36. He led the people out of Egypt, performing miracles and wonders in Egypt and at the Red Sea and for forty years in the desert.
37. Moses is the one who said to the people of Israel, ‘God will send you a prophet, just as he sent me, and he will be one of your own people.’
38. He is the one who was with the people of Israel assembled in the desert; he was there with our ancestors and with the angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai, and he received God's living messages to pass on to us.
39. “But our ancestors refused to obey him; they pushed him aside and wished that they could go back to Egypt.
40. So they said to Aaron, ‘Make us some gods who will lead us. We do not know what has happened to that man Moses, who brought us out of Egypt.’
41. It was then that they made an idol in the shape of a bull, offered sacrifice to it, and had a feast in honour of what they themselves had made.
42. So God turned away from them and gave them over to worship the stars of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets:‘People of Israel! It was not to methat you slaughtered and sacrificed animalsfor forty years in the desert.
43. It was the tent of the god Molech that you carried,and the image of Rephan, your star god;they were idols that you had made to worship.And so I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.’
44. “Our ancestors had the Tent of God's presence with them in the desert. It had been made as God had told Moses to make it, according to the pattern that Moses had been shown.
45. Later on, our ancestors who received the tent from their fathers carried it with them when they went with Joshua and took over the land from the nations that God drove out as they advanced. And it stayed there until the time of David.
46. He won God's favour and asked God to allow him to provide a dwelling place for the God of Jacob.
47. But it was Solomon who built him a house.
48. “But the Most High God does not live in houses built by human hands; as the prophet says:
49. ‘Heaven is my throne, says the Lord,and the earth is my footstool.What kind of house would you build for me?Where is the place for me to live in?
50. Did not I myself make all these things?’
51. “How stubborn you are!” Stephen went on to say. “How heathen your hearts, how deaf you are to God's message! You are just like your ancestors: you too have always resisted the Holy Spirit!
52. Was there any prophet that your ancestors did not persecute? They killed God's messengers, who long ago announced the coming of his righteous Servant. And now you have betrayed and murdered him.
53. You are the ones who received God's law, that was handed down by angels — yet you have not obeyed it!”
54. As the members of the Council listened to Stephen, they became furious and ground their teeth at him in anger.