Nothing can exceed, while still in the body, the brightness of such a moment. It was the Transfiguration of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. It was beyond the measure of the patriarch’s Bethel; for here the top of the ladder was disclosed, and Stephen was taught to know his place to be there with the Lord, and not at the foot of it merely with Jacob. The moment was transitional, which the time of Genesis xxviii. was not. It had its forecasting rather in the rejected, outcast Joseph finding his richer joys and brighter honours among the distant Gentiles in Egypt. Or rather, if we please, Joseph’s history and Stephen’s history, are, each of them in its day and its different way, the foreshadowing and the pledge of that glory and inheritance in heaven to which the Church, the election of this age, is called. Simply and necessarily, therefore, are Joseph and Stephen linked together, as we find in Acts vii. Each of them filled the same transitional place--more vividly marked indeed in Stephen, and properly so--but each of them filled it. All was new and heavenly, as we have seen, with Stephen. It is not _downwards_ but _upwards_ he is commanded to look. The angels had told the men of Galilee in chapter i. to take their eyes off from heaven; the Spirit Himself bade Stephen, in chapter vii., to direct his eye right up to heaven. The glory of the terrestrial had been one, the glory of the celestial is now another. Even the gift of Tongues had not pledged heaven to the disciples in chapter ii. There was no transfiguration then, no face shining like the face of an angel. The Holy Ghost was upon the assembly in Jerusalem, but the assembly itself was not in sight of heaven as its home and inheritance. But Stephen was on the confines of the two worlds. His body was the victim of the enmity of man’s world, his spirit was about to be received amid the glories of Christ’s world. He was rejected by his brethren, accepted by God. All was transitional--and fitly does he look back to Joseph and to Moses, who had been in such a place before him. And here let me say, suggested by this allusion to Joseph and others in Acts vii., that we are not to be surprised by this typical or parabolic character of Old Testament histories. Quite otherwise. We ought to be fully prepared for it; and that, too, on a very simple principle. God, acting in these histories (we speak to His praise) acts in them (surely) _according to Himself and His counsels_. And, consequently, these histories become so many revelations of Himself, and of the purposes He is bringing to pass.