Redemption Accomplished and Applied: Glorification

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.

Redemption Accomplished and Applied: Union with Christ

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 ninth chapter of Part 2: The Order of Application. You can read Tim’s summary here.

The subject of this chapter is the believer’s union with Christ. You’ll not find union with Christ in most orders of salvation, but  John Murray includes it—and I’m glad—in his discussion of the application of redemption.

Union with Christ, he says, is unlike the phases in the application of redemption already discussed in this book because “in its broader aspects it underlies every step in the application of redemption.” What’s more, union with Christ extends beyond the application of redemption.

• Eternal election is “in Christ”, so at the very beginning of salvation, we find union with Christ.
• When he died on the cross and rose again, Christ was united with his people. “In the Beloved” we have redemption.
• New creation is “in Christ Jesus.” It is through union with Christ that we are created anew.
• Our new life continues through union with Christ, in the “fellowship of Jesus’ resurrection.”
• Believers die in Christ. Death is real, but “the separated elements of the person are still united to Christ.”
• Believers will be resurrected and glorified in Christ.

There you have it: Union with Christ comes from eternity past and reaches its full purpose in the consummation. It runs from “no beginning” to “no end.” There is, for the believer, no way to think “of the past, present, or future apart from union with Christ.” It is, as you can see, a comprehensive matter.

Yet there is a specific time in our lives when we become, by our effectual calling, actual partakers of our union with Christ. Until that time, scripture says we are “without Christ” and “children of wrath.”

What is the nature of the union with Christ in which we come to partake?

• It is spiritual, not as some sort of airy-fairy thing, but as something worked and maintained by the Holy Spirit. Christ “dwells in us by the Spirit.” Murray writes that “it is a union of an intensely spiritual character consonant with the nature and work of the Holy Spirit so that in a real way surpassing our power of analysis Christ dwells in his people and his people dwell in him.”
• It is mystical. This word, of course, must be understood in a scriptural way. It “is mystical because it is a mystery.” All the varied illustrations in scripture used to picture this relationship should tell us that this union is something not exactly like anything else. It is communion with Christ and like no communion among men. Our faith “must have the passion and warmth of love and communion because communion with God is the crown and apex of true religion.”

Yes, “[u]nion with Christ is the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation.” We are elected in Christ; redeemed in Christ; called, regenerated, justified, adopted, and sanctified in Christ. “There is no truth, therefore, more suited to impart confidence and strength, comfort and joy in the Lord than this one of union with Christ.”

And there is still one more important thing about union with Christ. It brings us not only into communion with Christ, but through him to communion with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. Or maybe it is better to say, as Murray does, that union with Christ “draws along with it” union with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Here is mysticism on the highest plane. It is not the mysticism of vague unintelligible feeling or rapture…. It is faith solidly founded on the revelation deposited for us in the Scripture and it is actively receiving that revelation by the inward witness of the Holy Spirit. But it is also faith that stirs the deepest springs of emotion in the raptures of holy love and joy.

Redemption Accomplished and Applied: Perseverance

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 eigth chapter of Part 2: The Order of Application.

John Murray starts this chapter by admitting that there are, at first glance, strong arguments against the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. We all know, from scripture and history and our own experience, those who have appeared to be genuine believers but have fallen away from the faith.

The first step, then, in building the case for this doctrine is establishing what it is not. “It does not mean,” he writes, “that every one who professes faith in Christ and who is accepted as a believer in the fellowship of the saints is secure for eternity and may entertain the assurance of eternal salvation.”

No, Jesus himself gives us the criterion for determining true believers: true believers continue in the faith until the end. The kind of temporary faith that doesn’t endure can look very much like the real thing.

…[I]t is possible to have very uplifting, ennobling, reforming, and exhilarating experience of the power and truth of the gospel, to come into such close contact with he supernatural forces which are operative in God’s kingdom of grace that these forces produce effects in us which to human observation are hardly distinguishable from those produced by God’s regenerating and sanctifying grace and yet be not partakers of Christ and heirs of eternal life.

But true believers persevere. They sin, they may backslide, but they will not finally fall away because they “are kept by the power of God through faith” until the end.

What scripture does Murray appeal to in his defense of perseverance of the saints? He starts with Romans 8:28-30, the Golden Chain of Redemption. The called are justified and the justified are glorified. If true saints—those who are called and justified—can be lost, it would go against what Paul is plainly teaching in these verses.

Next he moves to the teachings of Jesus in John 6 and 10. Jesus says that those given to him by the Father—who are also those who believe, who are also those who come to him, who are also those who are drawn by the Father—will be raised on the last day. And no one who is given to Jesus by the Father can be snatched away. In fact, believers have a kind of double security because they are held in the hand of Christ and the hand of the Father. Two powerful hands are grasping us tightly until the end.

Have we not in this truth new reason to marvel at the grace of God and the immutability of his love?

When my kids were younger, they’d enthusiastically affirm something by saying, “Yes! Yes! Double yes!” Doubly held so that we can never perish gets a double yes from me.

---

Glossary for Part 2, Chapter 8

• quietism: a form of mysticism that requires withdrawal from human effort.