His Transfiguration and Our Secret
His Transfiguration and Our Secret
Our Lord’s Attitude (Luke ix. 28)
Prayer always transfigures
The Attitude of the Disciples (Luke ix. 32)
The natural must sleep
Our Lord’s Aspect (Luke ix. 29)
Pre-Incarnate Glory
The Aspect of the Disciples (Luke ix. 32)
Face to face with Reality
Our Lord’s Attendants (Mark ix. 4)
Converse with the Glorified
The Attention of the Disciples (Luke ix. 32)
They saw His glory and His companions
Our Lord’s Attention (Luke ix. 31)
His Death the Theme of Glory
The Amazement of the Disciples (Mark ix. 5–6)
Hysterical Suggestions
Almighty God’s Ascription (Luke ix. 35)
God Incarnate
The Awe of the Disciples (Luke ix. 34)
God’s Word
As has been already stated, Christian Psychology is not the study of human nature Christianised, but the endeavour to understand the wonder and the mystery of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Jesus Christ must ever be profoundly more than we can fathom, but we must study Him in order to get to know the characteristics of the new life which is to be manifested in our mortal flesh.
The Apostle John does not allude to the Transfiguration in his Gospel, yet his Gospel is written from that standpoint, the standpoint of the exceeding majesty of the Lord Jesus Christ.
According to the revelation of the Bible, our Lord is not to be looked upon as an individual Man, but as the One Who represents the whole human race. At His Baptism our Lord accepted His vocation as sin-bearer, the Holy Ghost descended upon Him as Son of Man, and the voice of God came with the Divine approval; and at the Transfiguration the voice of God came again. The Baptism and the Transfiguration reveal Who our Lord is, and the secret of the Christian is that he knows the absolute Deity of Jesus Christ.
The Transfiguration occurs practically in the centre of our Lord’s earthly ministry. The fulfilment of the Transfiguration is the Ascension. These two mountain peaks, without the Cross and the Resurrection, would portray the development of human life had there been no sin. The Cross and the Resurrection deal with sin and the need of Redemption.
Our Lord’s Attitude
“And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, He took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray ” (Luke ix. 28).
In our Lord’s presentation, prayer is the point where the Reality of God merges with human life. Until we are born from above, prayer with us is honestly nothing more than a mere exercise; but in all our Lord’s teaching and in His own personal life, as well as in the emphasis laid on prayer by the Holy Ghost after He had gone, prayer is regarded as the work (see John xiv. 11–13). Prayer in the Son of God as Son of Man is amazingly significant. If prayer is the highest reach of communion possible between Almighty God and the Son of Man, what part ought prayer to play in our lives? Prayer with us often becomes merely a way of patronising God. Our Lord’s view of prayer is that it represents the highest reach possible to a man or woman when rightly related to God, perfectly obedient in every particular, and in perfect communion with Him. Prayer is not meant to develop us, but to develop the life of God in us after new birth.
The Attitude of the Disciples
“But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep ” (Luke ix. 32).
The natural must sleep. If we are ever going to know Who the Lord Jesus Christ is we must be born from above into another Kingdom, and discern by a power other than our natural wits. The natural is not sinful, but the natural is not spiritual. When the Redemption of God has dealt with sin and delivered from it, then the natural must be sacrificed. Simeon said to the mother of Jesus, “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,” but not because of sin. Mary was the natural mother of the Son of God, and in that wonderful experience of the incoming of the Son of God into the human race she stands for our human nature. The natural has to be transfigured and subordinated to the spiritual; it must not obtrude itself.
It was required of Adam, the Federal Head of the human race, that he should turn his natural life into a spiritual life by obedience. That is, he was to have dominion over the life in the air and in the earth and in the sea, but he was not to have dominion over himself; God was to have dominion over him, and as he obeyed God his natural life would be turned into a spiritual life. Adam represented what Jesus Christ represents, viz., the whole human race, and if Adam had obeyed and transformed his innocence into holiness by a series of moral choices, the transfiguration of the human race would have happened in due course. But Adam disobeyed, and there entered in the disposition of sin, the disposition of self-realisation—I am my own God. This disposition may work out in a hundred and one different ways, in decorous morality or in indecorous immorality, but it has the one basis—my claim to my right to myself. That disposition was never in our Lord. Self-will, self-assertiveness, self-seeking were never in Him. When we become rightly related to God, we are not simply put back into the relationship Adam was in, but into a relationship Adam was never in; we are put into the Body of Christ, and then God does not shield us from any of the requirements of sons. We have the notion at first that when we are saved and sanctified by God’s supernatural grace, He does not require us to do anything, but it is only then that He begins to require anything of us. God did not shield His own Son; not only did He not shield Him, but He allowed Him to be driven into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. After the baptism of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Ghost upon Him, God took His sheltering hand off Him, as it were, and let the devil do his worst. So after the work of sanctification, when the life of a saint really begins, God lifts His hand off and lets the world, the flesh, and the devil do their worst, for He is assured that “greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world.”
The trouble comes when we forget that the Son of God is born into our old human nature. Whether we are six years old or sixty, our human nature is thousands of years old. Jesus Christ says that His Father makes His revelations, not to the virtues of human nature, not to the astute wisdom accumulated by the ages, but to ‘babes.’ Our Lord’s words can only be understood by those who are born from above, and He reveals Himself only to such.
The Church of Jesus Christ is built on these two things: the Divine revelation of Who Jesus Christ is, and the public confession of it (see Matthew xvi. 13–19).
Our Lord’s Aspect
“And as He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was altered, and His raiment was white and glistering” (Luke ix. 29).
Our Lord had emptied Himself of His glory for the purposes of the Incarnation, and the Transfiguration reveals His glory again. The subliminal nature of Jesus was absolute Deity, and it was that subliminal nature, the glory which He had with the Father before the world was, that suddenly burst through on the Mount of Transfiguration, and gave the manifestation of God and Man in perfect oneness—in His Son, God became His own Incarnation. The Apostle John is insistent that any tendency to dissolve the Person of Jesus by analysis is anti-Christ (1 John iv. 1–3). It is this pre-Incarnate glory that is being dissolved today. The dissolving of the Person of Jesus by analysis is prevalent because men refuse to know Him after the Spirit, they will only know Him after the reasoning of their own minds.
The test of any teaching is its estimate of Jesus Christ. The teaching may sound wonderful and beautiful, but watch lest it have at its centre the dethroning of Jesus Christ.
The Aspect of the Disciples
“And when they were awake, they saw His glory, and the two men that stood with Him ” (Luke ix. 32).
The disciples were with Jesus Christ on the Mount, and in his Epistle, Peter records what they saw there; he says, “we were eye-witnesses of His majesty” (2 Peter i. 16). Jesus Christ is no Comrade to Peter, He is absolute King of kings. In the Apocalypse the Apostle John gives the same revelation of the appalling and sublime majesty of Jesus Christ. The disciples are fully awake now and face to face with Reality.
Intellectual thinking and reasoning never yet got a man to Reality, because these are instruments of life, and not the life itself. Our only organ for getting at Reality is conscience, and the Holy Spirit always deals with conscience first. Intellect and emotions come in afterwards as the instruments of human expression.
The disciples came down from the Mount into the demon-possessed valley, but it was not until after the Cross and the Resurrection that they began to understand what they had seen, the reason being that what they had seen in vision on the Mount had to be worked out into actual experience in their lives. By the presence of the Holy Ghost in us we know Who the Lord Jesus is. We know Him “after the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit glorifies the Lord Jesus to us and in us until we know Who He is, and know the exceeding majesty of Him Who said, “All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.” We do not know this by our intellect or by our sensible reasoning, but by the real witness of the Paraclete of God. The eyes of the disciples needed to be opened by the impartation of quickening life from our Lord after the Resurrection before they knew Him (Luke xxiv. 16 and 31); and the only way in which we can know our Lord is by His Spirit.
Our Lord’s Attendants
“And there appeared unto them Elias and Moses: and they were talking with Jesus ” (Mark ix. 4).
Jesus was standing in the full blaze and glory of His pre-Incarnate glory while the two representatives of the Old Covenant talked with Him about the issue which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Then He turned His back upon that glory, and came down from the Mount to be identified with fallen humanity, symbolised by the demon-possessed boy. Had He gone back into the glory which was His before the Incarnation having only reached the Mount of Transfiguration, He would have left the human race exactly where it was; His life would only have been a sublime ideal. There are many who look at the life of Jesus Christ as an ideal and nothing more—‘His teachings are so fine, we do not need to have anything to do with the Atonement, or with those crude doctrines of the apostle Paul’s about the Cross and personal apprehension; it is quite enough for us to have the Sermon on the Mount.’ I should think it was! If Jesus Christ came to be an Example only, He is the greatest torturer of the human race. But our Lord did not come primarily to teach us and give us an example; He came to lift us into a totally new kingdom, and to impart a new life to which His teachings would apply.
The Attention of the Disciples
“ and when they were awake, they saw His glory, and the two men that stood with Him ” (Luke ix. 32).
The disciples were eye and ear-witnesses of all that transpired on the Mount. There is a curious insistence in the records on the fact that our Lord at His Transfiguration and in the Garden of Gethsemane, took His disciples to be witnesses of things which they could never experience. We see one reason why Jesus took them in Peter’s Epistles and in John’s Gospel. The Christian faith must stand in an Almighty Christ, not in a human being who became Divine.
Our Lord’s Attention
“who appeared in glory, and spake of His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem ” (Luke ix. 31).
The visitants on the Mount talked to Jesus in all His majesty and glory of Almighty God, but they spoke of His death, not of His glory. Does not that seem an appalling anti-climax? The whole of their attention is centred on the death of the Lord Jesus. The word ‘death’ has the meaning of ‘issue’. They spake of the issue He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem by His death, viz., the historic manifestation of the Redemption of the human race.
The Redemption of the human race does not necessarily mean the salvation of every individual. Redemption is of universal application, but human responsibility is not done away with. Jesus Christ states emphatically that there are possibilities of eternal damnation for the man who positively neglects or positively rejects His Redemption.
Jesus Christ emptied Himself of His glory a second time; He came down from the Mount of Transfiguration and accomplished His death at Jerusalem—for what purpose? That any individual of the human race might go straight to the heart of God without the slightest fear, because of what Jesus did on the Cross. This is the great effective working of Redemption in human experience. Our Lord’s death is not the death of a martyr; it is the exhibition of the heart of God, broken in order to bring the whole human race back into perfect oneness with Himself.
The death of Jesus is the only entrance into the life He lived. We cannot get into His life by admiring Him, or by saying what a beautiful life His was, so pure and holy. To dwell only on His life would drive us to despair. We enter into His life by means of His death. Until the Holy Spirit has had His way with us spiritually, the death of Jesus Christ is an insignificant thing, and we are amazed that the New Testament should make so much of it. The death of Jesus Christ is always a puzzle to unsaved human nature. Why should the Apostle Paul say, “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified?” Because unless the death of Jesus has the meaning the Apostle Paul gave to it, viz., that it is the entrance into His life, the Resurrection has no meaning for us either. The life of Jesus is a wonderful example of a perfect human life, but what is the good of that to us? What is the good of presenting to us a speckless holiness that is hopeless of attainment? It would simply tantalise us. Unless Jesus Christ can put a totally new heredity into us, there is no use asking us to think about the wonderful life He lived. The revelation made by the Redemption is that God can put into us a new disposition whereby we can live a totally new life.
Now we can see why our Lord lived the life He did for thirty-three years. Before He made the entrance into that life possible for any human being, He had to show us what the life of God’s normal man was like. The life of Jesus is the life we have to live here, not hereafter. There is no chance to live this kind of life hereafter, we have to live it here. Our Lord’s death is not the death of a martyr, not the death of a good man; His cross is the Cross of God, whereby any human being can enter into a totally new life. The way into the life of Jesus is not by imitation of Him, but by identification with His Cross. That is the meaning of being born from above: we enter into His life by its entering into us.
We talk about imitating Jesus, but isn’t it highly absurd! Before we have taken three steps, we come across lust, pride, envy, jealousy, hatred, malice, anger—things that never were in Him, and we get disheartened and say there is nothing in it. If Jesus Christ came to teach the human race only, He had better have stayed away. But if we know Him first as Saviour by being born again, we know that He did not come to teach merely: He came to make us what He teaches we should be; He came to make us sons of God. He came to give us the right disposition, not to tell us that we ought not to have the wrong one; and the way into all these benedictions is by means of His death.
To Christianise human nature is simply to veneer that which is not real. The life of Jesus Christ is the Standard, and we receive His life by means of His Death. The emphasis on His death is explained when we remember that His teaching only applies to His life in us. When we preach Christ, it is not His birth that we preach, but His Cross, and we bring ourselves face to face with the wonder and the power of His resurrection life.
The Amazement of the Disciples
“And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. For he wist not what to say; for they were sore afraid ” (Mark ix. 5–6).
Peter wist not what to say, then why did he say it? Have you never said things you should not have said? If we get a great grasp in vision of Who Jesus is and try to work it out in our ordinary human life by the energy of the flesh, we shall do what Peter did, talk nonsense through sheer bewilderment. When we come to Peter’s Epistles, there is nothing hysterical about them. Peter has gone through disillusionment about himself; he has gone through seeing the death of his Lord and through identification with His death; through the experience of receiving from the Risen Lord the gift of the Holy Ghost, and he says, we are not hysterical, we were eyewitnesses of His majesty when we were with Him in the holy mount.
Repeatedly the vision of entire sanctification, or of the baptism of the Holy Ghost, is mistaken for the actuality. The only test of the actuality is when we are brought down into things as they are; it is then that the reality must manifest itself. When Jesus had healed the demoniac boy, the disciples asked Him, ‘How is it that we could not cast it out?’ and Jesus said unto them, “This kind can come out by nothing, save by prayer and fasting,” by spiritual concentration on Him. We can ever remain powerless, as were the disciples, by trying to do God’s work through ideas drawn from our own temperament instead of by concentration on His power.
Never mistake the wonderful visions God gives you for reality, but watch, for after the vision you will be brought straight down into the valley. We are not made for the mountains, we are made for the valley. Thank God for the mountains, for the glorious spiritual realisation of Who Jesus Christ is; but can we face things as they actually are in the light of the Reality of Jesus Christ? or do things as they are efface altogether our faith in Him and drive us into a panic? When Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you,” it was to the Cross He went. Through His Cross He prepared a place for us to “sit with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus” now, not by and bye. When we get to the Cross we do not go through and out the other side, we abide in the life to which the Cross is the gateway; and the characteristic of the life is deep and profound sacrifice to God. We know Who our Lord is by the power of His Spirit, we are strongly confident in Him, and the reality of our relationship to Him works out all the time in the actualities of our ordinary life.
Almighty God’s Ascription
“And there came a voice out of the cloud saying, This is My beloved Son; hear Him ” (Luke ix. 35).
It is the same voice that spoke at our Lord’s baptism. God emphatically states, “This is My beloved Son”: this Man, known to men as the humble Nazarene Carpenter, is Almighty God presented in the guise of a human life; “hear Him.” How many of us do hear Him? We always hear the thing we listen for, and our disposition determines what we listen for. When Jesus Christ alters our disposition, He gives us the power to hear as He hears.
The Awe of the Disciples
“There came a cloud and overshadowed them: and they feared as they entered into the cloud ”(Luke ix. 34).
When the clouds around are dark and terrible, thank God, the saints know that they are but “the dust of His feet,” and when they fear as they enter into the cloud, they see “no man any more, save Jesus only with themselves.”