His Glorification and Ours
His Glorification and Ours
His Former Form of God (John xvii. 5)
Our Present Glorying (Galatians vi. 14)
His Fulfilled Fitness in God (1 Corinthians xv. 28)
Our Prevailing Glory (Romans viii. 30)
His Faithful Face of God (John i. 34)
Our Perpetual Glory (John xvii. 24)
As already stated, we must have Christian experience, but we must have more. Many of us are kindly interested in Christianity and in being devoted to Jesus Christ, but we have never received anything from Him. If we told ourselves the truth, we could not say that God had regenerated us experimentally. If we are not to be merely sentimental Christians, we must know what it is to be born into the kingdom of God and to find out that God has altered the thing that matters to us. That must be made perfectly clear first, and we have the experience described in Acts xxvi. 18. We must have the experience of the new life, and then we have to see that the new life is instructed by the facts in God’s Book. There are things that we cannot experience as Christians, yet we must build our faith upon them and not choose according to the predilections which are the outcome of our own experience.
His Former Form of God
“And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was ” (John xvii. 5).
Jesus Christ came from somewhere to here, and the ‘somewhere’ whence He came was Absolute Deity. Jesus Christ was not a Being Who became Divine, He was the Godhead Incarnated—“Who, being in the form of God ...” The ‘form’ of God originally in Absolute Deity is not the form we understand by the body, but ‘glory,’ the completeness of God, a form inconceivable to our human minds, in which what we call the Trinity was an absoluteness. The term ‘Trinity’ is not a Bible word, but a term that arose in the throes of a great conflict of minds, and is the crystallised attempt to state the Godhead in a word. One element of the Godhead became, through the Word of God, the Incarnate Son of God. Beware of separating God manifest in the flesh from the Son becoming sin . In other words, never separate the doctrine of the Incarnation and the doctrine of Redemption. The Incarnation was for purposes of Redemption. The New Testament reveals that God became Incarnate only for the purpose of putting away sin. God did not become Incarnate for the purpose of Self-revelation.
When the Son of God, Who became Son of Man, has done His work, He will be resolved back again into Absolute Deity (1 Corinthians xv. 28; cf. John xvii. 5). This is where our vocabulary will not go. We get into difficulties over God becoming Incarnate when we bring in our own conceptions. For instance, we say that the essential nature of God is omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; the New Testament reveals that the essential nature of God is holiness, and that He became the weakest thing in His own creation, viz., a Baby. Are we prepared to abandon our own conceptions? We are all idolaters, we do mentally what Isaiah ridiculed the people in his day for doing (Isaiah xliv. 9–20). Our ideas have no more power over us than we choose to give them. We bring God to the bar of the judgment of our ideas. Jesus Christ said that His Father made His revelations to babes. Are we modest enough, and humble enough, and regenerate enough, to accept Him as Master of our brains as well as of our souls? Are we willing to be as submissive to Incarnate Reason as we are to Incarnate God? Incarnate Reason is the Lord Jesus, and any man who exercises his reason in contradiction to Incarnate Reason is a fool. We must never take our Lord’s words and interpret them by our own human reason; we must always interpret them by His life. Am I prepared to be a believer in Jesus Christ? To believe in Jesus means much more than the experience of salvation in any form, it entails a mental and moral commitment to our Lord’s view of the world, of the flesh, of the devil, of God, of man, and of the Scriptures. To “believe also in Me” means that we submit our intelligence to Jesus Christ our Lord as He submitted His intelligence to His Father. This does not mean that we do not exercise our reason, but it does mean that we exercise it in submission to Reason Incarnate.
“And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was” (John xvii. 5). Our Lord is referring to the former form of God. No human being has any conception of what that is, it is a revelation. The insidious teaching abroad today, the heresy that dissolves the Person of Jesus Christ, has crept in everywhere. Jesus Christ asks in His prayer, from His position as Son of Man, that He might be taken back to His former glory. “I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do.” What was that work? To rehabilitate the human race, to bring the human race back to God—that is the work which God had given Him to do. Jesus Christ made the way clear for man to get straight into at-one-ment with God. Now that that work is completed—completed in His will, and soon to be completed in actuality—our Lord prays that He may be in the former form of God. There is no human connection in His prayer, it is superbly Divine.
Is Jesus Christ to me what He is in His estimate of Himself? He makes the destiny of the whole human race depend upon their relationship to Him. It is not the Divinity but the Deity of Jesus Christ that is the important thing.
Our Present Glorying. “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Galatians vi. 14). Glorying is the experience of joy on the inside, associated with the fame of God on the outside. Paul says his glorying is in the Cross of Christ, ‘and God forbid that I should glory in any other thing.’ Joy is neither happiness nor brightness, joy is literally the nature of God in my blood, no matter what happens. The joy that Jesus exhibited in His life was in knowing that every power of His nature was in harmony with His Father’s nature, therefore He did with delight what God designed Him for as Son of Man. Anything that exactly fulfils the purpose of its creation experiences joy, and Paul states that our joy is that we fulfil the purpose of God in our lives by being saints. How are we going to be saints? We all like to listen to the life of Jesus and to His teaching, but what does it all amount to? Ask the one who has been born again, and he will tell you, to the limit of his language, the difference it has made. It has made an absolute difference, because by the Cross of Jesus Christ, we enter into the life of the Son of God. What is the sign that we are born from above? That we see the rule of God. Have we got in us the new power, the new life, the new disposition that actually works itself out in our actual life? Our Lord did not tell us to ask for peace or for joy or for life, He told us to ask for the Holy Spirit (Luke xi. 13), and when we ask, the honour of Jesus Christ is at stake. The reason God gives us the Holy Spirit so easily is because of what His Son has done, and yet He never emphasises what it cost, that is in the background altogether.
Our glorying is in the Cross of Jesus Christ because it is through this doorway that all the new life comes in (1 Corinthians ii. 2). The normal life that God wants us to live is the life of the Lord Jesus Christ; but what good does it do us to talk about the speckless perfection of Jesus Christ? It would be a tantalising thing if all Jesus Christ gave us was the example of His own life. If a man is in earnest, it produces absolute despair. What is the good of teaching the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount? They are out of our reach altogether. Once we remember that the normal life, the life of perfect oneness with God, is ours by means of Jesus Christ’s death, it is all explained. We can enter there by His Cross. Have we entered there? It does not matter who the man is, how degraded or how moral, he can enter in at the door of His death, and then never cease to thank God that this is the crown of his joy. It is through the Cross of Jesus Christ that we begin to fulfil all that we are created for, and the great aim of the life is for the fame of God, not for the needs of men. Human sympathy has swamped the commands of God in the average Christian. Instead of the need being the opportunity it is made to be the call. The first of all the commandments is—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.”
The basis of Reality is Redemption and not reason. Reason is the basis of the way we work on reality, it is an instrument. Thank God for logic and for reason, they are instruments for expressing our life, but life itself is not reasonable. Man’s intellect has no power to lead him; his intellect makes him either a polished hypocrite or, in the case of a disciple of Jesus Christ, it becomes the bond slave of the right discernment of God’s will (John vii. 17).
His Fulfilled Fitness in God
“And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians xv.). This is the fulfilment of the prayer in John xvii. 5. When the Redemption wrought by the Son is actually fulfilled and all things are subdued unto Him, and when the whole human race—and God are at one, then the Son of Man will cease to be by resolving back again into Absolute Deity. “And when all things shall be subdued unto Him”—remember everything is not yet subdued unto Him. Redemption does not only mean personal salvation and the redemption of our body, it means the absolute and complete redemption of the whole material earth in every iota, and not only the earth, but the whole material universe—“a new heaven and a new earth.” It means that all relegated authority shall pass and God will be the absolute Authority, “that God may be all in all.” There is a time coming, thank God, when everything shall be under the direct rule of God in every detail. We look for new heaven and a new earth, and then shall the human race stand before God as Jesus Christ stood before Him when He was here. Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, is not a mere individual, He is the One Who represents the whole human race. In order to see the human race as God intends it to be, look at the life of Jesus; and by the Redemption the human race is to be brought there. When the human race is actually there, Jesus Christ as Son of Man ceases to be and becomes absolute Deity again. The Son becomes subject to the Father, and God remains all in all. Our Lord’s prayer is answered. “And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” That glory is to be in God.
Our Prevailing Glory. “And whom He justified, them He also glorified” (Romans viii. 30). In John xvii. 5 we see the transcendent revelation of the Absolute Deity of our Lord; in John xvii. 22 He speaks of a second glory, “and the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them.” What glory had Jesus when He became the Son of Man vicariously, when He became the whole human race in one Person? what was His glory then? Did every one who saw Him say, ‘That is God Incarnate’? No, Isaiah said He shall be “as a root out of a dry ground,” utterly disadvantaged. Is this true? Look in your own heart and you will see it is true. “He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him.” It is not true that ‘we needs must love the highest when we see it’; the human beings of His own day saw the Highest, and they hated Him. It needs the transformation of an inward surgery, being born from above, to see that He is the altogether lovely One. The glory of Jesus was not an external thing; He effaced the Godhead in Himself so effectually that men without the Spirit of God despised Him. His glory was the glory of actual holiness. What is holiness? Transfigured morality blazing with indwelling God. Any other kind of holiness is fictitious and dangerous. One of the dangers of dealing too much with the Higher Christian Life is that it is apt to fizzle off into abstractions. But when we see holiness in the Lord Jesus, we do know what it means, it means an unsullied walk with the feet, unsullied talk with the tongue, unsullied thinking of the mind, unsullied transactions of the bodily organs, unsullied life of the heart, unsullied dreams of the imagination—that is the actual holiness Jesus says He has given them. This is the meaning of sanctification. Paul says, and no wonder, “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.” The holiness of the Son of God is to be actually manifested in our ordinary bodily lives. This is the actual experience of sanctification working out in each detail.
This is our prevailing glory; Paul is not talking about being justified and glorified hereafter, but now. Thank God, the joy of the Lord is an actual experience now, and it goes beyond any conscious experience, because the joy of the Lord takes us into the consciousness of God, and the honour at stake in our body is the honour of God. Have we realised that the Son of God has been formed in us by His wonderful Redemption? Are we putting on the habits that are in keeping with Him? This is the glory of the saint here and now—the glory of actual holiness manifested in actual life. Whether it comes out in eating and drinking or in preaching, it must show in every detail straight through until the whole limit actually manifests the complete new life.
His Faithful Face of God
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth ” (John i. 14).
In Genesis i. 2–3 we read that the Spirit of God brooded, the word of God was spoken, and creation was begun. John takes us back there; see also Proverbs viii. The Word has become Incarnate in the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Word of God Incarnated, made flesh, and in Him we see the Face of God. All that our Lord said about Himself is in perfect accordance with this. “I and My Father are One.” He did not say, ‘I and Humanity are one.’ Jesus nowhere said that God and man are one; He nowhere said ‘He that hath seen man hath seen the Father.’ Jesus nowhere taught that God was in man; but He did teach that God was manifested in human flesh in His own Person that He might become the generating centre for the same thing in every human being, and the place of His travail pangs is the Incarnation and Calvary and the Resurrection. Jesus Christ did not say that human beings were all specimens of God, as some men try to prove from conceptions of their own. ‘Reason being God, there can be nothing unreasonable; sin is not a positive thing, it is a defect in the desire to grasp hold of God.’ These blasphemies start from a thing that looks so humble, ‘God is all.’ God is not all. I am not God, neither are you. Jesus Christ reveals God as the Father. “I am the Way ... no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me.” Jesus Christ is not the way to God, not a road we leave behind us, a fingerpost that points in the right direction; He is the way itself. “Abide in Me”; consequently the Lord satisfies the last aching abyss of the human heart. Has He satisfied yours? If not, why are you in Christian work? What is the explanation of the great craving for the salvation of the souls of men? If it is not born of the Holy Ghost experimentally realised in us, it is nothing in the world but the introduction of sordid commercialism into religion (Matthew xxiii. 15). Why do we want people to be saved? Has Jesus Christ made such a difference to us that we cannot rest day or night till by prayer we get all our friends there? That is the passion for souls born of the Holy Ghost because its experimental reality is with us every day.
If we want to know what God is like, let us study the Lord Jesus. “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” How did people see Him in the days of His flesh? By their natural eyes? No, after His resurrection they received Holy Spirit, and their eyes were opened and they knew Him. We do not know Him by the reasoning of our minds, but by the new life. Jesus Christ is to us the faithful Face of God. Could anyone be in doubt any more after they had seen Jesus Christ by the Holy Ghost? Think of the absurd, painful, distressing, never-to-be-answered questions we ask—‘Shall I know those whom I love after death?’ Wild, vagrant, wrong, stupid, painful questions. Look at Jesus Christ, get into contact with Him by the Holy Spirit, and those questions are impossible. He says—“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in Me.” The Face of God is the Lord Jesus Christ. It always comes back to the simple point, “Come unto Me.”
Our Perpetual Glory. “Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory, which Thou has given Me” (John xvii. 24). Now our Lord is speaking of the glory which we are only to behold. We are not to be absorbed into God as drops in an ocean, we are to be lifted into perfect oneness with Him until God and the glory of perfected human redemption are transfigured by a mutual love. ‘I want those whom Thou hast given Me,‘ says Jesus, ’to behold My glory.’ What is His glory? “The glory which I had with Thee before the world was,” and our perpetual glory is not only that we are saved and sanctified and redeemed and lifted into the glory of unspeakable things as the result of our Lord’s Redemption, but something other—we shall see God face to face, an inconceivable beatific vision. This is what Jesus Christ has prayed for His saints. This is not the glory we have here, but the glory we are going to have, the glory of beholding His glory.