I’m participating in Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program. The book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is the very last chapter, which Tim has summarized here.
In this last chapter, we reach the final phase of the application of redemption, the believer’s glorification. From the beginning, this has been God’s goal for us and the purpose of Christ’s redemptive work.
But what is glorification? Let’s start with what it is not: It is not what happens to us directly after death. For the believer, the state after death is a blessed one in which we are completely holy and with Jesus, but glorification is better than that. Glorification is
the complete and final redemption of the whole person when in the integrity of body and spirit the people of God will be conformed to the image of the risen, exalted, and glorified Redeemer, when the very body of their humiliation will be conformed to the body of Christ’s glory.
Glorification is our resurrection and those who have died wait until Christ comes again for it. This means glorification is the one aspect of redemption that we all enter together. All the other steps happen individually, but in glorification we are, all of us, together with Christ. (Do you find this picture as thrilling as I do?) Murray says that this may not seem important, but it is, for the togetherness of glorification is something stressed in the New Testament. The Lord descends and the living and the resurrected dead “will together be snatched up to meet the Lord in the air.”
How could it be any other way? Everything in the redemptive process comes to us through union with Christ, and the design of Christ’s work is to present to himself a glorious church. It all comes together in
a perfect coincidence of the revelation of the Father’s glory, of the revelation of the glory of Christ, and of the liberty of the glory of the children of God.
Not coincidence in the sense of fluke or serendipity, but as events that occurs at the same time. And yes, it is perfect!
Glorification brings “to final fruition the purpose and grace which was given in Christ Jesus” and is connected with
- the coming of Christ in glory. Our hope is focused on the coming of our glorious Savior, and our “glorification is glorification with Christ.” Remove the glorification with Christ, Murray says, and you have “robbed the glorification of believers of the one thing that enables them to look forward to this event with confidence, with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”
- the renewal of creation. Yes, creation itself is delivered from corruption with us in the same glorious event. Creation waits, groaning, for the glorification of God’s children.
Glorification, then, means a whole new world. All the affects of sin in us and in our world—all of the curse—is gone together and forever.
Throughout Christian history there has been a recurring heresy that regards matter itself as the source of evil. This shows up in the thinking that it is our bodies that are our problem, and that salvation consists of “the immaterial soul [overcoming] the degrading influences emanating from the material and fleshly.” But Murray calls this spiritual sounding teaching “beautiful paganism,” for in the very beginning, human beings were created with bodies and spirits and God pronounced them very good. We were created to have bodies, and without them, we are not complete.
The right doctrine of glorification counters this heresy.
Here we have the concreteness and realism of the Christian hope epitomized in the resurrection to live everlasting and signalized by the descent of Christ from heaven with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God.
And our hope also includes the material universe around us, which will also be delivered from bondage with us. New heavens, new earth, glorified people, and “‘then the end, when he delivers over the kingdom to god and the Father’ and ‘God will be all in all.’”
I’m looking forward in hope to that glorious, glorifying day.