Reading: Matt. 16:28; 17:1-7.
Though we are familiar with this
incident of the transfiguration of Jesus, I have always had a
feeling that we have not really grasped strongly enough the
significance of it. We view it objectively as something that
happened in the life of our Lord here, perhaps the most wonderful
thing, and we leave it there and fail to realize that there is a
tremendous challenge in it, and that it means something of very
great importance and significance in the economy of God.
Furthermore, we fail to realize that this is the focal point of
all the Scriptures. From the beginning of the Bible up to this
point, and from this point onwards, everything past and future
meets here, is focused upon this, and this therefore contains
that which is of tremendous account. The Lord Jesus said with
emphasis, There are some of them that stand here, who shall
in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in
his kingdom. Pentecost was the fulfilment of that, but the
transfiguration was the meaning and nature of that. The two go
together the transfiguration and the coming of the Holy
Spirit as He came on the day of Pentecost.
A Kingdom
Trio
Now, in order to get right to
the meaning of this, let us note that it says and Jesus
was always very deliberate and quite calculated in what He did,
there was nothing casual about Him in word or in deed
Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John his
brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart.
Peter and James and John more than any others of the disciples of
our Lord were those who had the great Kingdom complex. They were
looking for the coming of the Kingdom. They had all the Jewish
concept of the Kingdom and all the Jewish expectation of the
Kingdom, and from various ejaculations of theirs it is quite
clear that they were thinking in terms of the Israelitish kingdom
coming in relation to Jesus. Lord, dost thou at this time
restore the kingdom to Israel? (Acts 1:6). That is their
mentality, their expectation, their hope. We can say this trio
was a Kingdom trio in mentality and concept and expectation. It
was as though all this system of truth or teaching about the
Kingdom was focused upon and gathered up into those three men.
An Object
Lesson of the Kingdom
And Jesus took them deliberately
apart up into the high mountain and was transfigured before them.
They were the spectators of this. They were the ones who had this
unique experience. Jesus was giving them an object lesson of the
Kingdom. If you look at all the features you will see how truly
that was so. Jesus had said the Son of man coming in
his kingdom. That is the first significant thing. The
Son of man in his kingdom. That is relationship to
man, that is man being brought in according to God. This Kingdom
is the Kingdom which God intended man to have, to be mans
Kingdom. It is the Kingdom of the Son of man as representing man
according to Gods mind.
The
Kingdom for Man
And so at once we are taken
right back to the beginning of the Bible, and we see what God
intended regarding the first man to give him the Kingdom.
Thou makest him to have dominion (Psa. 8:6). The
Kingdom was the great idea in Gods mind in the creation of
man, that all things should be under his feet. But that first man
missed the Kingdom or lost the Kingdom, and it was not only a
matter of government. Why he lost the Kingdom was because he
became another kind of man, for this Kingdom belongs to a certain
kind of man, and Adam, the first for whom it was intended,
changed his nature by disobedience, by unbelief, and so he lost
it. Another, the last Adam, comes in and recovers what Adam lost
or missed the Kingdom.
The Moral
Perfection of the Kingdom
But He shows what kind of a man
is the Kingdom man, and you have two things here in this
presentation of the transfigured Son of man. One is moral
perfection. Here He is presented in all the purity and perfection
of moral victory, tested, proved in every way in which a man can
be tested and proved, emerging triumphant after all. There is
nothing more really to be done as far as He personally is
concerned. If He descends the mountain and goes to the cross,
that is not on His own account. That is to bring the other men
into the Kingdom, but on His own account all is done. He has
reached the point of moral perfection, and so perfection is
written large in the very description of Him here: His garments
and His face, the picture of moral and spiritual perfection.
The Glory
of the Kingdom
The other thing is glory, and
when you put those two things together, you know what the Kingdom
is. It is spiritual and moral perfection in manhood issuing in
glory. That is a word very difficult to understand. Of course, we
usually do associate with the word glory the
accompaniments of this transfiguration bright, glistening,
fierce light. That is quite true in this sense if you find
a person who is really by the grace of God overcoming, they are
up against something that calls for much grace, maybe in
themselves, some difficulty, some handicap, some discouragement,
something that is so calculated to make them anything but
triumphant Christians; or it may be in some other person with
whom they have to live and work, it may be in the home, it may be
in the business, it may be anywhere, and these people are an
awful trial to them, but if you see these people triumphant
through the grace of God over those trials, you do see something
about them that is glorious. You can even see it in their
countenance. How different they are from the people who are under
their troubles. Their face tells whether they are over or under.
There is something you recognize there of glory. It is a very
faint illustration of this thing. Jesus has triumphed, reached
the point of absolute victory on all matters, and the glory
follows. I do believe that when we are glorified together with
Him, there will be something very light about us I do not
mean frivolous. We shall be radiant that is the word
radiant people. Heaven is going to be a glorious place in
this sense that everybody is going to be so radiant.
Here is Christ the Son of man
radiant, and the basis of His radiance is His spiritual life.
That is the Kingdom. It was for that that man was created. It was
that which he lost. It is that which the last Adam has recovered
in His own Person, and here in the transfiguration He gives these
three representatives of the great theory of the Kingdom a real
object lesson of what the Kingdom really is. The Kingdom is
not you sitting upon thrones and exercising your importance over
other people, ordering them here and there and all that sort of
thing. This is the Kingdom: the Kingdom is in terms of spiritual
victory resulting in spiritual radiance.
Now when He came in His Kingdom
on the day of Pentecost, look how radiant they are. See how so
many of those things which had bothered them and troubled them in
themselves and with one another up to that point just
disappeared. They were a quarrelsome crowd; they could not get on
together even when they were with the Lord. They are always
spoiling things by their wrong approaches and reactions and
interests and ambitions. But see, now there is a mighty victory
over all that. We could say it was never before possible for
those twelve men to stand up together. They might have done it
physically, but to really have stood up together is a mighty
victory over temperamental differences and all that sort of thing
of the natural man. It is a mighty victory to really be together:
one voice, one heart, one mind, one objective. They are together.
Lots of things have been transcended now by the coming of the
Kingdom. The sovereign rule of the glorified Lord has descended
upon them, and that which had been so contrary to the divine idea
of the Kingdom has just gone out, and there is radiance there.
They are just filled with joy. It is a wonderful picture really
of transfigured men, and the church is supposed to be a
transfigured church on that basis.
The Focal
Point of History
This is the heart of the
transfiguration. It is the Kingdom, what God meant, what man
missed, what Christ has brought in in His own Person and into
which He has called us, into His eternal Kingdom. It was a
wonderful event. I think the greatest thing that had ever
happened in the history of mankind was the transfiguration of our
Lord, and yet the newspapers said nothing about it, the world
knew absolutely nothing about it, completely ignorant of it for
the time being. It is not found in any historical record at all
apart from the New Testament, and the greatest thing in the
history of mankind, the Kingdom, is always like that. The world
cannot appreciate it, cannot understand it, cannot appraise it.
The world really does not know anything about this. Its system of
values is altogether different from spiritual values and moral
perfections, and therefore it cannot appreciate even the joy and
the radiance of Christians. The world looks on at a radiant
Christian, and says, I do not know what it is all about,
what you are making all the fuss about. It just cannot
appreciate this joy and radiance but it is the greatest thing in
history.
The
Impact of the Kingdom
Well, this whole thing needs to
be analysed much more thoroughly, but we are not going to be able
to do that now. But note, these men, Peter, James and John, as
beforehand representatives of that other idea of the Kingdom, and
now the nucleus of this new idea of the Kingdom, these men felt
the impact of that Kingdom that day. We even had to excuse Peter
for, as we say, putting his foot in it. It was an
awful blunder that Peter made, but there you are, you see. When
you get an overwhelming experience, you make all sorts of
blunders. You get carried away from yourself. And so he blurted
this thing out. But the fact is that these men went down under
the impact of this thing. This was the Kingdom coming in power,
and when the Kingdom comes in power, we go down, we just have to
go down. This is the test and the challenge of the Kingdom where
we are concerned. We have all the teaching about the Kingdom, we
have got a number of different systems of teaching about the
Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of heaven, and so on. But it is not
our teaching, it is not our system, it is the effect that it has
upon us, and really to truly hold the truth of the Kingdom means
that we are people who have gone down with our faces to the
ground before the revelation of Jesus Christ. This thing is too
much for us, it is overwhelming, it is a tremendous thing. We
just fall on our faces; we are like dead people. Is that how the
presentation of divine truth comes to us? Do you ever sit in the
presence of the presentation of the Lord Jesus, either in a
meeting or with your Bible, and as it is going on, you are
hearing, or you are reading, you bow your head and say, It
is too big for me, too wonderful, it is overwhelming? I do
not mean intellectually overwhelming, but spiritually. This is
tremendous! It touches the heart like that, and unless that is
true, there is something lacking in our apprehension of truth.
Truth ought to bring us to our knees. The presentation of Jesus
Christ ought to humble us and empty us, and we ought to go down
on our faces yes, if you like, in fear and trembling,
anyhow so long as we go down, and that is what happened to them.
It came in power, in representation, in the Person of the Son of
man that day, and it registered something overwhelming upon them.
You know that because it was many years after this event that
Peter wrote about it. This voice we ourselves heard borne
out of heaven, when we were with him in the holy mount (2
Pet. 1:18). Read further what he says about it. You had
better take heed, he says, as unto a light that
shineth in a dark place. Peter never forgot it. It came
back to Peter with renewed force and it went through to the end
of his life with him.
Now, we may not have a physical,
objective sight of a transfigured Lord, but the Holy Spirit would
make the glorified Lord glorious to us. You see, it is borne out
all along. When John himself so many years afterwards saw this
Son of man, he said, I fell at his feet as one dead
(Rev. 1:17). When Saul of Tarsus saw the glorified Jesus of
Nazareth, he was down on his face, a broken, crushed man,
helpless, impotent in his own strength. We need to recover, do we
not, this element of the wonder and glory and greatness of the
Christ about whom we hear so much, that He should be redeemed
from a commonplace, saved from familiarity; on the contrary, our
hearts should be deeply moved.
The
Lordship of Christ
I will say one other thing
concerning Peter well, we will excuse him. Probably we
should do something very much like that in such an experience.
This he said, says another writer, not knowing
what he said (Luke 9:33). All right: but when he had said
it, heaven took serious account of it, and while he was yet
speaking, a cloud overshadowed them, a reaction of God from
heaven, and a voice came out of the cloud saying, This is
my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him. Now
then, the whole question and issue of utter subjection to the
Lord is brought in at that point. That is the Kingdom. You may
talk foolishly, frivolously, impulsively, but look here
you had better subject all your talking to the absolute
domination of your Lord. Dont our tongues want to come
under the Lordship of Christ? Therefore they are to be touched by
the Kingdom and transfigured. Tongues have got to be delivered
from that which is not the glory and purity of the Kingdom of the
Son of man, and in every other way. This little phrase
Hear ye him dont you go
dictating to Him; dont you make suggestions to Him: you
listen to Him. That is the law of the Kingdom. Christ is the
first and the last. Christ is the only One from whom we are to
take our orders, our instructions. We have got to be there where
we refer everything to Him, we defer everything to Him, where He
is in the place of absolute Lordship.
The Need
of Openness of Heart
Is it not an amazing thing?
I think it becomes the more amazing when we consider it
here is the Son of man transfigured and glorified in that
brief moment as an object lesson and an example, but look at Him
again and consider and contemplate all that that signifies
a man in the glory, a man glorified because perfected, all that
that means. We cannot grasp it. And then listen And
killed the Prince of life (Acts 3:15) a terrible
thing to contemplate, killed that One. Here He is, look at Him,
transformed, transfigured, and then kill Him. He was no other Son
of man or Son of God that they crucified than the One on the
mount; He was the same One. The point is just this, that we need
really to have our eyes opened to the Lord Jesus to save us from
making the most awful blunders where His honour and His glory are
concerned. They did it because they were blind, and they were
blind because they were prejudiced, and see what they did because
they were prejudiced. It is not two Christs, the Christ of the
Transfiguration Mount, and the Christ hanging on the cross. It is
the same Christ, and they can do that as the result of prejudice.
They can do that, a thing like that, because their hearts are not
willing to have Him as Lord, as King. Oh, what we can do by
reason of a closed heart and a closed mind. How necessary it is,
then, for us to be in the place of obedience to the Lord and what
it will lead us into. Do you get my point? Openness to the Lord
will lead us right into that which Adam lost, the glorious
Kingdom. Openness to the Lord is the first step back into the
Kingdom. Closedness to the Lord, like Jewish prejudice, meant
that Israel lost the Kingdom.
Oh, may the Lord give us an open
heart, an unprejudiced mind, a pure spirit, transparent inside,
and see what it will lead to. It will lead to the Kingdom, and
the Kingdom is not just a system of things, although it will
become that eventually. It is a nature; it is a spiritual power.
It will lead us to glory. There is no glory along the line of a
closed heart or a closed mind of prejudice, fear and suspicion.
That is the way away from glory. The open heart, submission,
subjection to Christ, is the way into the Kingdom.
Transcribed from a spoken message given on 23rd
January, 1955. This message can be listened to on the Audio page of this website.