Verily I say unto you, 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.
And after six days Jesus taketh with Him Peter, and James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart:
And He was transfigured before them; and His face did shine as the sun, and His garments became white as the light.
And behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elijah talking with Him.
And Peter answered, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if Thou wilt, I will make here three tabernacles; one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.
While He was yet speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold, a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him.
And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid.
And Jesus came and touched them and said, Arise, and be not afraid.
And lifting up their eyes, they saw no one, save Jesus only.
There we are familiar with this incident, 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—perhaps the most wonderful thing. Then, having read it and become informed of it, we leave it there and fail to realize that there is a tremendous challenge, and that it means something of very great importance and significance in the whole economy of God.
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 onward. Everything, past and future, linked here, is focused upon this. This, therefore, contains that which is of tremendous account.
Jesus said, “Verily I say unto you, 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 fulfillment of that, but the transfiguration was the meaning and the visual demonstration. The two go together: transfiguration and the coming of the Holy Spirit, as He came on the day of Pentecost.
Now, in order to get right to the meaning of this, let us note that Jesus was always very deliberate and quite calculated in what He did. Nothing was casual about Him, either in word or deed. Always there was a very large, conscious background which pressed into what He said and what He did. It was never just something in itself.
And so here it says that Jesus took with Him Peter, and James, and John, and brought them up into a high mountain apart.
Peter, James, and John, more than any other of the disciples of our Lord, were those who had the great kingdom complex. They, in a very full way, were looking for the coming of the kingdom. They had all the Jewish concepts of the kingdom and all the Jewish expectation of the kingdom.
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?” Those were their words. That was their mentality, their expectation, their hope.
We can say that this trio was a kingdom trio in mentality, concepts, and expectations. It was as though all the system of truth, or teaching, about the kingdom was focused upon and gathered up into those three men.
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. The transfiguration is the great object lesson of the kingdom. If you look at all the features, you will see how truly that was.
Jesus had said, “The Son of man coming in His kingdom.” That is the first significant thing: the Son of man in His kingdom, and His relationship to man. That is man being brought in according to God.
This kingdom is the kingdom God intended man to have—to be man’s kingdom: the kingdom of the Son of man, as representing man according to God’s mind.
And so at once we are taken right back to the beginning of the Bible. We see what God intended regarding the first man: to give him the kingdom. The kingdom was the great idea in God’s mind in the creation of man—that all things could be put 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 missed it, or lost it.
Another comes in and recovers on Adam’s lost ground 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. Every test in such a man can be tested and proved, emerging triumphant after all. There is nothing more really to be done so far as He personally is concerned.
If He descends the mountain and goes to the cross, henceforth it is not on His own account. It is to bring other men into the kingdom. On His own account, all is done. He has reached a point of moral perfection, tested and proved.
So perfection is written large in the very description of Him here: His garments, His face—a picture of moral and spiritual perfection.
The other, and consequent upon that, is glory. Glory. 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 associate with the word glory the accompaniments of this transfiguration: brightness, glistening, light. Yes, that is quite true.
If you find a person who is really, really, by the grace of God, overcoming something that calls for much grace—perhaps some difficulty, handicap, or discouragement in themselves, something calculated to make them anything but triumphant Christians—or perhaps some other person with whom they have to live and work, whether in a home, in business, or anywhere else, and it is an awful trial—
If you see that person triumphant through the grace of God over those things, you do see something about them. It is glory. You can even see it in their countenance. How different they are from people who are under their troubles. Their face tells whether they are over or under. Something you recognize: there is glory.
It is a very illustration of this thing. Jesus has triumphed, reached the point of absolute victory on all matters, and the glory follows. The glory part.
I do believe that when we are glorified together with Him, there will be something very light about us. I do not mean frivolous—light, bright, glorious—but being radiant people. Ah, what radiant people! It is going to be a glorious place in heaven, in this sense, that everybody is going to be so radiant.
Now 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 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.
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. The kingdom is in terms of spirituality 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 and troubled them—in themselves and with one another—after that point disappeared.
They were a quarrelsome crowd. They could not get on together, even when they were with the Lord. They were always spoiling things by their wrong approaches and reactions and ambitions. But see now: there is a mighty victory over all that.
We could say it was never before possible for those poor men to stand up together. They might have done it physically, but to really stand up together is a mighty victory over temperamental differences and all that sort of thing in the natural man.
It is a mighty victory to really be together: one voice, one line, one objective, set 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. That which had been so contrary to the divine idea of the kingdom has just gone out—just gone out. And there is radiance there, filled with joy, just filled with joy.
It is a wonderful picture, really, of transfigured men, is it not? And the church is supposed to be a transfigured church, on the basis of the heart of the transfiguration. It is the kingdom: what God meant for man, what Christ has brought in in His own person, and unto which He has called us—unto His eternal kingdom.
It was a wonderful event. I started by saying this is the focal point of history. I think it was the greatest thing that had ever happened in the history of mankind: 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 records apart from the New Testament, and yet it was the greatest thing in the history of mankind.
The kingdom is always like that. The world cannot appreciate it, cannot appraise it. The world really does not know anything about this. Its system of values is altogether different from spiritual and moral perfection.
And people cannot appreciate even the joy and radiance of Christians. “Well, it looks as though they are radiant. I do not know what it is all about. What are you making all the fuss about?” They cannot appreciate it. But it is the greatest thing in history.
Well, this whole thing needs to be analyzed much more thoroughly, but we are not going to be able to do that this morning. Look at 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 scene. We even have to excuse Peter, as we say, for putting his foot in it. It was a lawful blunder, Peter made. But there you are. You see, when you get an overwhelming experience, you make all sorts of plans. You are just 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.
Dear friends, this is the test and the challenge of the kingdom itself. We have got all the teaching about the kingdom. Oh, we have got a number of different systems of teaching about the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven around. But it is not our teaching; it is not our system. It is the effect that it has upon us.
And really, to truly own 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 a presentation of the Lord Jesus, either in a meeting or with your Bible, as you are hearing or reading, and 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. This is to me. It touches the heart like that. And unless that is true, there is something lacking in our apprehension.
Truth ought to bring us to our knees. The presentation of Jesus Christ ought to humble us and empty us. We ought to go down on our faces—yes, if you like, in fear and trembling. Anyhow, as 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 thing registered, and they fell upon their faces.
You know that because it was many years after this event that Peter wrote about it: “This voice we heard, and we were with Him in the holy mount.” And further, what he says is, “Ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place.” You see, Peter never forgot it.
It came back to Peter with renewed force. It went through to the end of his life with him, something like that. And we may not have physical, objective sight or vision of the transfigured Lord, but the Holy Spirit would make the glorified Lord glorious to us.
You see, it is borne out all along. Think of John himself. So many years afterward, he saw this Son of Man, and he said, “I fell at His feet as one dead.” When they saw the glory of this Jesus of Nazareth, they were down on their faces—broken, crushed men, helpless and impotent in their own strength.
We need to recover, do we not, this element—the wonder and glory and greatness of the Christ about whom we hear so much. He should be redeemed from commonplace familiarity. Our hearts should be deeply moved.
Now, I have only time for saying perhaps one other thing. Peter—well, we will excuse him. Only, we should do something very much like that in such an experience. Yes, another writer says, “This he said, not knowing what he said.” All right. But when he said it, heaven took serious account of it.
And while he was yet speaking, a cloud overshadowed them. A reaction of God from heaven. The 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, but look here: you had better subject all your talking to the absolute dominion of your Lord. Those tongues want to come under the lordship of Christ. Oh, they do.
And our tongues, therefore, 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,” is the word. Do not you do dictating to Him. Do not 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 and our instructions. We have got to be there. We refer everything to Him. We defer everything to Him. He is in the place of absolute lordship.
Is it not an amazing thing? I think it becomes more amazing the more 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 it again. Consider and contemplate all that it means, all that it signifies.
In the glory, in the perfection—all that that means, we cannot grasp it. And then listen: “And you killed the Lord of glory.” Terrible thing. They came from killing that One.
Here He is. Look at Him. Look at Him 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—the same One.
The point is just this: we need really, we need really, to have our eyes opened to the Lord Jesus, to save us from making the most awful, awful blunders where His honor 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 the Christ of the transfiguration mount, the Christ hanging on the cross—it is the same Christ. They can do that as the result of prejudice.
They can do 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 openness to the Lord. What will it lead us into? 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 thing back into the kingdom. Closedness to the Lord, like Jewish prejudice, meant that Israel lost the kingdom. And that is the kingdom.
Oh, may the Lord give us an open heart, an unprejudiced mind, a pure spirit, transparent honesty. See what it will lead to. It will lead to the kingdom.
The kingdom, as we have been saying recently, is not just a system of things, though it will become that eventually in nature. It is a spiritual power to lead us to glory.
There is no glory along the lines of a closed heart, closed mind, prejudice, fear, and suspicion. That is the way away from glory. The open heart, the submission and subjection to Christ, is the way into the kingdom.