<p>7:45 <i>W</i><i>hich also our fathers, in their turn</i>, <em>brought into the land with Joshua</em>- Joshua is the same Hebrew word as 'Jesus'. Joshua-Jesus and the &quot;fathers&quot; brought in the tabernacle into the place previously possessed by Gentiles. I suggest that the tabernacle now referred to people, God's dwelling place. The Lord used the same word, so Luke alone records, of how those previously excluded from the temple were to be 'brought in' by Him and His servants (Lk. 14:21). The 'fathers' therefore equate with the servants of Jesus; the tabernacle is the new system of worship. Paul was later accused of bringing in Gentiles to the temple (Acts 21:28,29 s.w.). As the &quot;fathers&quot; along with Joshua-Jesus brought the tabernacle into the holy space of the land of Israel, so the early Jewish Christians along with the active Lord Jesus were to bring Gentile converts into the new holy space- not a literal space, but the temple of God's invisible church and spiritual temple. It was all just too much for the listening Judaists. That those fishermen believers-in-Jesus could be equivalent to the &quot;fathers&quot;, that the crucified Jesus was as the historical Joshua, that the Gentiles were as the ark, that holy space no longer counted... it was all too much. The intensity and depth of Stephen's allusions were increasing as he progressed in his apparently innocent recounting of Israel's history. And when men are spiritually and intellectually cornered, they descend to personal attacks, in this case to the extent of throwing Roman law to the winds and picking up stones to stone Stephen to death with.</p><p><i>When they received possession of t<em>he nations that God thrust out before the presence of our fathers</em></i>- Stephen has just drawn a parallel between the early Jewish Christian preachers, many of them illiterate manual workers, and the &quot;fathers&quot; at the time of Joshua-Jesus. And now he says that the Gentiles were cast out before them; the implication was that the Judaist elders were no better than the Gentile inhabitants of Canaan, who were now being cast out of the holy space. The Lord had literally cast out such persons from the holy space of the temple. Saul's conscience was badly goaded at this point; but the point was not lost on him. For in the years of his repentance, he wrote of how just as Gentile Hagar was &quot;cast out&quot;, so Judaism had been cast out from God's true family (Gal. 4:30).</p><p><em>To the days of David</em>- At first blush, a strange detail to add; that the process of casting out the Gentile tribes from the land was only completed by David, many generations later. The &quot;fathers&quot; hadn't done the job; they were not the peerless elders Judaism liked to imagine. And it was David, a clear type of Messiah, whose &quot;son&quot; was to be Messiah, who actually completed the job. The Lord Jesus was likewise doing the same- completing the job of casting the Judaists out of God's holy space because He had redefined that holy space.</p>