Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 7:59

"And they stoned Stephen, calling upon [the Lord], and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." — Acts 7:59 (ASV)

As Stephen was being stoned, he cried out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” and, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” The cries are reminiscent of Jesus’ own words from the cross in Lk 23:34, 46, though the parallelism of sequence and wording is not exact. While it is probably going too far to say that Luke meant Stephen’s execution to be a reenactment of the first great martyrdom, that of Jesus, the parallelism here is certainly not just inadvertent; and it was probably included to show that the same spirit of commitment and forgiveness that characterized Jesus’ life and death was true of his earliest followers. The expression “fall asleep” (GK 3121) is a common biblical way of referring to the death of God’s own (cf. Jn 11:11; Acts 13:36; 1 Corinthians 7:39; 1 Corinthians 11:30; 2 Peter 3:4), and the word “sleep” suggests something as to the nature of personal existence during that period of time theologians call “the intermediate state.”