God Is the Gospel: Meditations on God's Love as the Gift of Himself by John Piper

Author:John Piper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Spirituality, Non-Fiction, Religion
ISBN: 9781581347517
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2005-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

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G O D I S T H E G O S P E L

unseen glory of Christ in the gospel is the key to inner transformation from day to day and from glory to glory.

Nevertheless this inner transformation is the first step in total transformation, including the transformation of our bodies. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11). Being conformed to the image of Christ will, in due time, include conformity to his glorious body: “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Phil. 3:20-21). “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Cor. 15:49).

TOTAL SIGHT WILL MEAN TOTAL CHANGE

This final physical glorification is not disconnected from beholding the glory of the Lord—neither now nor then. Only by beholding the glory of the Lord are we kept on the path that leads to the glorified Christ. There is a “holiness without which no one will see the Lord”

(Heb. 12:14). That holiness is our transformation “from one degree of glory to another,” and that happens by keeping our gaze fixed on the glory of Christ in the gospel. Therefore, our final meeting with Christ and our final transformation into his glorious image depends now on beholding the glory of the Lord.

But the connection between beholding the glory of God in the face of Christ and being finally and physically changed holds true at the end as well. This is expressed in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet

appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him,13 because we shall see him as he is. ” The completion of our becoming will happen at the completion of our beholding. Seeing him “as he is” implies that the way we see him now is incomplete.

13 The “him” in this context is God the Father. But the whole drift of Paul’s thinking in 2 Corinthians 3:18–4:6 is to show that the glory of the Father shines in the face of Christ, and the glory of Christ is the glory of the Father. So I am not making a distinction here.

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