{9} But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus {z} standing on the right hand of God,

(9) The nearer that martyrs approach to death, the nearer that they rise up, even into heaven, as they behold Christ.

(z) Ready to affirm him in the confession of the truth, and to receive him unto himself.

People's New Testament

7:55 Looked up stedfastly into heaven. The Lord who had promised his presence was with him. His faith was so strengthened that, by faith, he saw the Savior in Heaven, through the opened heavens. The scene was revealed to his soul, instead of his eyes.

Wesley's Notes

7:55 But he looking steadfastly up to heaven, saw the glory of God - Doubtless he saw such a glorious representation, God miraculously operating on his imagination, as on Ezekiel's, when he sat in his house at Babylon, and saw Jerusalem, and seemed to himself transported thither, Eze 8:1 -
4. And probably other martyrs, when called to suffer the last extremity, have had extraordinary assistance of some similar kind.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

55. But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God-You who can transfer to canvas such scenes as these, in which the rage of hell grins horribly from men, as they sit condemned by a frail prisoner of their own, and see heaven beaming from his countenance and opening full upon his view-I envy you, for I find no words to paint what, in the majesty of the divine text, is here so simply told. "But how could Stephen, in the council-chamber, see heaven at all? I suppose this question never occurred but to critics of narrow soul, one of whom [Meyer] conjectures that he saw it through the window! and another, of better mould, that the scene lay in one of the courts of the temple" [Alford]. As the sight was witnessed by Stephen alone, the opened heavens are to be viewed as revealed to his bright beaming spirit.

and Jesus standing on the right hand of God-Why "standing," and not sitting, the posture in which the glorified Saviour is elsewhere represented? Clearly, to express the eager interest with which He watched from the skies the scene in that council chamber, and the full tide of His Spirit which He was at that moment engaged in pouring into the heart of His heroical witness, till it beamed in radiance from his very countenance.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

7:54-60 Nothing is so comfortable to dying saints, or so encouraging to suffering saints, as to see Jesus at the right hand of God: blessed be God, by faith we may see him there. Stephen offered up two short prayers in his dying moments. Our Lord Jesus is God, to whom we are to seek, and in whom we are to trust and comfort ourselves, living and dying. And if this has been our care while we live, it will be our comfort when we die. Here is a prayer for his persecutors. Though the sin was very great, yet if they would lay it to their hearts, God would not lay it to their charge. Stephen died as much in a hurry as ever any man did, yet, when he died, the words used are, he fell asleep; he applied himself to his dying work with as much composure as if he had been going to sleep. He shall awake again in the morning of the resurrection, to be received into the presence of the Lord, where is fulness of joy, and to share the pleasures that are at his right hand, for evermore.