The glories of the Lord Jesus are threefold — personal, official and moral. His personal glory He veiled, save where faith discovered it or an occasion demanded it. His official glory He veiled likewise; He did not walk through the land as either the divine Son from the bosom of the Father or as the authoritative Son of David. Such glories were commonly hid as He passed on in the circumstances of life day by day. But His moral glory could not be hid. He could not be less than perfect in everything—it belonged to Him; it was Himself. From its intense excellency, it was too bright for the eye of man, and man was under constant exposure and rebuke from it. But there it shone, whether man could bear it or not.
If the darkness comprehend not the light of His personal or official glory, His moral glory shall only find occasion to shine the brighter, for there is nothing in morals or in human character finer than His willingness to take a low place in the midst of men and the consciousness of intrinsic glory before God.
His Holiness and Grace
How consistent was the combination of holiness and grace in Him. He is near in our weariness, our hunger or our danger. He is apart from our tempers and our selfishness. His holiness made Him an utter stranger in such a polluted world; His grace kept Him ever active in such a needy and afflicted world. And this sets off His life, I may say, in great moral glory — that though forced, by the quality of the scene around Him, to be a lonely One, yet was He drawn forth by the need and sorrow of it to be the active One. “I know no one,” says another, “so kind, so condescending, who is come down to poor sinners, as He. I trust His love more than I do Mary’s, or any saint’s; not merely His power as God, but the tenderness of His heart as man. No one ever showed such or proved it so well — none has inspired one with such confidence. Let others go to saints if they will; I trust Jesus’ kindness more.”
While poor, nothing that in the least savored of meanness is ever seen attaching to His condition. He never begs, though He have not a penny, for when He wanted to see one He had to ask to be shown it. He never runs away, though exposed, and His life in jeopardy, in the place where He was. He withdraws Himself, or passes by as hidden. And thus, again, I may say, nothing mean, nothing unbecoming, but full personal dignity attaches to Him, though poverty and exposure were His lot every day. Blessed and beautiful! Who could preserve under our eye such an Object, so perfect, so unblemished, so exquisitely, delicately pure, in all the minute and most ordinary details of human life!
His Way of Imparting and Receiving
He asked His disciples in the hour of Gethsemane to watch with Him, but He did not ask them to pray for Him. He would claim sympathy. He prized it in the hour of weakness and pressure, and would have the hearts of His companions bound to Him then. Such a desire was of the moral glory that formed the human perfection that was in Him, but while He felt this and did this, He could not ask them to stand as in the divine presence on His behalf. He would have them give themselves to Him, but He could not seek them to give themselves to God for Him.
The Lord was continually giving. He made great communications where He found but little communion. This magnifies His goodness. There was, as it were, nothing to draw Him forth, and yet He was ever imparting. He was as the Father in heaven, of whom He Himself spoke, making His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sending His rain on the just and the unjust. This tells us what He is, to His praise — what we are, to our shame.
The light of God shines at times before us, leaving us, as we may have power, to discern it, to enjoy it, to use it, to follow it. It does not so much challenge us or exact of us, but, as I said, it shines before us, that we may reflect it, if we have grace. And such, in a great sense, is the moral glory of the Lord Jesus. Our first duty to that light is to learn from it what He is. We are not to begin by anxiously and painfully measuring ourselves by it, but by calmly and happily and thankfully learning Him in all His perfect moral humanity.
The Lord Jesus restored to God His complacency in man, which sin or Adam had taken from Him. God’s repentance that He had made man (Gen. 6:66And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. (Genesis 6:6)) was exchanged for delight and glory in man again. And as He was thus representing man to God, so was He representing God to man.
The Right to Be Glorified
When the Lord Jesus was here, and thus manifested as man to God, God’s delight in Him was ever expressing itself. In His person and ways, man was morally glorified, so that when the end or perfection of His course came, He could go “straightway” to God, as the sheaf of firstfruits of old was taken directly and immediately, just as it was, out of the field, needing no process to fit it for the presence and acceptance of God (Lev. 23:1010Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest: (Leviticus 23:10)). The title of Jesus to glory was a moral one. He had a moral right to be glorified; His title was in Himself. And the cross being the completeness and perfection of the full form of moral glory in Him, it was at this moment He utters these words, “Now is the Son of Man glorified.” Then He adds, “And God is glorified in Him.”
At the cross God was as perfectly glorified as also the Son of Man was, though the glory was another glory. The Son of Man was glorified then, by His completing that full form of moral beauty which had been shining in Him all through His life. Nothing of it was then to be wanting, as nothing from the beginning up to that late hour had ever mingled with it that was unworthy of it. The hour was then at hand when it was to shine out in the very last ray that was to give it its full brightness. But God was also glorified then, because all that was of Him was either maintained or displayed. His rights were maintained, His goodness displayed. Mercy and truth, righteousness and peace were either satisfied or gratified. God’s truth, holiness, love and majesty were magnified in a way and illustrated in a light beyond all that could ever have been known of them elsewhere. The cross is the moral wonder of the universe.
The Heads of Two Creations
The first man, upon his sin, had been put outside creation, as, I may say, this Second Man (being, as He also was, “the Lord from heaven”), upon His glorifying of God, was seated at the head of creation, as at the right hand of the Majesty on high. Jesus is in heaven as a glorified Man, because here on earth God had been glorified in Him as the obedient One in life and death.
In one sense, this perfectness of the Son of Man, this moral perfectness, is all for us. It lends its savor to the blood which atones for our sins. It was as the cloud of incense, which went into the presence of God, together with the blood, on the day of atonement (Lev. 16). But, in another sense, this perfection is too much for us. It is high; we cannot attain to it. It overwhelms the moral sense, as far as we look at it in the recollection of what we ourselves are, while it fills us with admiration, as far as we look at it as telling us what He is. The personal judicial glory, when displayed of old, was overwhelming. The most favored of the children of men could not stand before it, as Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, and Peter and John experienced the same. And this moral glory, in like manner exposing us, is overwhelming. Yet, faith is at home with Jesus. Can we, I ask, treat such a One with fear or suspicion? Can we doubt Him? Could we have taken a distant place from Him who sat at the well with the woman of Sychar? Did she herself take such a place? Surely, beloved, we should seek intimacy with Him.
The Human and the Divine
How perfect was this! How perfect, surely, was everything, and each in its generation — the human virtues, the fruits of the anointing that was on Him, and His divine glories. The natures in the one Person are unconfused, but the effulgence of the divine is chastened, the homeliness of the human is elevated. There is nothing like this — there could be nothing like this — in the whole creation. And yet the human was human, and the divine was divine. Jesus slept in the boat: He was man. Jesus quelled the winds and the waves: He was God.
Every step of His life and death is important to us. All that He did and said was a real, truthful expression of Himself, as He Himself was a real, truthful expression of God. And so, we reach God, in the certain and unclouded knowledge of Him, through the ordinary paths and activities of the life of this divine Son of Man.
J. G. Bellett, adapted from
The Moral Glory of the Lord Jesus Christ