“Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God”
(Ps. 87:3).
“Ye are come unto mount Zion, and unto
the city of the living God” (Heb. 12:22).
“Unto Him be the glory in the church
and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever”
(Eph. 3:21).
We have been walking about Zion in these
messages, taking account of some of the aspects of this heavenly
spiritual seed which is Christ and His own.
Now we come to that which is gathered into the
one word - ‘glory’, the glory of Christ and of His own
people. Now a very simple survey of the New Testament with that
word ‘glory’ in mind - and you will only have to glance
down the columns of a concordance under that word - will make a
tremendous impression. The impression will be that this idea of
glory, this matter of glory, seems to govern everything.
Glory Governs Everything
If you read the Gospels regarding the life of
the Lord Jesus here on the earth, you will be impressed that in
His life the dominant note and the motive of everything was the
glory of God, that glory manifested in Himself and handed on to
His disciples, His followers, His church. Anyone familiar with
the New Testament or with the Gospels will find Scriptures,
statements, leaping up to their memories at once. “We
beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father,
full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), and that is a
comprehensive statement, for undoubtedly John, writing so very
many years after the passing of the Lord Jesus to heaven and the
conclusion of all His earthly life, was taking the sum of things.
Perhaps he was remembering one particular point in His
transfiguration of which both he and Peter, who were
eyewitnesses, spoke as of beholding His glory then, yet covering
those works of His from the beginning of his signs in Cana of
Galilee, when he manifested His glory (John 2:11); covering all
His works, covering all His movements, covering all His doings
and His refusal to do, and His movements and His refusing to be
moved, showing that the motive of everything in the life of the
Lord Jesus was the glory of God, and that manifested in Himself.
Think about it. Recall the words: glory,
glorify, glorified. How often they occur in connection with His
time down here. And, although the cross seemed to be so very much
other than fraught with glory, the undergirding and overriding
thing of the cross and the work accomplished thereon and thereby
is glory. On the one hand, the removal of all that could never be
to the glory of God, the removal of the man, the kind of man, the
old Adam, order of man, the removal of all the sin and its
consequences, the whole mighty work of atonement, all to put out
of the way that which could never be to the glory of God and
never be glorified, the ground that was entirely against glory;
and, on the other hand, in resurrection triumph, to bring in the
ground for glory, it is glory that governs the work of the cross.
And then again it is the governing idea of all
the apostles in the second section, coming in with the Acts. It
is the spirit of glory that comes in in Acts 2, the Spirit of the
glorified One, and He comes in in glory. The church was filled
with glory, the church was brought in in glory, because Christ
had been glorified, and that was the note, the triumphant note,
of the church and of the preaching. This One Whom they had
crucified, God had glorified. All the instruction, all the
admonition, all the exhortation, all the warning, and all the
ministry of consolation in the letters of the apostles has to do
with this one matter of glory. “Our light affliction,
which is for the moment, works for us more and more exceedingly
an eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. 4:17). It is glory
that is there in the ministry of consolation, explaining the
trial. If it is warning, it has to do with losing the on-high
calling, losing the glory. And so the second great section of the
New Testament is really dominated by this one thought of glory.
We make the general statement and come to it more particularly as
we go on.
And what can we say about the book of the
Revelation? It is introduced with a presentation of the glorified
and glorious Lord, and the doxology so soon breaks out. “Unto
Him that loved us, and loosed us from our sins by his blood... to
Him be the glory” (Rev. 1:5). And from that
introduction, the presentation of the glorious Lord, right
through, the one thing that is governing all is the issue of
glory. All has to be dealt with, the nations, the forces of evil,
because God is going to fill His universe with His glory, and all
that is not according to glory must be dealt with and got rid of,
and at last that book of the Revelation emerges in the unveiling
of the glorious city. It is only, in other words, the church in
union with Christ - “having the glory of God”
(Rev. 21:11). Well, do we need to stay to gather more evidence
that the New Testament, at least, is governed by this thought of
glory?
Now, that whole matter in general is divided
into three main divisions. Firstly, there is the glory in divine
initiation. Secondly, the glory in hidden operation. Thirdly, the
glory in final manifestation. I think that sums up the matter so
far as the Word of God is concerned. Of course, there is a vast
amount of detail, but in general that is what it amounts to.
Glory in Divine
Initiation
We shall now occupy ourselves with the first of
those three: glory in divine initiation. I think two outstanding
instances can be cited as sufficient indication. We take the
birth of the Lord Jesus and then the birth of the church. There
are many other initiations in the Bible, in the Old Testament and
in the New. We might say there are as many divine initiations as
there are saints. And we find that they are all with glory.
Here we have these two. The divine initiation
marked by the incarnation, the coming into flesh and into this
world of the Son of God, the Son of Man. We ought to read the
story again in Luke chapter 2, but it is hardly necessary.
The angel and his announcement, and then
suddenly with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host singing,
praising and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and
on earth peace among men in whom He is well pleased” (Luke
2:14). It was a scene of glory, an occasion of glory, tumultuous
glory in heaven breaking through into this world.
Something in a spiritual way happened like that
on the day of Pentecost. We can only deduce that the ascension of
the Lord Jesus was a wonderful scene in heaven. “Lift up
your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting
doors: And the King of glory will come in. Who is the King of
glory?” (Ps. 24:7-8). It is a scene of ecstasy in
heaven, the receiving up - not just the ascending up, but the
receiving up of the Lord of glory, the Prince of glory, and out
of heaven’s joy, heaven’s tumultuous joy, the Holy
Spirit came forth, and if what happened expresses one thing here
on the earth in the church, it does express joy, it does speak of
glory. Oh, what a day that was when the church was born out of
the heavenly glory and filled with that glory!
Glory a Matter of Joy,
Peace and Satisfaction
The initiation in both cases was with glory.
There is no doubt about it, God’s beginnings, God’s own
beginnings, are always in glory. And glory, if you break it up,
if you look at it through the prism, is a matter of joy. It is
not just some blaze of external light. It is joy, strange, often
inexplicable joy. It is peace: discord ceases, strain departs,
there is a wonderful sense of everything being all right. There
is peace and satisfaction. An answer has been given to all that
we have felt in our deepest being needed to be, ought to be, for
the vindication of God, for the justification of God, for the
explanation of heart questions and problems. When God acts, your
problems cease, your questionings go out in satisfaction. You are
satisfied God has done this, that is all there is to it. How He
has done it, that does not matter; by what means, sometimes so
simple. We thought it was going to mean a mountain-removing
miracle, and just quietly it has taken place. Satisfaction has
entered into our hearts. We are not like Naaman of old - I
thought at least He would have come out and done some
extraordinary thing! “Are not Abanah and Pharpar the
rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?”
(2 Kings 5:12), demanding something very extraordinary, No, it is
just in this simple way God does it, and you are satisfied. When
God does a thing, it is like that. That is the essence of the
glory of God, that you are satisfied; and God’s beginnings,
God’s initiations, are in glory in that sense, without
anything of the external to account for it.
Take the birth of the Lord Jesus, that great
initiation of God. Well, look at the conditions, look at the
circumstances, look at the surroundings, look at everything
naturally. No palace, no earthly comforts, no accompaniments of
those sovereign activities of God which are according to
men’s ideas that everything should be just so beautifully
and wonderfully arranged on the earth side - no, everything to
the contrary. From the earth standpoint: weakness, poverty, want,
discomfort, and yet it is in glory; there is no contradiction of
the divine glory. Heaven is satisfied, heaven is rapturous in
glory, and anyone who has any real touch with that is quite
satisfied. There is something here that is deeper and more
wonderful than anything external. Is it not like that every time
the Lord Jesus has a new birth? Forgive me putting it that way.
Was it not like that when He was born in your heart and in mine?
Well, on the outside, things did not seem very different. The
home was the same, the business place was the same, the world was
the same, the circumstances did not change a bit, but somehow
there was a glory inside: joy, peace, satisfaction, glory.
Perhaps some of you say, I was brought up in a
Christian home, there was no great crisis in my experience, I
seemed to move quite naturally into the Christian life. Have you
never since in your spiritual history had an experience of the
Lord, the Lord coming into your life, the Lord moving in in some
way, in this way? The strain went out, the fret went out, the
shame went out, the discontent went out, the disappointment went
out. You were at peace, great joy flooded in, you were satisfied.
I think we can all speak of that, and that more than once.
God’s new beginnings are always in glory. It was with His
Son, and - let me put it in this way again - every birth of His
Son in a life or in a place is accompanied with these tokens of
glory.
The Essence of Divine
Glory
But what is the essence of this glory? What was
the essence of that glory on the day when Jesus was born in
Bethlehem? Now here you have to mark very carefully a
discrimination, because it is just here that people go wrong and
get into difficulties. The essence of the glory of Christ’s
birth at Bethlehem, as is the essence of glory in every event and
every fresh movement of God, was and is this: God Himself having
brought in that which is to His pleasure. God has introduced and
brought in that which is to His pleasure, and the Lord Jesus is
the object of the Father’s pleasure. If He is not there,
there is nothing to the Father’s pleasure. When He is there,
there is something present which is to the pleasure of the
Father. The Father’s pleasure, satisfaction and joy is
centred in His Son and where His Son is. Now the peril into which
so many have fallen is that they have taken the effects of that
rather than the cause. The effects - yes, joy and peace and
satisfaction and deeply moved emotions, gratification and
pleasure, and then, taking the effects, the feelings, the
results, they have tried to perpetuate them. They have been
afraid that they might go, they get into a state of fear - how
long will this last? Shall I wake up in the morning and find it
all gone? Will it be amongst those nine days’ wonders? And
so they have strained after holding and maintaining the effects,
and missed the basic reality.
The basic reality is Christ and Christ is
God’s delight and God’s pleasure; not the feelings, but
the fact. How many of you are trying to recover the feelings, or
to hold on to the feelings, to have the feelings, the effects;
reaching out for some abstract thing that you call glory? That is
the mistake. God’s facts remain. The feelings may change -
that is the second part of this whole matter of glory - the
hidden operations of glory, that touches another realm
altogether. We are occupied with God’s initiations. But when
God gets His Son in, He has not just got a set of emotions, a lot
of feelings; He has got a mighty eternal reality, the very object
of divine glory. And Christ in you is the hope of glory (Col.
1:27), not your feelings about it, but the mighty, basic reality.
God has that which is to his pleasure. His pleasure is not in us,
in what we are, however we feel. I do not believe that the Lord
is any more pleased and satisfied with us when we are having an
ecstatic time than He is when we are having a most miserable
time. That is just the variableness of our own soul life. We can
get up or we can get down; God’s pleasure and satisfaction
is centred in His Son, and He wants us to have our hold of faith
upon His mighty fact and not the variableness of our own
reactions. No, God’s initiation is just this: that God has
brought in, where there never was before, that which is to His
satisfaction. It is Christ and not first of all the effects of
Christ. Oh, the effects are there, praise God for that, but you
know so often the effects are the elementary aspect of things,
the infant period. You go out into maturity, and in maturity you
will have to learn to live on Christ, not on feelings.
God’s Initiations
His Basis for Future Operations
Secondly, God, having obtained that which is to
His pleasure, His initiations, His beginnings are His standards,
and His basis for all future operation. Everything afterwards
will be in accordance with the beginning, the initiation. I do
not mean that for ever and always there will be that conscious
ecstasy, that sense of glory. But I do mean this, that God,
having obtained it, introduced that which is to His satisfaction,
the seat and centre of His glory. And He will be working for ever
after to make that which is in His Son true in us so that we are,
in conformity to His Son, on the way to glory ourselves,
progressive glory by that which satisfies God being wrought into
us so that the glory is spreading out and taking hold, and we are
coming nearer and nearer to that of which the Word speaks, “God...
called you unto his eternal glory” (1 Pet. 5:10). The
beginnings of God govern the end. The end is to correspond to the
beginning, but even in greater measure. The beginnings may be
comparatively small. Bethlehem in a sense is small, is little;
Christ there is limited; and yet all the fulness of the glory is
opened up in that smallness, in that littleness. In the end, it
will not be additional glory. It will be that glory which has
expanded and filled the universe. God is working according to His
beginnings to have His end corresponding therewith. So the
beginnings of God are the basis of all God’s activities.
There will be that in the end which is glory in the church and in
Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever (Eph. 3:21).
This is practical. If the Lord has done
something, has introduced something of Himself, of His Christ, in
us personally and individually in this earth, as a work of His,
that beginning has been God’s, and it has come in with these
accompanying manifestations of deep joy and gratification. And
oh, how blessed and precious a thing it is to have the assurance
that this is of God, this is not of man, the Lord did this. How
assuring and heart satisfying it is to have that realisation! And
when God does that in a life that individual is able to say,
‘I did not choose Him but He chose me, the initiative was
with God. It was not my doing, it was the Lord’s doing; if
it had not been for the Lord I would never be here today.’
Many can say that all the way along what He did at the beginning
He has continued to do. I have wandered, yea fallen, but I am
here today because God started this thing, and it is going on
because it started in glory and glory is not a matter of the
variableness of my nature, not at all to do with me. It is His
Son, He planted His Son and He has worked and is working all the
way through my life on the ground of Christ, not on my ground at
all. When I come at last to the fulness of that glory to which He
has called me I shall have to say: He did it, it was the
Lord’s doing, not mine; He did it!
God is working on the basis of His initiation.
I believe that there is a great deal of very profound truth in
the New Testament gathered into that, upon which we will not
embark. May it not be that the whole of those deep things of God
gathered into Paul’s words in Ephesians 1:4 about being
chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, and in Romans
8:29, “whom He foreknew, He also foreordained to be
conformed to the image of his Son”, (which takes us
right out of time and all that belongs to time, right out of this
human life here and all that belongs to it, and places us right
there on the Rock in eternity) that it is all gathered into this,
that God has taken the initiative and is working according to His
initiating? I am not ruling out our response and all that is
incumbent upon us to go on, to be steadfast - that is another
side. But all our effort, our determination, would be futile if
God had not started this thing Himself and laid the foundation
for it. If our obedience, our compliance, our response, our
setting of our hearts to go on with God, if all that were not
upon a basis that God has laid down, how in vain it would be; but
it is simply our coming to the Rock.
Thank God, the Rock is there and the Rock is
Christ. He has done it, and so, with our deviations, we come
back. With our failures, we rise again. We are ashamed and
grieved, we suffer discipline, but we are not cast off. God
started this, and that is glory; it is the glory of His grace.
My point is that God is working according to
His beginnings. His beginnings are His basis for all His further
activities right on to the end, and because Christ is the
beginning, the end will be Christ, and the end is Christ because
Christ was the beginning. God, then, has commenced with us in
glory. How many of us are able to say, Yes, I know something
about that. I know at a certain point at the beginning something
happened, and the effects of that were great joy, great peace, a
great sense of satisfaction. It was just glory. I can only use
that word about it, it was glory. I have many times made this
terrible mistake of trying to make everything of the effects, the
nice feelings that I had then, and I have forgotten the fact of
Christ, but I know something of the glory, and every time that
the Lord is able to get something more of His Son into our lives
that thing happens again. Here is a controversy that the Lord may
have with us or we may have with the Lord. We are held up because
of some unsettled question. There is a dispute going on between
the Holy Spirit and ourselves. We are delaying, we are
disobedient, we are slow, we are not girding ourselves to the
battle. We have no peace, no rest, no satisfaction, our lives are
torn, the glory goes out of our face, out of our testimony. Then
the day comes when, under the Holy Spirit’s persistent,
urgent constraint, we say, I am going to have this thing settled!
We go in and we shut the door and say, This is an end of this,
something has to happen. We get before the Lord, and there may be
a battle, a bitter battle, but we get through. The Lord is given
His place, we step aside, our wills, our desires, whatever may be
involved, we hand up to the Lord and say: That is gone, I have
finished; now Lord Your will, Your way. When we get through, the
glory is back again. Yes, joy, peace, satisfaction. Every
bringing in anew or in greater fulness of the Lord Jesus over a
matter is accompanied by glory. If only we knew how much glory we
are forfeiting by allowing the struggle to go on so long, by not
coming to grips with the situation! Oh, we are robbing ourselves
of the glory - and we all do it. We are slow to learn.
But here are God’s facts, that it is in
His Son and His Son having His place, that glory dwells upon
that, and so we close on that note. If the Lord can only have a
full place for His Son, the measure of glory in our hearts will
be commensurate. Circumstances may not change at all. You may
still be up against the hardships, the difficulties of your way
and place and work. Things may not change, people may not change
and work may not change and place may not change, but the inside
is different. And may it not be - one does not want to be
exacting - that the Lord does not do anything on the outside
until He has that position on the inside, that delay is because
we have not got to the place of glorying in infirmities. We want
to get glory by deliverance from them; we are not glorying in
them. Well, let us ask the Lord about it, but keep in view that
God’s thought is glory and all His beginnings, whether it be
that first phase of His beginnings, or those beginnings of so
many after-phases, when He is beginning a new phase and yet a new
phase and still a further phase, (how many new beginnings we have
had - not going right back, but as it were a new phase, a new
beginning), all God’s beginnings where He gets what He wants
for His Son are fraught with glory. The Lord bring us into the
glory and the glory into us, the glory which is Christ. “Glorious
things are spoken of thee, O city of God.” “Ye are come
unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God.”
“Unto him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus
unto all generations for ever and ever. Amen.”