NOTES ON SCRIPTURE 1895 NO. 5
NOTES ON SCRIPTURE 1895 [p. 45] NO. 5
In the case of Stephen the Holy Spirit opens and inaugurates for us the way to Jesus in glory. Ezekiel 1:26 is fulfilled to Stephen. There the cloud of glory was departing from Israel because of their perverseness, but though it was going away, yet in the brightest spot there was a Man. Stephen sees the Man in glory. The glory never returned to the earth from Ezekiel’s day until the scene in Luke 2, when it came to announce the coming of Christ to the earth. Now Stephen sees Him in glory, and thus he is prepared to suffer from the religious man here, man under the law, the council, the elite of Israel; at their hands he suffers a cruel death because of their unrelenting antipathy to Christ, the Man in glory. The more Stephen suffered from those who assumed to be for God here, the more he was established in the blessedness of being with Christ in glory.
The way is open now for us by the Spirit. Every christian knows Christ as set forth in Jonah, but when He is known as Solomon you are so entranced that you own that though you had heard you did not believe, until you had come and your eyes had seen, and, behold, the half was not told you!
Beholding the Lord’s glory supersedes yourself, so that, as an individual, you would always bear about in your body the dying of Jesus. And beholding Him in the assembly, you are so interested in His interests that you come out to manifest Him where He has been refused, prepared by association with Him in glory to have fellowship with His sufferings down here.