Unsavory Truth

“When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth.” (Ac 7:54 AV)

After rehearsing the history of Israel’s rejection of God’s prophets and comparing this habit to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, this was the people’s response.  They would later take Stephen out and murder him by stoning.  The gnashing on him with their teeth is an expression of verbal abuse, not actual biting.  Stephen started his sermon with Abraham’s calling and didn’t stop until he got to Solomon’s temple.  In particular, Stephen recalled the repeated rejection of Moses’ leadership which these people no claim to follow.  His point was very clear.  Whenever God speaks by the mouth of the prophets, the habit of God’s people was to reject it.  What really bothered the crowd was not the fact they rejected Christ, but rather, it was their well-established nature and habit.  Stephen called it like it was.  He went from day one and established the pattern of Israel to reject God’s word.  From going down to Egypt to building a temple to replace God’s tabernacle, God’s people always think they have a better way than God does.  It is hard to hear the truth.  Specially when it is a pattern.

It is one thing to hear that you messed up once.  It may even be tolerable to hear that one has messed up in the same area a few times.  But when we are told that we have erred repeatedly, we are saying we are a failure.  It is one thing to say we have failed.  Quite another to say we are a failure.  We do not mind hearing that we made a poor choice.  What we do not like to hear is that we usually make poor choices.  The former is not impossible to deal with.  We make a correction and go on.  The later is hard to admit and accept.  It hurts our pride.  It steals hope.  It reflects on our worth.  We do not like to hear it.  We may even react to hearing such news.  No one likes to be called a failure.  But the truth of the matter is, God’s grace, specially saving grace, can only come when we internalize and admit this horrible truth.  We are failures.  That is our nature.  That is what we are.

The good news is, if we receive the free gift of salvation by faith, after acknowledging what we are and what we deserve, we become a work of grace.  The Bible calls us “His workmanship.”  As Jeremiah describes it, He is the potter and we are the clay.  Let us understand one thing though.  The clay has no worth without the potter’s hand.  It is the nature of the clay to be worthless.  It is the nature of the clay to resist the hand.  Otherwise, the clay would be liquid, always conforming to the influence of the hand.  For the clay to be something beautiful and useful, it must agree that without the potter, it is a mere lump of nothing.  This is a hard place.  It is a needful place.  We are going to react one of two ways.  When we hear the reality that we are failures, we will either gnash with the teeth or we will seek the mercy of God.  We will either react violently to the cold hard fact we are worthless outside of the grace of God, or we will welcome what we know deep down in our hearts.  Without God’s grace, our history of failure continues.  Time to be honest with one’s self.  Time to yield.  Time to rejoice in what God can go because we have not been doing that good of a job ourselves.