later, when Yeshua cleansed the temple, He quoted those very words:

Matthew 21:13 And He said to them: "It is written: 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it a den of robbers."

Across the centuries, Jeremiah, Yeshua, and Stephen speak with one voice. The trouble was never the house of stone. It was a heart that clutched the house like a charm while ignoring the Torah of the God who lived there. What was rebuked was not the temple but the people who used the temple as an idol.

What Stephen Tore Down

Stephen did not tear down the temple. He tore down the superstition that had grown up around it. What made him an enemy of the temple was not Scripture but false witnesses.

Yet the phrase “made with hands” shows up again in the New Testament. This time it comes from Paul, far from Jerusalem, in the middle of Athens, and once again the setting explains the words.