DID IDO THAT?
The sun beat down on the marble steps of the Temple Precinct. The air, thick with the smell of incense and sacrifice, also carried a new tension—the electric crackle of a changing world. The followers of “The Way” were everywhere, their message of a direct relationship with God, unmediated by the Temple elite, was spreading like wildfire.
This was the ultimate separation of church and state, not as a political doctrine, but as a spiritual earthquake. The religious authorities, the Sanhedrin, saw it as a direct assault. They were the state, the church, the culture, the law. To challenge the Temple was to challenge the very order of society.
Into this fray stepped Stephen. He wasn’t one of the original twelve, but he was filled with a fierce, undeniable light. He performed wonders and spoke with a logic that his opponents could not refute. To the Sanhedrin, he wasn’t a preacher; he was a radical, a dissident, a threat to public order.
They had him arrested.
The Trial: “Show me some ID!!”
Stephen stood before the High Priest and the full council. The charges were sedition: speaking against the Temple and the Law of Moses. The atmosphere was less a court and more a precinct interrogation room.
The High Priest leaned forward, his voice a low growl. “Are these things true?”
But Stephen didn’t defend himself. He launched into a sweeping history of Israel, showing how God was never confined to a single building. He spoke of Abraham in the wilderness, Moses at the burning bush, the prophets in exile. His argument was clear: The institution is not the faith. The state is not the spirit.
The council grew restless. They weren’t hearing a defense; they were being indicted. They saw his passion not as conviction, but as disrespect. His refusal to acknowledge their authority was, in their eyes, the ultimate crime.
The verdict was passed not with a gavel, but with a glare. He was guilty of blasphemy. But the sentence was not handed down by the court. The separation of church and state shattered as the religious leaders, consumed by rage, became judge, jury, and executioner.
The Execution: Police Brutality
They dragged him out of the city. The mob, once dignified elders, was now a brutal, uniformed force. They picked up heavy stones, the tools of their sanctioned violence.
As the first rock struck his shoulder, Stephen looked up. His face was not contorted in pain, but in a kind of terrible, ecstatic clarity. He saw the heavens open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.
He cried out, “Look! I see heaven open!”
But the mob saw only a man defying them to his last breath. They saw a man without the proper ID—the ID of submission, the ID of fear, the ID that validated their power. They screamed, plugging their ears, and rushed at him all at once.
The stones fell like hail.
The Aftermath: Family Matters and “Why did I do that?”
Later, in the quiet of his home, a young man named Saul sat, wiping the dust and a speck of blood from his cloak. He had been there. He had guarded the coats of the killers. He had approved.
The zeal, the righteous fury, had felt so pure in the moment. But now, in the silence, a single, looping thought began to echo in his mind. It was a phrase he’d heard Stephen cry out just before the end, a prayer for his murderers: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
And then, Saul’s own thought, a quiet, horrified whisper:
“DID I DO THAT?“
It wasn’t funny. It was a cataclysm. The memory of Stephen’s face—not angry, but forgiving—would not leave him. This wasn’t about doctrine or law anymore. This was a Family Matter. He had helped murder a brother. The family of God was broken, and he was the one swinging the hammer.
Why did I do that? Not funny, Steve.
He wasn’t calling the apostle “Steve” as a joke. It was the intimacy of the guilt. In his mind, the victim was no longer “Stephen the Blasphemer,” a distant theological opponent. He was “Steve,” a man he had watched die with grace. The casual, awful familiarity of the name made the guilt more personal, more unbearable.
The separation that Stephen preached—the division between the dead institution and the living God—had now taken root in Saul’s own soul, separating the man he was from the man he was becoming. The brutal enforcement of a unified “church and state” had, in its violent overreach, created its own most powerful enemy. And it all started with a question, asked in the dark:
Lord… what did I do?
About The Author
