Acts 7:55-56 But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God… But twice, so far as we know, since Christ's ascension has the cloud which received Him out of the sight of those first loving gazers opened its blinding folds — once for the conversion of the persecuting Saul, once for the support of the suffering Stephen. It was a great crisis in the history of the new faith. How much depended on the faithful endurance of that young champion! To him tortured men and women would look back from many a scene of agony, and take courage. But he had no example. To him, therefore, most fitly was this support vouchsafed. And mark the mode of its bestowal: "Stephen, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven." What a gaze was that! What faith, desire, love, need, supplication was gathered into it! And as he gazes, lo, the cloud melts away; being "full of. the Holy Ghost," the power of intuition, so weakened in us fallen men, is supernaturally strengthened, and he sees Jesus standing, because it is the priestly attitude of the great Intercessor, and because the attitude of His intercession is the attitude of His help. And so He showed Himself as reaching out from the eternal shore into the billows of this bitter storm the pierced hand to be the stay of His martyr. And that sight changed all things to him. The lights of earth paled beneath its lustre; the sounds of earth were hushed by its ineffable harmony; the mighty throb which shot through his spirit deadened the power of marking any lower sensation, as he saw that sight of glory, and knew that contenance of love which was bent full upon him. He saw God's kingdom in its strength, its vastness, and its repose, and he was safe. How can the ripple around their darkened base stir those adamantine foundations? How can the hate of man pluck him out of that hand pierced by love and full of omnipotence? "The Son of Man — the sharer of my nature." And as the shadow of the great Intercessor falls upon him, transforming him into its own likeness, the dying martyr pleads for his murderers. And then, not as one shrinking back from pain, but as a soul in rapture, thirsting for its full fruition, he calls upon his manifested Lord to receive his spirit; until amidst that storm of murdering violence, calm as the hushed infant upon its mother's breast, he sinks into a rest sweeter than that of peaceful infancy, and falls indeed asleep in Jesus. For the sake of its great practical lessons — I. We have here a notable instance of the way in which THE WHOLE OF OUR HOLY RELIGION RESTS ON FACTS. We see what it was amongst its first confessors in a time of crucial experiment. It was not a set of beneficent maxima which leavened, and raised the tone of, society; not a set of lofty ideas which, gradually, with the help of time and distance, formed a highly-coloured medium through which reverence and affection could look back to the form of their first promulger, and gaze upon it with a wonder which at last invested him with the fancied attribute of a god. No! from the very first it was faith in a Person, Divine and human, beside His follower, and able and willing to hold him up in every struggle. Stephen's spirit did not cast itself upon sublime abstractions. No! he looks up steadfastly into heaven with the earnest, longing, searching glance of undoubting expectation, following the ascended form to where the cloud had received Him out of their sight; and before such a gaze the cloud melted, and he "saw the heavens opened, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God." II. IF THUS THE WORD OF GOD WAS A SET OF FACTS, ANY ATTEMPT TO RESOLVE IT INTO A SET OF IDEAS SUBVERTS ITS VERY FOUNDATIONS, AND DESTROYS THE WHOLE EDIFICE. For — 1. This is to take a position altogether at variance with that occupied by the first believers, and thus to shake utterly their credit, inasmuch as, in this view, either they were so ignorant as to be misled, or so false as to mislead. Nor is this all; the great Teacher Himself appealed to these facts as the proofs of His commission (John 10:38; John 15:24). Either, therefore, the facts were real, or the Teacher was a deceiver. 2. It is not possible, consistently with any rules of reasoning, to make a selection from the facts, and yet seek to retain the ideas. A philosophy, being a speculation, may contain a multitude of great and true ideas, mixed with phantasies and fictions; and it is the office of higher intelligences to separate the precious from the vile. But in a system of alleged facts resting upon evidence, the presence of one falsehood shakes the truth of the whole fabric. This is the very issue to which St. Paul brings the whole question, "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." III. THE LIGHT THROWN HEREBY UPON DIFFICULTIES AS TO GOSPEL MIRACLES. 1. These difficulties rest mainly on the supposed existence of a contradiction between the universally observed law of causes and effects, and the interposition of any intervening power to suspend or to invert those laws. Such pretended interruptions, we are told, no evidence could establish, and that a miracle therefore is impossible. The same conclusion is more gently insinuated by those who would have us think that miraculous power was nothing more than a deeper acquaintance with nature, enabling the operator to work a trick and to call it a miracle; to do, as some have done by savages, when they called to their aid the secrets of science to astonish by pretended portents the ignorance of the uncivllised. 2. But cast upon all these difficulties the brightness of St. Stephen's vision, and they are scattered in a moment; for it lifts us at once out of the dull level of naturalism into the new lights and shadows of the mountain of God. If one of these recorded facts be true and real, it is of itself enough to prove that the Lord of nature has for His wise purposes resolved to manifest to us, through our sensible faculties, His peculiar presence and His direct working; and this once admitted, the probability is in favour of the truth of any other well-attested miracles. For just as one flash of lightning evinces the existence of such conditions of the atmosphere as may be expected to produce a second, and so makes the coming of that second as probable then as at another time it would be improbable; so does one such direct proof of the manifested working of the Master's hand make it even probable that according to His wise purpose it may be followed by another. One such fact, therefore, proves that, we are not under a dispensation of nature but of grace; that we are introduced into a new atmosphere, to which we cannot apply the laws which governed that from which we have been transported; that we can no more argue as to what can and cannot be from the data of mere naturalism, than we could measure the laws of light by knowledge gathered from the darkness. 3. Here, then, we are led to the real cause of such difficulties. It is to be found in a want of hearty belief of the spiritual world. To any one of such a habit of mind all difficulties multiply spontaneously after their kind. It is with such spirits as with the bodies of men who live beside open drains, or are encompassed in the malaria of a marsh; they imbibe unconsciously at every pore the lurking poison: you must lift them up to higher grounds and purer airs if you would give health to their fever-stricken limbs. To heal these troubled spirits you must place them with St. Stephen on the mountain of God. If that eye, so diseasedly minute in its small criticisms; if that apprehension, so ready but so shallow in its power; if that reason, so feverishly captious in its questions; if that bent, narrow, trembling soul could but be lifted to those heights — could but be led to look up steadfastly into heaven — its difficulties would pass even unconsciously from it, and its cure be certain. 4. Here, then, is the true mode of meeting these difficulties: not by shutting our eyes feebly to them, not by turning away from them as though we were afraid of them; but by looking at them, not in the purblind darkness of a carping petulance, but in the light of these spiritual verities. To live in this light is our Christian birthright. We need not be with St. Stephen in the agony of martyrdom to attain to it. God has so made us that common life gives us daily opportunities, if we will but use them, of gaining this insight. To every soul so seeking Him He reveals Himself; the cloud opens; the form of the Son of Man is seen; and then belief is comparatively easy, and the difficulties which must remain, whilst they keep our faith humble and watchful, cease to be perplexing to the soul. 5. If this be so, then what becomes of the supposed morality of encouraged doubts in any Christian man? Surely we can see the utter falsehood of representing them as the patient reachings forth of an inquiring spirit for the light for which he longs Rather, assuredly, are they the wilful turning, through some fault of the flesh or of the spirit, away from the light; and instead of bearing the noble titles of reasonable and faithful inquiry, they should by every true heart be degraded to the discreditable category of suspicions nourished in cankered hearts against a father's truthfulness or a mother's honour. Dark and sad is the history of such a course. Its steps lead surely down from the mountain of light. The one only Sun which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, sinks for him who treads it in the mists which gather ever thicker and thicker round his blackening horizon. Worship in its fervour, prayer in its reality, and then trust, and love, and peace one by one are all extinguished — peak after peak loses the last lingering ray of the daylight — until all is dark (Isaiah 59:9-11). 6. It is not on the difficulties of belief alone, but upon all the struggles through which the life of God is maintained within our souls, that this vision of St. Stephen casts its light. Never cap the impetuous tyranny of appetite be subdued, and the soul and body kept in purity, save by these powers of the world to come. When the flesh is strong within, what shall aid us in the strife like looking up steadfastly into heaven and seeing the Son of Man as our helper? Or, again, as years go on, and these impetuous temptations of earlier life being somewhat past, new ones of a soberer, heavier, and more stupefying worldliness have taken their place, what else can so guard us against sinking into the dull, respectable, commonplace conformity with evil which, like the white ashes after the conflagration, succeeds so naturally to the burst of youthful indulgence, as the ever-living sense of our nearness to the Lord and of His perpetual presence with us? What can arouse watchfulness, keep prayer alive, kindle love, deepen humility, renew contrition, quicken zeal, minister support in sorrow, or awaken praises in the soul which God is graciously keeping, like the perpetual realisation by the eye of faith of what is now going on within the veil? (Bp. S. Wilberforce.) Parallel Verses KJV: But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, |
    |