'He shall come to be glorified in His saints; and
to be admired in all them that believe.'--2 THESS.
i. 10.
The two Epistles to the Thessalonians, which are the Apostle's earliest
letters, both give very great prominence to the thought of the second
coming of our Lord to judgment. In the immediate context we have that
coming described, with circumstances of majesty and of terror. He 'shall
be revealed . . . with the angels of His power.' 'Flaming fire' shall
herald His coming; vengeance shall be in His hands, punishment shall
follow His sentence; everlasting destruction shall be the issue of evil
confronted with 'the face of the Lord'--for so the words in the previous
verse rendered 'the presence of the Lord' might more accurately be
translated.
And all these facts and images are, as it were, piled up in one half of
the Apostle's sky, as in thunderous lurid masses; and on the other side
there is the pure blue and the peaceful sunshine. For all this terror
and destruction, and flashing fire, and punitive vengeance come to pass
in the day when 'He shall come to be glorified in His saints, and to be
wondered at in all them that believe.'
There be the two halves--the aspect of that day to those to whom it is
the revelation of a stranger, and the aspect of that day to those to
whom it is the glorifying of Him who is their life.
I. The remarkable words which I have taken for my text suggest to us,
first of all, some thoughts about that striking expression that Christ
is glorified in the men who are glorified in Christ.
If you look on a couple of verses you will find that the Apostle returns
to this thought, and expresses in the clearest fashion the reciprocal
character of that 'glorifying' of which he has been speaking. 'The name
of our Lord Jesus Christ,' says he, 'may be glorified in you, and ye in
Him.'
So, then, glorifying has a double meaning. There is a double process
involved. It means either 'to make glorious' or 'to manifest as being
glorious.' And men are glorified in the former sense in Christ, that
Christ in them may, in the latter sense, be glorified. He makes them
glorious by imparting to them of the lustrous light and flashing beauty
of His own perfect character, in order that that light, received into
their natures, and streaming out at last conspicuously manifest from
their redeemed perfectness, may redound to the praise and the honour,
before a whole universe, of Him who has thus endued their weakness with
His own strength, and transmuted their corruptibility into His own
immortality. We are glorified in Christ in some partial, and, alas!
sinfully fragmentary, manner here; we shall be so perfectly in that day.
And when we are thus glorified in Him, then--wondrous thought!--even we
shall be able to manifest Him as glorious before some gazing eyes, which
without us would have seen Him as less fair. Dim, and therefore great
and blessed thoughts about what men may become are involved in such
words. The highest end, the great purpose of the Gospel and of all
God's dealings with us in Christ Jesus is to make us like our Lord. As
we have borne the image of the earthly we shall also bear the image of
the heavenly. 'We, beholding the glory, are changed into the glory.'
And that glorifying of men in Christ, which is the goal and highest end
of Christ's Cross and passion and of all God's dealings, is accomplished
only because Christ dwells in the men whom He glorifies. We read words
applying to His relation to His Father which need but to be transferred
to our relation to Him, in order to teach us high and blessed things
about this glorifying. The Father dwelt in Christ, therefore Christ was
glorified by the indwelling divinity, in the sense that His humanity was
made partaker of the divine glory, and thereby He glorified the divinity
that dwelt in Him, in the sense that He conspicuously displayed it
before the world as worthy of all admiration and love.
And, in like manner, as is the Son with the Father, participant of
mutual and reciprocal glorification, so is the Christian with Christ,
glorified in Him and therefore glorifying Him.
What may be involved therein of perfect moral purity, of enlarged
faculties and powers, of a bodily frame capable of manifesting all the
finest issues of a perfect spirit, it is not for us to say. These things
are great, being hidden; and are hidden because they are great. But
whatever may be the lofty heights of Christlikeness to which we shall
attain, all shall come from the indwelling Lord who fills us with His
own Spirit.
And, then, according to the great teaching here, this glorified
humanity, perfected and separated from all imperfection, and helped into
all symmetrical unfolding of dormant possibilities, shall be the
highest glory of Christ even in that day when He comes in His glory and
sits upon the throne of His glory with His holy angels with Him. One
would have thought that, if the Apostle wanted to speak of the
glorifying of Jesus Christ, he would have pointed to the great white
throne, His majestic divinity, the solemnities of His judicial office;
but he passes by all these, and says, 'Nay! the highest glory of the
Christ lies here, in the men whom He has made to share His own nature.'
The artist is known by his work. You stand in front of some great
picture, or you listen to some great symphony, or you read some great
book, and you say, 'This is the glory of Raphael, Beethoven,
Shakespeare.' Christ points to His saints, and He says, 'Behold My
handiwork! Ye are my witnesses. This is what I can do.'
But the relation between Christ and His saints is far deeper and more
intimate than simply the relation between the artist and his work, for
all the flashing light of moral beauty, of intellectual perfectness
which Christian men can hope to receive in the future is but the light
of the Christ that dwells in them, 'and of whose fulness all they have
received.' Like some poor vapour, in itself white and colourless, which
lies in the eastern sky there, and as the sun rises is flushed up into a
miracle of rosy beauty, because it has caught the light amongst its
flaming threads and vaporous substance, so we, in ourselves pale,
ghostly, colourless as the mountains when the Alpine snow passes off
them, being recipient of an indwelling Christ, shall blush and flame in
beauty. 'Then shall the righteous blaze forth like the sun in my
Father's kingdom.' Or, rather they are not suns shining by their own
light, but moons reflecting the light of Christ, who is their light.
And perchance some eyes, incapable of beholding the sun, may be able to
look undazzled upon the sunshine in the cloud, and some eyes that could
not discern the glory of Christ as it shines in His face as the sun
shineth in its strength, may not be too weak to behold and delight in
the light as it is reflected from the face of His servants. At all
events, He shall come to be glorified in the saints whom He has made
glorious.
II. And now, notice again, out of these full and pregnant words the
other thought, that this transformation of men is the great miracle and
marvel of Christ's power.
'He shall come to be admired'--which word is employed in its old English
signification, 'to be wondered at'--'in all them that believe.' So fair
and lovely is He that He needs but to be recognised for what He is in
order to be glorified. So great and stupendous are His operations in
redeeming love that they need but to be beheld to be the object of
wonder. 'His name shall be called Wonderful,' and wonderfully the energy
of His redeeming and sanctifying grace shall then have wrought itself
out to its legitimate end. There you get the crowning marvel of marvels,
and the highest of miracles. He did wonderful works upon earth which we
rightly call miraculous,--things to be wondered at--but the highest of
all His wonders is the wonder that takes such material as you and me,
and by such a process, and on such conditions, simply because we trust
Him, evolves such marvellous forms of beauty and perfectness from us.
'He is to be wondered at in all them that believe.'
Such results from such material! Chemists tell us that the black bit of
coal in your grate and the diamond on your finger are varying forms of
the one substance. What about a power that shall take all the black
coals in the world and transmute them into flashing diamonds, prismatic
with the reflected light that comes from His face, and made gems on His
strong right hand? The universe will wonder at such results from such
material.
And it will wonder, too, at the process by which they were accomplished,
wondering at the depth of His pity revealed all the more pathetically
now from the great white throne which casts such a light on the Cross of
Calvary; wondering at the long, weary path which He who is now declared
to be the Judge humbled Himself to travel in the quest of these poor
sinful souls whom He has redeemed and glorified. The miracle of miracles
is redeeming love; and the high-water mark of Christ's wonders is
touched in this fact, that out of men He makes saints; and out of saints
He makes perfect likenesses of Himself.
III. And now a word about what is _not_ expressed, but is necessarily
implied in this verse, viz., the spectators of this glory.
The Apostle does not tell us what eyes they are before which Christ is
thus to be glorified. He does not summon the spectators to look upon
this wonderful exhibition of divine judgment and divine glory; but we
may dwell for a moment on the thought that to whomsoever in the whole
universe Christ at that great day shall be manifested, to them, whoever
they be, will His glory, in His glorified saints, be a revelation beyond
what they have known before. 'Every eye shall see Him.' And whatsoever
eyes look upon Him, then on His throne, they shall behold the attendant
courtiers and the assessors of His judgment, and see in them the
manifestation of His own lustrous light.
We read that 'unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places
shall be made known' in future days, 'by the Church, the manifold wisdom
of God.' We hear that, after the burst of praise which comes from
redeemed men standing around the throne, every creature in the earth and
in the heavens, and in the sea and all that are therein were heard
saying, 'Blessing and honour and glory and power be unto Him that
sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.'
We need not speculate, it is better not to enter into details, but this,
at least, is clear, that that solemn winding up of the long, mysterious,
sad, blood and tear-stained history of man upon the earth is to be an
object of interest and a higher revelation of God to other creatures
than those that dwell upon the earth; and we may well believe that for
that moment, at all events, the centre of the universe, which draws the
thoughts of all thinking, and the eyes of all seeing, creatures to it,
shall be that valley of judgment wherein sits the Man Christ and judges
men, and round Him the flashing reflectors of His glory in the person of
His saints.