We continue our consideration of the pathway of glory.
We have traced the glory through the Book of Acts up to a certain point, more especially in the life of the Apostle Paul.
When we come to the end of that book, we find ourselves in the presence of the consummate and inclusive revelation, expression, and manifestation of the glory at the end of the earthly course of the Lord’s servant, Paul.
It is impressive to note, on the one side, an accumulation of opposing forces, as you have presented in the last chapter of that book. Way back there in Palestine: the imprisonment at Caesarea for two years; the tremendous uprising of the whole Jewish region and hierarchy; and Gentile cooperation, as in the case of the Lord Jesus.
Bitter animosity and hatred, and a determination to destroy him, led at last to his being sent to Rome for the final judgment and the putting into effect of all that united earth and hell to have this man, and what he represented, done away with—finished.
Then we have all the threatening circumstances, particularly threatening through the one ambition of his life: to preach the Word in the great imperial centre of the world, Rome. Every circumstance seemed to say, “That will not be. That cannot be. You never will realize that life desire.”
The Lord goes to him and says, “Cheer up, Paul. As thou hast testified concerning Me at Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome.” And through it all—the storms naturally and the storms spiritually—the little word is, “And so we came to Rome.”
At Rome, a prisoner. All the adverse forces—spiritual, satanic, and human—were determined to bring that ministry to an end by bringing that man to an end.
Over the wide area, things moved toward that. In the churches in Asia, which owed their existence instrumentally to this man, and all that they had spiritually to him under the Lord, “all they that are in Asia” turned away from him. His brethren betrayed him.
You have an accumulation of things gathered and focused upon that prison in Rome, all saying, with their own meaning, limitation, curtailment, shortening of tenure, influence, and life.
That is the natural, satanic situation, very imperfectly described and set out. On the human side, looked at strictly as a natural situation, everything in that prison and those chains seemed to say what the enemy meant: “This is an end. This is a curtailment in every way.”
And yet, looked at from heaven’s standpoint and from history’s standpoint, it is the most glorious chapter of the whole book.
Though earth said, “Limitation,” heaven said, “Enlargement.” Though earth said, “Never; you will not go through,” heaven said, “Expansion.” They said, “Death and an end”; heaven said, “A new beginning,” not only of the man in heaven, but of his ministry.
For it was out of that prison, and all that was set for the ending of that ministry, that there came the greatest ministry that he fulfilled.
These letters from that prison embrace a priceless divine revelation that can be found nowhere else—an enrichment for the church beyond all telling, an expansion of ministry far, far beyond the whole range of his missionary journeys personally.
Today, in every country of this world, Paul lives. Perhaps not in every spot in every country, but in every country—from far east to far west, from far north to far south—that man is known, and his ministry has gone.
Today, through all the battle and controversy over what is called Paulinism in the theological world, Paul is on top. They just cannot cope with this man. They cannot set him aside. They cannot account for him.
You probably will not know a good deal of that battle. There are others who have really studied, through many years, this conflict of ideologies, philosophies, and theologies focusing upon this man, Paul. At one point the whole thing became just this issue: “Back from Paul to Christ; back to Christ, or back to Jesus, away from Paul. Paul has betrayed Christianity.” There was a terrific battle on that ground.
Today, the very school that was represented by that position is saying that Paul is the interpreter of Christ, the supreme interpreter. That is just by the way, as part of the whole situation.
This man’s life started in a blaze of glory. Glory descended and struck him. As we said earlier, that glory went right through his life. He never got away from that—never got away from that. He had seen the glory of the Lord.
Although the end of disaster seemed naturally to be so complete, so much speaking for the apparent triumph of the forces which were against him, two thousand years have not quenched that glory. He shines with it today.
We are but a little minute fragment of a very great worldwide whole here at this time, glorying in the glory which has come through that man.
So I say that the last chapter of the Book of Acts is just the consummate and inclusive setting forth of the whole book, showing the pathway of glory.
What is the pathway of glory? It has two sides. The one side is the reduction of the natural human element. It demands that. It will always work that way: the reduction, the nullifying, the weakening, the emptying, the undoing of the natural human element in man.
Running alongside of that is the positive increase of Christ. The pathway of glory is, on the one side, an increasing, ever-increasing taking aside of the natural man, even as a Christian and in the work of the Lord, bringing more and more to the consciousness that it must be the Lord, or there will be nothing at all.
The human factor is increasingly of no account. That is the pathway to glory.
It is not a happy thing, perhaps, to contemplate if you look at it on that side alone, but it is true. Here is this man, naturally and humanly in weakness, naturally and humanly in limitation, as a man.
But there is the other side: the enlargement of Christ, the Lord—the mighty, marvellous enlargement of Christ.
These letters from the prison are an unmatched setting forth of the greatness of the Lord Jesus. You have only to read the first chapter of the letter to the Ephesians to see the place the Lord Jesus is given.
Now, you can see this as well if we do take at least a glance at it by the opposite. Go right through your Bible and you will see that whenever man put forth his hand upon divine things, the glory went out.
That is the word written over Eden, is it not? The Lord’s precaution: “Lest he put forth his hand.” The Lord knew quite well that if he put forth his hand on divine things, that was an end of the glory. And that is exactly what happened.
Right through your Old Testament you can see this, case after case, when man pressed in—pressed in—and put his hand upon the right thing, the glory went out.
You know how Isaiah says:
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up;
and His train filled the temple.
But the tragedy of Uzziah—you remember that he was the man, and one of the greatest, an idol of Isaiah the prophet himself—reached great dimensions of power and influence and earthly glory, and then presumed upon it. He forced his way into the temple, to the sanctuary, to the altar.
The priests came upon him and said, “It pertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord.” But he spurned the warning. He was smitten with leprosy and died in shame, with all his own earthly glory gone.
He forced himself in to lay his hand upon divine things. So far as he was concerned, and for that time, the glory departed.
You have a great reversing of the situation when Isaiah saw the Lord on the throne: then the glory came back. When man usurps the place of God, the glory goes out.
You remember David with Uzzah, do you not? Remember the ark? The ark is always the ark of the glory—remember that—always the ark of the glory. The glory of Israel is focused upon and centred in that ark.
David, with the purest and best motives, sought to bring the ark to Jerusalem. Mistakenly, he formed a new cart after the Philistine manner, put the ark on it—contrary to the divine Word—and brought it up to Jerusalem.
They were apparently having a very good time on the road until they reached the threshing floor. The oxen stumbled, and Uzzah put forth his hand upon the ark—his hand on the ark—and the Lord smote Uzzah there, so that he died.
The ark was turned aside, and for long, long weary months—it says the time was long—it was in the house of Obed-edom. Israel was without it; the glory had gone, because man put his hand on divine things.
And so we could go on like that, but there it is.
The glory of life, the glory of joy, the glory of spiritual fullness, and the glory of divine power depart, are overshadowed, eclipsed, or limited. It is usually because man’s hand has touched the testimony.
Man’s nature has insinuated itself—that is, his judgment, his idea, his thought, his will, his emotions.
David’s mind got to work. David’s emotions got to work; it was a very emotional thing, very much so. David’s will got to work, so that his soul—mind, heart, and will—came out to touch divine things. It was man.
Whenever it is like that, when our judgments, our emotions, and our decisions lay hold of the things of God, we will be left without the glory. The glory will depart, or the glory will be under eclipse; the glory will be limited. It is a long story: “Lest he put forth his hand.”
Well, that is the other side. That is a truth, friends, I say, that we have to get down to, because that is so largely the trouble today. There is an absence of the glory or a limiting of the glory.
Our hearts cry for the glory to return. We are always asking and praying that the glory of the Lord may be manifested, known, and felt. We have got to get out of the way before that can be. It is the Lord’s place to be all—the Lord to be all.
So, on the one side, there is the limiting of human abilities and powers—mind, will, ability. On the other side, by that limiting or excluding, comes the increase of Christ: Christ is our wisdom; Christ is our strength; Christ is our will; Christ is all.
Dear friends, that is the pathway of His glory. It is painful to the flesh—very painful—because the flesh is very strong, stronger than we would believe. It is there.
There we must finish, and finish on a happier note—much happier. We must understand what the glory demands and see the way of glory.
We do want to have, at the end, a final look at the ultimate glory, so that we remember Peter’s word:
And when the chief Shepherd shall be manifested, ye shall receive the crown of glory that fadeth not away.
A crown of glory—that is the end. It is a symbolic word, of course. I am not very ambitious to have a literal crown upon my head, and for the life of me, I do not see how I am ever going to have three crowns on my head literally. There are three crowns mentioned in the Word.
It means having your life and your work crowned—capped, if you like—with glory. That is the last picture: the crown of glory.
What is it? Well, I have mentioned that there are three crowns. You know them well, probably.
There is the crown of righteousness:
Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give to me at that day; and not to me only, but also to all them that have loved His appearing.
What was he meaning? At the last part of his life, in one of his prison letters, there is that beautiful letter to his beloved and longed-for children in Philippi. He said:
Forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before,
I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Again he said:
Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect; but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus.
And again:
That I may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law,
but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.
The last long cry of the apostle was that the righteousness of God through Christ should adorn him, that he should attain unto it; that he should stand before the throne of eternal burnings without fear, and justified—stand in a righteousness not his own, perfect in righteousness.
That is what he meant by the crown of righteousness: to stand before the eternal throne in holiness, clothed with divine righteousness, with all his own unrighteousness and imperfection gone forever; robed in righteousness.
He called that the crowning thing for his life, the full realization of his ambition: “I may stand perfect, lacking nothing. I am not already perfect. I have not already attained. But if only I can attain to be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own goodness, but His righteousness!”
Glorious end! That is a crown to covet, a crown to suffer for, to live for, to be abandoned for. A crown indeed of glory.
For, dear friends, you and I are in agreement on this: if there is one thing we long for, it is full and final escape from our own sinfulness, this fallen makeup and all that it carries within. The crown of righteousness.
And then the crown of life:
Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life.
Crowned life. What is that? Faithful unto death, to be answered with a crown of life.
All right, it is perfectly fearless. The crown of life means that death has no power; it is robbed of its power. Death as a power is destroyed, and life—divine resurrection life—is mightier than all the power of death.
“Stand in the power of His resurrection.” In that same letter, in the same passage of that letter, as we have quoted Philippians:
That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection.
The cry at the end of his life was, “The power of His resurrection”—that is, the ultimate and final nullifying of death in all its forms and in its whole power; standing in the good of a life which can never, never be touched by death again.
Move over to John, and the repetition: “There shall be no more death.” Crowned life.
And then the third crown is the one of which we are speaking: the crown of glory. You know what we have said about glory. Glory is the expression of the full satisfaction of God’s nature.
Can that ever be for me, for you—that we come to the full satisfaction of God’s own nature? That is what He has called us to, redeemed us for, and is working in us unto. And we will walk to the end for this crown of glory.
Perhaps at the end of our longest life, we shall not have reached the place where we do at that point utterly, fully, and finally satisfy the nature of God. For in our last moments, at our last breath, there will still be a lot of imperfection about us.
But remember, when He takes the responsibility of ending the process, He makes up all that would have been if He had not done so. That is, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall be changed.
All that we lack then will be added. All that would have been if we had lived on and on and on under His grace and under His power, I think, will be put to our account.
I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness.
I go to sleep not altogether in Thy likeness, but I will awake in Thy likeness. It is just that mighty thing that God is going to add to those who are faithful to the end—not perfect, but in the way of being changed into the same glory.
Not perfect, but in the way of being changed into the same glory, from one degree to another, from one image to another.
The crown of glory is God’s final approval—God’s final approval.
Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
And believe me, the Lord will never be joyful really over what is not according to His own nature. When He says, “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord,” He will have got what His heart has been set upon.
The crown of glory is God’s full and complete approval, satisfaction. Oh, what a wonderful, almost unbelievable prospect there is along the pathway of glory!
Well, I must leave all the rest with you—all the other connections of riches—and this very, very imperfect and limited setting forth of the riches of His grace and the riches of His glory.
May the Lord Himself follow on and teach all that we cannot teach, all that we have yet to know about this; and may He use even this for our help, our encouragement, to go on in the way of glory unto the everlasting glory.