Acts 7:55

“And being full of the Holy Ghost and looking up to heaven, he saw the glory of heaven, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God.” The normal posture of Jesus in heaven is sitting on the mediatorial throne. This is an extraordinary occasion; heaven enjoys the exquisite privilege of witnessing the death of the first Christian martyr. Now see Jesus vacate the throne, walk out to the heavenly battlements, calling the attention of the enraptured hosts. Archangels ceased to play on their golden harps, the cherubim hushed their triumphant song, the seraphim paused amid the triumphant shouts, while all heaven with Jesus look down and see how His martyr can die. The judgment hall, where Jesus, the apostles and Stephen were tried for their lives, stands on Mt. Zion, about six hundred yards from the city wall on the mountain brow, which is there entered by David's Gate. As a criminal must not die in the holy city, and they have condemned him unanimously, under charge of blasphemy, because he said he saw heaven open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, which was true, but they did not believe it, in a similar manner the magnates of the fallen churches at the present day accuse the holiness people of blasphemy and are awfully shocked at our testimonies, and we would really fare like Stephen if the stars and stripes did not float over our heads, and gunboats roar from the seas. Therefore, laying violent hands on Stephen and dragging him out through the gate to the brow of Mt. Zion, beyond the wall, as the Greek says, “they continued to cast stones on him.” Pursuant to the law against blasphemers (Deuteronomy 17), the witnesses must testify against him and cast the first stones. Thereafter the people indiscriminately continued to cast stones on the poor victim. There is a striking double significance in the laying down of the clothes at the feet of this young man called Saul. They only saw in it the fact of his leadership in the martyrdom of Stephen, which was true, arising from the simple fact of his constitutional pre-eminence among men, since he was in every way an extraordinary character, born to rule, whether in the kingdom of Satan or God. We have a most striking secondary meaning, legitimately attachable to this notable transaction, i. e., the succession of the dying martyr, of which no one present had the slightest dream, Saul himself of all most alien from such a Conception. Oh, how strikingly prophetical was this laying down of their garments at the feet of Saul, destined in the miraculous providence of God to take the place of the dying martyr, receive the converting grace and sanctifying power which flooded Stephen's countenance with an unearthly radiance, misunderstood and falsely interpreted by Saul and his clerical comrades as vile contrariness and devilish stubbornness; even to come back to Jerusalem, enter those Hellenistic synagogues, there preach and witness precisely as Stephen had done, and only escape the same bloody fate at the hands of that identical murderous rabble by providential intervention, which simply prolonged his life till he could finish his work and then die, like Stephen, a martyr for Jesus.