For what purpose did Stephen, when IF brought before the council, remind his hearers, “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians?” Was the remark made to no purpose? He later called his hearers “Stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears . . .”, adding, “as your fathers did, so do ye”.1
Our upbringing leaves an indelible mark upon our lives; almost invariably we follow fairly closely the manner of life, beliefs and customs of our parents. In many cases we develop a one-sided point of view and go through life unconsciously guided by preoccupations which originated in early life. The Scribes, the Pharisees and their fellow “blind-guides” were guilty of this and in their case it was a most serious fault.
To fully serve the Creator in complete purity of truth means that we must make a thorough self-analysis of character and purge out, with the help of the Word, our early instincts and desires that can blind us from a whole-hearted acceptance of the Truth. To aid us we can take the examples of the Scriptures: Abraham, Moses, all the disciples, and of Paul; these all had to overcome their first conceptions of humanity. A major mental re-direction was involved which refined the characters of these men, making them worthy vessels of the Most High God.
Moses Life In Egypt
Stephen referred our thoughts to Moses, and we will take him as an example. The record of his early life is intriguingly sketchy, but in the last one hundred years the archeologist has been able to lay bare the civilization of his time. We know well the comment of the writer to the Hebrews, “By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharoah’s daughter; choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season” 2 What were these pleasures of sin? As a son of Pharoah’s daughter, Moses would have moved among the elite of Egypt, with no lack of worldly goods. His spiritual life would be strange indeed, for all Egyptian life was interwoven with idolatry of the most intricate kind. It is necessary to appreciate a little of this, if we are to understand the atmosphere in which Moses was reared and in which his people served their bondage.
One Egyptologist has described the period prior to Aknaten as “an age of superstition . . . a land where the grossest polytheism reigned absolutely supreme”. The Egyptians were great artists and we can get a vivid picture of the manner of daily life from drawings, milleniums old, that have been uncovered in ancient tombs and temples. In one tomb the explorer Mariette, in the last century, discovered paintings that depicted every aspect of the dead man’s life on earth. “The highly stylized, linear, and richly detailed wall-paintings and reliefs depict the activities of the workers as well as the pursuits of the rich. We see flax being prepared, reapers mowing grain. The process of building a ship four and a half thousand years ago is illustrated: the felling of the trees; the cutting of the planks; the use of adze, handram, and paring chisel. We see that saw, axe and auger were in common use. We also see gold smelters at work, and observe how air was blown into the ovens to produce high temperatures. We discover sculptors, stone-masons and leather-workers at their daily tasks.”3
The dead man, whose name was Ti, was also anxious to preserve proof of his own importance. The walls display “village magistrates . . . in the act of being driven like sheep to Ti’s house to settle their accounts . . . We see rows of peasant women bringing Ti gifts, and troops of servants, some leading up sacrificial bulls, others in the act of slaughtering them”.4
From such scenes we can build up a mental picture of life in this ancient but highly civilised land. The construction of the pyramids, when we appreciate the exactness which such a prodigious creation entailed, was an overwhelmingly tremendous feat. The availability of slave labour was only part of the account. Consider their tools. Cottrell writes, “The Egyptian workman used bronze tools. The jewelled cutting joints may have been of beryl, topaz, chrysoberyl, sapphire, or hard uncrystallised corundum. For cutting the stones they employed great bronze saws with jewelled cutting points. . . . By curving the saw blades into a circle drills were formed which could cut out a circular hole by rotation”.5 Petrie said, “The lathe appears to have been as familiar an Instrument in the Fourth Dynasty as in our modern workshops”.6
The Wisdom Of Egypt
It was to such a mode of existence that Moses was reared when he became known as the son of Pharoah’s daughter. But so far we have only examined the apparent representations of Egyptian life. Evident on every hand, and connected with every discovery, the religious wisdom of the Egyptians” lies unmasked. Truly it was an age of great superstition. For all their craftsmanship, their daily mode of life, their great achievements, the whole object of their existence revolved around the worship of mystic gods and a preparation for their conception of the future after death.
The Pharoah began each day with a ritual to give honour to the sun at dawn, for the Pharoahs believed that they were the fleshly embodiment of the sun-god “Fla.”. The Egyptians had also developed an entire pantheon of deities to whom worship was due. Many of these had temples for their exclusive use, with an elaborate priesthood, and even their very wives in the land of the living. It may seem beyond belief that such a manner of life existed—yet the evidence is plain. Some of the finds have been fantastic; in 1954 a 102 foot long pit was discovered, quite accidentally, at the base of the Khufu pyramid. It contained a carefully dismantled funerary boat, and Egyptologists think that it was reserved for the King’s voyages across the sky with the Sun-God. A wall painting on the tomb of Ramesses IX depicts the boat of the Sun-God (represented as a beetle) passing through the underworld preceded by serpents.
We could continue indefinitely, but sufficient has been given to impress in our minds the nature of “the wisdom of Egypt”. In the time of Christ, although the time of Egypt’s greatness had ceased 500 years before, the evidence abounded, and Stephen’s hearers would have been well aware of the might and wonder of this ancient empire. From his early years Moses had been instructed in this wisdom! What a miracle that he preserved a belief in the one true God. It is a strange thing that history repeatedly reveals that those whom God calls for his greater tasks are often those who have lived in a worldly society. Was this Stephen’s challenge? Perhaps we have not thought of it that way before.
All those Jews who accepted Christ did so despite the teachings of the Scribes and Pharisees. In Matthew’s Gospel, 15th and 16th chapters, we read of the Master’s condemnation of the religious leaders of the day. “Take heed”. He tells his followers, and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees”. At first they misunderstood, but then He made it plain, they were to beware of their teaching. They heard Him deride the Pharisees: “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” They heard the prophets quoted so as to expose them: ” . . . in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men”. To those who had ears to hear, there came a transformation; with seeking hearts they were able to discard the rituals of man’s devising, and receive the true light from heaven.
Stephen’s Hearers
were in like position. Their great hero, Moses, had also been in like position and to this Stephen drew their attention. Did they reflect upon it? The record bears testimony to their failure. Today, the living record of Stephen’s words brings to us the same challenge — Which Wisdom? The challenge goes deeper than that! It implores us to reflect upon the “great gulf fixed” between the two ways—the two wisdoms. It cries out for us to put today’s way of life into the witness box; to illuminate the comparisons and to highlight the warnings that can be revealed.
Can the same comparisons be drawn today? The answer is plainly “Yes”, and it is a matter of the greatest urgency that this is done: not once, not twice, but daily—by those who would truly follow in the footsteps of Stephen and the early apostles. Let us expand our meaning. We have seen that many to whom the greatest acts”of faith have been ascribed had in their early and impressionable years been exposed to the wiles of worldly society. We think of Daniel and his companions in Babylon, Abraham among the Chaldeans, Joseph in Egypt, and so forth. These men were all able in later life to display the strength of their faith. They had seen both ways, had experienced both wisdoms; when times of crisis arose they were able to weigh up the position with greater clarity of mind. To them the alternatitve to God’s wisdom was plain; it was to be rejected at all costs. They reflected on the ‘fleshpots of Egypt” and recognised them in their true colours.
When the disciples set forth after the ascension of Christ to fulfil his command to “go into the world”, they would also have possessed this perception of the contrasting wisdoms. They would also be encouraged to reflect on the examples left by earlier generations. They were inspired to call upon those who manifested opposition to make such reflections—and in Stephen’s defence we have perhaps the best example. When Israel finally obtained release from their Egyptian bondage their rejoicing was short lived. Christ came to deliver men from bondage of sin and death—was rejoicing again to stagnate into failure? As Stephen spoke we perceive how he led on his audience, tempting them to use their powers of reflection; not until he had fully reasoned with them did he utter his words of denunciation.
God Reasons With Us
Today, through the power of His Word, God reasons with us. We are not called to live our lives under a code of “Thou shalt nots”—Paul’s 8th, 9th and 10th chapters of his first epistle to the Corinthians makes this principle plain. But it does ask—No! it urgently demands that we develop reflective minds, that we might say with David, “I do not swerve from thy testimonies. I look at the faithless with disgust . . . but my heart stands in awe of thy words”.7
In the days of Egypt, Babylon and Rome, the distinction between the wisdom of the world and the ways of the Almighty was manifest on every hand. Reflecting on life in Egypt we can see how all life was geared to the service of worldly wisdom. Take away the superstitions wrought by the ingenuity of man’s unillumined mind and there would be nothing left. This was the god which the children of the Most High God could not serve—either then or now! We asked you to put today’s way of life into the witness box: where does worldly wisdom cease—is there much that it does not contaminate? No!—like hot weather in mid summer, we cannot escape from it; there is not a wilderness to which we can flee. If we live by a code of rigid “Thou shalt nots”, our burden becomes intolerable. As we review the history of our community over the past 1 00 years, together with the ever-growing presumption of this world’s wisdom, we fear for our defences. Only if we seek to reflect, and one feels that “reflect” is an inadequate word, can we hope to achieve inward thoughts that will continually keep the comparison of the two wisdoms before our eyes.
The gods of the Egyptians must have been very familiar to Moses; to us there are the gods of this world, they are very familiar to us! Yet, because we fail to reflect frequently upon the comparison, how often do we mix a little of the wisdom of the world in with that of God?
We pander to the easy paths because the harder going is not demanded of us by our present circumstances. Do our actions reveal that our thoughts have lost their clarity of understanding? We fail to see that, just as life in the time of Moses was utterly debased and full of vanity, so everything that goes on today represents complete idolatry in the eyes of the Almighty.
How is our time spent? Which wisdom do we desire? We all know to whom our desires should be turned. Possibly the greatest danger is that we seek the god of this world in small ways for a most unworthy motive—so that we might not appear too greatly different from our fellows. But the reflective mind would be proof against such motives. Comparisons would emerge, for example that of Daniel; he did not shrink from refusing the king’s meat for fear of appearing to be different. We can produce so many examples of the value of the reflective mind, and this is what Stephen’s defence brings home to us. This is the lesson that God teaches all his chosen. He who was called “the man after God’s own heart”, was eloquent in proclaiming, “I remember the days of old, I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the works of thy hands”.8 David remembered, he meditated and he mused, or in other words, he developed a reflective mind. Are we of the same calibre as Moses and David? We fear we are not, but can we be likened unto those thousands of Israelites released from the cruel bondage of Egypt who nevertheless “fell in the wilderness”? What caused their failure? The answer is plain: they did not reflect daily on the nature of their calling. Thus we see the lesson, the great truth behind Stephen’s comment, “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians”. We see that lesson—but are we prepared to benefit?
References
1—Acts 7. 22, 51.
2—Heb. 11. 24, 25.
3—Weigall: Quoted by Cottrell, “The Lost Pharoahs”, p. 218, Pan Ed.
4—Ceram: “Gods, Graves and Scholars”, p. 133.
5—”The Lost Pharoahs”, p. 77.
6.—Ibid p. 78 (Quoted by Cottrell).
7—Psalm 119. 158, 161 R.S.V.
8—Psalm 143. 5.
Reflections on the Potter and the Clay