Especially, we welcome those who join us for the first time in this conference.
Let me say that, in these gatherings, we are moving within God’s eternal appointment: His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the horizon—the utmost range—of all His activities and all His interests; to comprehend everything in His Son, and to make His Son the nature and character of everything.
This was established before the world was. This divine decision was the cause of that evil first in heaven, and of that rupture which brought its repercussions into creation, to man; and the end is fruit there in the rupture between man and God.
God commenced in history to move on the line of His Son, in spiritual principles and laws. The Old Testament is a record of God so moving: on the one side, by discipline to undo the mischief; on the other side, to constitute according to His own mind. The Old Testament closes in failure: people chosen, dealt with, with that divine purpose before God.
And then, in the fullness of the time, God sent forth His Son, made in the likeness of sinful flesh—the embodiment of all His thoughts and intentions, and the expression of His own nature—to which He will conform all who come into the way of the Son: the way of complete repudiation of all rebellion, of all departure, of all insubmission and insubordination; the way of utter capitulation to the will of God.
God will proceed with His twofold work in a new spiritual nation in this dispensation—not an earthly nation this time, but a spiritual nation. We call it the Church, or the New Testament calls it the Church. Let us, for the moment, see it as this new people chosen by God to be the vessel in which all His thoughts, as summed up in His Son, are to find expression.
And, in the end, the whole creation is to manifest the nature of His Son and to be entirely governed by that character.
That, in brief—in very few words—is what has occupied us now for these two days.
We have been latterly looking at some of those epochs in the life of the Lord Jesus which are related to this great purpose of God. They are like a series of mountain peaks that touch the heaven.
The birth touches the heaven. The baptism touches the heaven. The temptation in the wilderness reaches far beyond the wilderness and out into the cosmic realm of the prince of this world.
Tonight we come to the next peak: the transfiguration.
We must note that from each of these peaks, the next one comes into view in related sequence. That is, when you contemplate the birth of the Lord Jesus—its meaning, purpose, nature, and association—it is not difficult to see that the time will come in the life of that Child when a great act of renunciation, a great act of committal, a great act of utter yieldedness to the will of God on redemptive lines, will come about.
And so surely the baptism is related to the birth as the sequel of the birth. Baptism is His full and complete committal to the will of the Father. From that point, by the descending Spirit upon Him, that abode upon Him, rested upon Him, He was bound, and is a bondservant, to the will of the Father.
It is not difficult to see from that peak of the baptism that it is all going to be very definitely challenged. The sequel to that committal is going to be conflict—not only personal conflict, but cosmic conflict. The whole world and its surroundings are going to be involved. The kingdoms of this world and their ruler will become involved in this committal in baptism.
And so, in quite natural sequence, from the baptism we move to the temptation in the wilderness.
The issue of that, we read, was that Jesus returned full of the Holy Spirit, in the power of the Spirit. He came from the wilderness to take up that to which He had there committed Himself. The battle so quickly followed His initial gaining of the victory.
At the end of that temptation, “the devil leaveth Him.” You almost see the devil, defeated and pressed back, looking over his shoulder and saying, “But I’ll be back again. I’ll be back again.” So it was many times, all the way to the hour of His death on the cross. The battle was started.
Now we come to the transfiguration, the next mountain peak. You would like to have the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of the Gospel by Matthew open before you. You want to check me up as I go along. There it is.
The transfiguration is not an isolated incident in the life of the Lord Jesus. It is a link in the chain, and it must be seen from the standpoint of the temptation. You cannot understand rightly, sufficiently, the transfiguration of the Lord Jesus unless you view it in the light of the temptation in the wilderness.
Because, for one thing, the transfiguration was a climax. It was a climax. And it was also the beginning of a new phase.
There is a very real and true sense in which, at this point, so far as He Himself was concerned, it could have been the end of the journey. He could have gone through into God. We will come back to that again in a minute.
This is the climax of all that has preceded: Christ’s glory. That is the climax, the end, the ultimate issue of that to which He so utterly surrendered Himself: trial and temptation, conflict and suffering.
The climax had to be reached, so far as He Himself was concerned. And if it had been just Himself, that would have been the end of His earthly story.
Now, I am saying that you have to see it in another context: the beginning of a new phase, as well as the end of one. The new phase is not only personal; it is a way that He never had gone for Himself.
Well, let us look at this. It is a great pity that these chapters are divided into sixteen and seventeen only for convenience, but certainly very inconveniently for understanding. They ought to run right on without any break.
And it is to be noted that the three writers—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—all record this, all put it at the same point in the life of the Lord Jesus, and all give the same associated features. They do not do that about everything, but in this they do. There is, therefore, something to take account of in that fact.
You know just how the thing begins. It begins thus:
Now when Jesus came into the parts of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, Who do men say that the Son of man is?
And they said, Some say John the Baptist; some, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.
He saith unto them, But who say ye that I am?
And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Everything for the future hung upon who Jesus was. That is basic to everything, the key to everything, and He knew it. Until that was established by them, and settled, He could not go any further.
Who Jesus was: “Who do men say that I am? Who do you say that I am?” There is a very, very deep reason for that seemingly strange question.
No one else in the human race dare talk like that. You see, any man who said, “Who do you think I am? Who do people say that I am? What do you say about me?”—well, we just would not tolerate it, would we? No.
But He could do it, because He knew how much hung upon their recognition of who He was—everything. God had made Him the horizon of the whole race, and He knew it. It was very necessary, therefore, for those who were to be within that horizon to know the identity and character of the One who formed that horizon.
Something had to be done that was going to survive a terrible ordeal. We shall see that in a minute. And the only thing that would survive the ordeal through which they were about to pass, and through which all of us will have to pass, is the real inward knowledge of who the Lord Jesus is: an adequate knowledge, a clear and definite knowledge.
If we have any doubts about Him, we will not survive. If we are not clear on this matter, we will not survive. It may sound foolish to be talking to Christians like this, but you will see in a minute that there was very, very good reason for talking to these very disciples like this.
The point is, at the moment, that He had to challenge them on this matter as to His Person. He had to draw out from them a committal, a confession, and a committal.
Simon got it by revelation:
Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Very well. Very well. Notice what follows immediately—the next step.
From that time Jesus began to show unto His disciples, how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up.
And Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him, saying:
Be it far from Thee, Lord: this shall never be unto Thee.
“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. Nothing like that could happen to You.”
Now here is a terribly disconcerting thing on the path of the Lord. He had drawn out this confession. He had established His identity with them as the Son of the living God. And now, in this most disconcerting way, right at that point, He begins to talk about going to Jerusalem, being treated in a shameful way, and being crucified.
It is quite clear that the very pronouncement itself challenged the temptation. It went right to the heart of this declaration: the Son of the living God into the hands of men, to be treated like this. How could that be? How could it be?
It was a terrible shock for these men. Make no mistake about it. Such a shock that Peter lost his moral balance. He took Him and began to rebuke Him.
Peter, at that moment, fell out of the Lord’s way into the way of the enemy. Jesus turned and said unto Peter:
Get thee behind Me, Satan: thou art a stumbling-block unto Me: for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men.
What a fall. What a shock it must have been, after having made a confession like that, then to have this stunning statement about Jerusalem and what would happen there.
After six days, Jesus took with Him Peter, and James, and John his brother, and brought them up into a high mountain apart. And He was transfigured.
How gracious. How merciful. How redeeming. How saving. How confirming.
Sorry, pause. Put something in parenthesis—something we said this afternoon in another connection.
How often it is when a committal has been made to a challenge from the Lord: “I surrender to His will, to His way, to His purpose.” That submission, and the next section in the will of God—a position has been taken, a stand has been made, and we have declared ourselves.
How often it is that there comes something so soon afterward that is absolutely disconcerting, so that the vision thing—all that which came from the open heaven, “flesh and blood did not reveal this unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven”—and which came by way of an open heaven, seems to have come into eclipse.
Now hope, picture, change, glory, wonder, and ecstasy give place to suffering, sorrow, disappointment, loss, and, we would say, tragedy. Was it all true? Was it all right?
This is very true to spiritual history. It is true to individual spiritual history, and it is true in the history of the Church. God gives a revelation, a vista, a presentation. He opens up heavenly revelation concerning His Son, and there is a reaction of acceptance and embracing and committal—a testimony.
Then there comes a phase and a period, the features and characteristics of which are so difficult and so dark that you wonder if ever it was the truth, if there really was God’s truth at all—not some illusion, something which for the time was very wonderful, but now, is it right? Is it all right?
Have you gone that way? A time when you seem to be just disintegrated, in pieces, and you do not know how to explain it. You think, “This is all wrong. I feel that this is all wrong. It cannot be right. It is so contrary to what we were led to expect—so altogether other than the vision.”
The glory of the Lord Jesus broke upon our hearts as from heaven, and we committed ourselves. And now, has it all gone? Have the dark clouds gathered over it? Are you asking questions as to the past—whether it was right, whether it was true, whether it was of man, or just yourself?
Every revelation of the Lord Jesus will be, sooner or later, subject to a tremendous test and trial: the trial of seeming eclipse. And you can doubt it all.
Now, what is the point of the transfiguration? Calvary is not the end. The cross is not the end. The darkness and the shadows are not the end.
The testing and the trial and the suffering—the eclipse of everything—is not the end. The end is glory. The aim is magnificent.
The Lord Jesus did not just put the transfiguration there; God the Father put the transfiguration there. I do not know that the Lord Jesus went up into the mountain knowing that He was going to be transfigured. He just withdrew into the mountain. One of the writers says it was for prayer with His disciples. When He was there, He was transfigured. But God took this in hand to show that although there must be this phase of the cross, this terrible thing represented by Jerusalem, all that was centred in Jerusalem, that is not the end.
It is not the suffering, and the shame, and the reproach that is the horizon of God. It is the glory of His Son—His Son glorified. On the way to that, you may go by Calvary, but at the end is transfiguration.
And do not forget, dear friends, that this transfiguration of the Lord Jesus has a counterpart in believers. Paul, writing his second letter to the Corinthians, says:
We all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews says the same thing in other words:
We see Jesus crowned with glory and honour, bringing many sons unto glory.
Peter, so many years after this, wrote his letters. He had got through the darkness now, through the clouds, through the shadows—got through all the perplexity. He said, “This voice we heard when we were with Him in the holy mount, and there came from the excellent glory such a word.”
Is it all clear now? Do not be clouded by the cross. The transfiguration is there not only as an isolated incident, or an epoch in the life of the Son of Man. It is there as representing the horizon of God for all His redeemed ones: transformed and transfigured and glorified with His glory.
Let us believe. Let us ask the Lord to strengthen us to believe that if all that to which we did commit ourselves—the full belief that it was heaven’s revelation to us—has passed into the shadows and clouds, surrounded with questions and difficulties, and seems no longer to be so gloriously real as it once was, there is a meaning in this phase.
But the end, the end, is not this phase. The end is the glory: the mountaintop of transfiguration, Christ transfigured as the horizon of God’s redeemed creation. Nothing less than that, whatever may intervene in the meantime.
But here, while that ultimate horizon is brought into view as glory, the way toward realization is the way of the cross. It is the way of the cross. It cannot be otherwise.
But this is something to know: when you or we really do get something from God, it really does come from God. If it could truly be said, “Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father”—if it is not just a mental apprehension which will not stand up to the ordeal, if it is not just an acceptance—
This is not just an acceptance, an assent to some doctrine, some truth, which will not carry us through. But if it can be said truly, if it is a fact that the thing came from God to our hearts, right from God the Father, something is done. Something is done.
And there may be an appearance of dark eclipse, deep sorrow and suffering and perplexity and bewilderment, but that something done will survive. We will come back again. Look at Peter as representative. He got it from the Father.
The very story of Jerusalem threw him off his balance, disconcerted him, broke him to pieces; and then the facts of the cross. Awful story, is it not? We read it this afternoon—that story in the court of the high priest: the man who denied, the protestations.
It is a tempestuous storm. The ordeal is a terrible one. The cross is something most devastating for the natural man. But something has been done, put within, that is going to come up again out of that depth.
And Peter will forget the intervening darkness, and the mount of transfiguration and his own spiritual position will be linked: “This voice we heard when we were with Him in the holy mount.” There is no reference at all to what came between—Jerusalem and himself.
He is on that spiritual mount now. You read his letters: full of glory, full of grace. Something has been done.
This is why the cross was coming—or one of the reasons why this devastating experience must come: to find out and prove that God has done something in us.
If you and I can go back upon anything that we in the past have called a revelation from God, something shown to us by the Lord, and we can just throw it overboard and write it off, saying, “Well, that belonged to the past. It does not hold good any longer,” let it be understood that that never came into us by revelation of the Holy Spirit.
You cannot—you cannot depart from something that God has done in you, no matter what the time, the testing, yes, the devastation of pain, perhaps long drawn out. You cannot depart from it. It is something done. It has become a part of yourself.
You cannot say, “Well, I have left that now,” or, “I have gone beyond that now,” or, “That is something that I once thought was very good, but I can dispense with that now.” Nothing that comes from God—even though it might be in those precious elementary things from which you have to move forward—nothing in the future cancels out anything that God has done.
So I see this man: first, his committal and confession, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”; and then I see that same man broken, shattered, devastated; and then I see that man afterward transfigured.
The thing that was done on that mountain had perhaps passed out of his consciousness during the ordeal, but it nevertheless survived the ordeal. That is how it must be.
Oh, do take that to heart. Do take it to heart. It will be the test of reality: whether it has been real, or imitation, artificial—something less than revelation into our very being.
Can you give it up? Can you let it go? Can you discard it? Can you write it off? Can you write it down? Then God Almighty never revealed that to your heart. It will hold fast, though it may all seem to have gone. It will come back with glory.
This is the foundation which is laid deeper, deeper than our human frailty, deeper than Peter’s human failures. Say all that you like about Peter and his weakness and breakdown—all that. Yes, it is all true, all true, and Peter would be the first to confess and admit it.
But something had been done because of human frailty. Thank God. If it were left to our strength, it would be a poor look-out for the truth. God must do something that is stronger than all the forces in us and outside of us.
Now then, we close. You can see in the last phase of this transfiguration the great principle coming up again: the great principle of the horizon and its realization.
We have said that, had it been for the Lord Jesus Himself personally and alone, this could have been His way into glory. Other men, on lesser ground, have come into glory. Two men appeared with Him on this mount: Moses, who had gone into glory, and Elijah, who was caught up in the chariot of fire. They went in, but they never made anything perfect. They went away with their work still incomplete.
They had their personal reward. All right, the Lord Jesus might have had a personal reward of glory. But at that point, when He could have gone through—and you know that some translate the words, “who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising shame,” in another way—whether the translation is correct or not, the fact is there.
At that very point, when on His own account, by His own merit, in His own right, He could have gone through as the glorified Son of Man, He turned round from the glory and came down.
You know what was there at the foot of the mountain: a world in suffering, in sorrow, in misery, and a demon-possessed boy. He came down, renounced the glory again, said no to the open door into heaven for Himself, and then, in fact, said, “I cannot accept that alone. I must bring many sons to share it with Me. I must go down, for that is why I came.”
That horizon is not myself individually, as a person. It never is with any of us. The horizon is mankind to be brought to glory. So He came down. He accepted the cross, accepted all that shame and that sorrow, that ignominy.
We are more amazed every time we read the story of His trial and death, all that accompanied it, and sense: this is God incarnate; this is the Lord of glory; this is the Prince of life; this is the eternal Son of God. Oh, it is beyond us.
But why? Simply because He knew that He had not come for His own glory. He had come for the glory of His Father, which was to be manifested in the mankind that He had made.
God has made man, and God is not going to be satisfied to have all men as they are. He will only be satisfied when men are glorified. Men can refuse to be glorified, can refuse God’s horizon, can refuse Christ, God’s realm and sphere, and miss it all.
You and I, dear friends, are called, says the Word, unto His eternal glory. That is where the Father will be satisfied, and having committed Himself for the will and pleasure of the Father, He has come down from the mountain of His own satisfaction.
That is the principle: the servant spirit—for the Father, for man. The service.
Shall we go on with it? We repeat: when the great end is finally reached, all things, as the Word says, are gathered together, summed up in Christ. God reaches that end where everything is not only within the horizon as a realm, but in character is conformed to the Lord Jesus.
The chief feature and characteristic of heaven will be this abandonment to serving one another, and serving. That is what it will be like. Think that it is like that. But it will be like that.
Everybody, everybody thinking of what they can do for somebody, without any thought of what they are going to get out of it—either praise, or exaltation, or reputation, reward, or anything else. Just abandoned to the interests of one another all the time, for the Lord, as unto the Lord.
This is foreshadowed in the Word. We are told to begin that now. Everything is unto the Lord, in the Church as unto the Lord.
Well, may the Lord bless His Word.