Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 7:54

"Now when they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth." — Acts 7:54 (ASV)

To interpret Stephen’s address as an absolute renunciation of the land, the law, or the sacrificial system is an exaggeration. Indeed, Stephen saw worship in terms of the tabernacle, not the temple, to be the ideal of Israel’s worship. But that is not to say he rejected the worship of the temple, particularly as it continued the pattern of worship instituted by God in giving the tabernacle. Nor can it be said that Stephen was proclaiming a law-free and universal Gospel or suggesting the futility of a Christian mission to Israel. Instead, his desire, it seems, was to raise a prophetic voice within Israel, pleading with his hearers to make Jesus, not their traditional holy things, the center of their worship and thought. Certainly Stephen was more daring than the Jerusalem apostles, more ready to explore the logical consequences of commitment to Jesus than they were, and more ready to attribute Israel’s rejection of its Messiah to a perpetual callousness of heart.

Nonetheless, Stephen’s message was, for his hearers, flagrant apostasy—in both its content and its tone. While his purpose was to denounce the status quo mentality that had grown up around the land, the law, and the temple, thereby clearing a path for a positive response to Jesus as Israel’s Messiah, this was undoubtedly taken as a frontal attack against the Jewish religion in its official and popular forms. And in the council’s eyes, its assumed prophetic stance together with its obnoxious liberal spirit must have represented the worst of both Jewish Hellenism and the beginning Christian movement. So, Luke tells us, “they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him.”