“THE GLAD TIDINGS OF THE GLORY”
E. C. Burr.
The glad tidings are presented under a variety of different titles in the Bible. There is the
‘gospel of God’ which, Mr. Darby suggests, means that the gospel has its origin in God—that is a very powerful thing to grasp. It does not have its origin in man, and you can see as you look round the world or take account of people that you know, that if man had to do with the question of the forgiveness of his sins or the question of his state he would certainly not have dealt with them in the way that God deals with them. The writer, many years ago now, of the tract “Rubbing it out Bit by Bit” hit exactly on the way in which man would deal with his sins. He would take one and try and remedy that, and having done that, he would think that that part of his life was now safe, and would go on and rub out a bit more—trying to put things right one by one. But God has not dealt with things like that. The glad tidings which has its origin in God has met, in one great operation, the whole question of sin, and provided a basis on which the sins of any man, woman or child may be forgiven.
The glad tidings which has its origin in God has as wide a breadth, and as great a power, as God has Himself. There is nothing that God does not know, and He has provided a remedy in the gospel which has its origin in Him for every sin and failure of man, of which He does know. It is no good any of us thinking that we can conceal things from God—He knows and sees everything. What Mr. Darby translates, “Thou art the God who reveals Himself” (Genesis 16: 13), stands in the Authorised Version as “Thou God seest me”. I am not speaking critically of translations of the Bible, but it is well for all of us, young and old, to remember that “Thou God seest me”. And what God sees, He assesses; and God, seeing things according to His own standards and not according to ours, will have a judgment of them according to His own standard. Sorrowfully for man, God finds that even the best that man can do falls short of His standard; and it falls short of God’s standard because man has a wayward will of his own which, being contrary to God, must require God to vindicate Himself against that contrary will. The foundation of sin is that I want to do what I like, whereas, being God’s creature, I should do what He likes—and God has established the gospel of God in order to deal with those questions.
There are many other aspects of the gospel presented in the Bible. “The glad tidings of the glory of the blessed God” (1 Timothy 1: 11), is the gospel that is about the glory of the blessed God; and “the glad tidings of the kingdom” (Matthew 4: 23) is the glad tidings that is about the kingdom. And so, in the scripture that we have read, “the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ” is the glad tidings about the glory of the Christ.
This chapter is quite a delight to preach from. You find in it that Paul is touching things on quite a different level from the way he had touched things in the first epistle to the Corinthians. He is not here concerned with sin in the assembly, and failure, and short-coming.
He is not in this chapter saying, “the other things, whenever I come, I will set in order” 1 Corinthians 11: 34. He is in triumph in this chapter, he is moving in power, and the bearing I would like to give it, is its effectiveness in helping us to live. There are a lot of people who want the gospel in order to help them to die, but this chapter is the gospel that helps you to live—and, beloved, a lot of us need that. I can remember hearing quoted a hymn which said, ‘Teach me to live, ‘twere easier far to die...’ That is the outlook of many, and when things go ill or untowardly with them, what they look for is release and a way out, and the final release is death. Persons will say, ‘Well, I wish I was with the Lord, I wish the Lord would take me’; but, beloved, there is a gospel that helps people to live, and that gospel is the “glad tidings of the glory of the Christ”.
You will have noticed that in this chapter, after what is spoken about in the first two or three verses (which clearly relate to things that belong to sin), the question of sin and sins is not taken up. There can be no gospel that does not take up the question of sin and of sins; but Paul does not say, ‘I have a gospel here that will remove your anxieties and take away your guilt complexes, and remove the worry from your mind’; what he says is, ‘I have such a gospel that will help people to triumph over everything that may appear to be against them in their day-to-day living’. This is the kind of gospel that Paul would have the Corinthians live by. As you can see, it is the gospel that Paul lived by. “Seeing no apparent issue”?—very well, we see no apparent issue, but “our way not entirely shut up”. Why?—Because we have the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ. “Persecuted”?—yes, indeed persecuted, (in another chapter Paul will tell you in detail about his persecutions and his sufferings)—“but not abandoned”. If Paul was not abandoned, who kept him company? The Christ, as to whose glad tidings he was speaking in this chapter. There is no circumstance that is beyond the reach of the glad tidings of a glorified Christ.
As I say, there is no gospel at all that does not deal with those fundamental issues in the life of man which relate to his relationships with God and his having to do with God as the creature of God. God has a right, and an unqualified right, to raise with men and women that He has created the question of where they are in relation to Himself. The two questions that come in at the beginning of Genesis remain. They are questions that have to be asked and answered in every generation. In the end, there is no man or woman that does not have to answer the question addressed to Adam and the question addressed to Cain. First of all, “Where art thou?” Genesis 3: 9. No man or woman born can fail to answer that question. In the end people know that they are confronted with it. People nowadays are brought up in and live lives which characteristically leave God out. Perhaps sometimes we say that a little too freely, because it is likely that in spite of the outward veneer of godlessness and not caring there is something deeper in men which really has some yearning after God. But in the end, when people know that shortly they will have to face God, they come up against this question, “Where art thou?” And God requires that question to be answered.
But men also have to answer the question, “What hast thou done?” Genesis 4: 10. You have to answer it—there is no escape from it. It is very interesting that God has put these two questions at the beginning of the Bible, and God insists that every man and woman shall answer those two questions. “What hast thou done?”—one day, God is going to ask that question at the great white throne. I will not say He will ask you, because I trust that I am speaking to a company in which nobody will be at the great white throne (it is a far greater thing, and a restful thing, to know that you will be at the judgment seat of Christ rather than at the great white throne)—but there God will again raise with men the question that He raised with Cain, “What hast thou done?” And when God raises that question then, from His face the earth and the heaven flee away. There will not be a man or a woman there that will have an excusing answer to the question “What hast thou done?”
God gave Paul to write the epistle to the Romans to tell us the answers to those two questions. Romans, down to chapter 5 verse 11, deals with the question “What hast thou done?” From Romans 5: 11 to chapter 8 deals with the question “Where art thou?” And God has dealt with all that thoroughly, in the detail that He brings out in that epistle. If the question is raised, “What hast thou done?”—and all have sinned. God sets forth Christ as a mercy seat, through faith in His blood. And He offers redemption in Christ Jesus, that is to say, God is not just offering you, as it were, a change of ground, and buying you back (as we understand the word means) from one condition of things in which you are as a sinner, and putting you on new ground; God puts you in another Man. The redemption is in Christ Jesus, that is, God has secured people again through faith in His blood, and has established them, redeemed, in Christ Jesus. That is the answer to “What hast thou done?”
The answer from man, once he is affected by God speaking to him, once some stirring after God has begun to be aroused in his heart, is to say to God, ‘What hast Thou done?’ Is it not? If God says to you, “What hast thou done?” the thing is to say to God, ‘What hast Thou done?’ And God will tell you what He has done.
He has set forth Christ as a mercy seat, through faith in His blood. You can speak to God in the utmost simplicity, and the answer to God’s challenging question to you, “What hast thou done?” is to appeal to what God has done Himself—say to Him, ‘What hast Thou done?’ And you will find the answer again in Romans 8, “He who, yea, has not spared his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall He not also, with him grant us all things?” Romans 8: 32.
Have you found what God has done? God will be asking you. If you do not yet know the answer that meets what you have done, you will, I trust, come to discover what God has done, and then go on and on, exploring and exploring the greatness of the other things that God has done. Say to God, ‘What hast Thou done?’ Ask Him to open it out to you, ask Him to tell you more about it. A lot of us here are getting older but what a thing it is, as you come towards the end of your life, to be dwelling with God on what He has done in relation to what you have done.
The second part of Romans deals with the question, “Where art thou?” It takes you up as sold under sin, but it takes you through until you are established in the liberty of there being no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus. God has Himself provided the answer in the Person of His own beloved Son to the two fundamental questions that He has raised with man.
Therefore, if Paul begins the epistle to the Romans, as he does, by referring to the glad tidings, it is “God’s glad tidings … concerning his Son”, Romans 1: 1–3. That is, God’s interest in the gospel revolves round Christ. Man is the object of it, but God’s interest in the gospel revolves round His beloved Son; and if God has secured the blessing of men through the work that the gospel presents to men, God’s interest in that is that the glory of His beloved Son is extended through men believing in the gospel that relates to him. God’s glad tidings concerning His Son deals with both questions; with the question “What hast thou done?” because God has set Him forth as a mercy seat, and with the question “Where art thou?” because if we have died with Christ we are put on new ground in Christ raised from among the dead by the glory of the Father.
I press on you that, in the end, everybody has to answer those two questions, and God has put them at the beginning of His word in order that they might be focused in the mind of man,
“Where art thou?” and “What hast thou done?” The glad tidings of God—the gospel that has its origin in God—meets both those questions, it provides a perfect answer to them. God’s glad tidings concerning His Son provides the answer—the glad tidings of the glory of the blessed God—that provides the answer, because God has glorified Himself in blessing man through what He has set out in the gospel, and it has required His own giving of His Son in order that His own glory in relation to man and his sin might be thoroughly secured.
All this has to do with the question of sin and of sins, and these questions are fundamental.
Nobody can live what can rightly be called a christian life unless they know that the question of their sins and their sin has been settled. Many have tried it. Many have tried even to imitate the life of Jesus here. Fancy trying to imitate the life of Jesus if you do not know that the question of your sins is settled; but even more, fancy trying to imitate the life of Jesus if you do not know that the question of sin has been resolved! You are trying to do something when there is a principle in you perverse to the very thing that you are trying to do. Men are trying with a characteristic fault in their lives to produce something perfect for God, and it is quite impossible. What is needed is a new man, and God has established means, by the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, of establishing man so that he can live a christian life.
But Paul, in this chapter, is not taking up the question of sin—he disposes of it in the second verse, “We have rejected the hidden things of shame”—that is a man who is in the gain of what Christ has done for him through the glad tidings. Nobody who has not proved what the death of Christ means, in relation to sins and to sin, can possibly say, “We have rejected the hidden things of shame”. There is no power in man to reject the hidden things of shame apart from the work of God in him. Indeed, there is no power to reject the hidden things of shame unless a man has the gain of the effective power of the Holy Spirit; and nobody has the Holy Spirit who has not already received the forgiveness of sins. The remission of sins and the receipt of the Holy Spirit cannot be put out in any other order than that.
But Paul says, “We have rejected the hidden things of shame”. A man who says that is absolutely clear as to the fundamental things that I have been speaking of. If you say to him, ‘What about the question “What hast thou done?”’—‘I know that what I did is met, and I have rejected the hidden things of shame.’ ‘What about “Where art thou?”’—‘I am no longer in the things in which I was held—I have rejected the hidden things of shame.’ ‘What are you going to live by?’ “The radiancy of the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ”. This is elevated far above the solutions and remedies and prescriptions that men find for the lives of one another. They have various devices—a favourite one is to provide full liberty for man’s will, and the reaction from that after a little while is that everyone has to be bound by one man’s will. Men go from one extreme to the other. First of all, everybody does as they like, and then at the other extreme, everybody does as one individual likes. But Paul has a power in him which is going to hold him, help him, see him right through everything, that is, he has in his soul the fact that God has glorified a Man. “The radiancy of the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ” is the key by which Paul now lives.
As I say, he does not touch the question of sin or sins (except to say in a comprehensive way that he has now done with all that order of things), but he has a gospel, he has a means, by which man may live. Paul does not say in this chapter, ‘Once you have believed in the gospel, everything is going to be easy’, or ‘After this, it is a simple and straightforward way home’.
No, Paul in no way masks the difficulties and the problems of the christian life. ‘But’, he says, ‘the fact that I know the gospel that relates to a glorified Man is what is going to see me through’. I wonder why Paul says that. Why is he so sure that because Christ is glorified he can be quite restful about whatever lies in his own course? The reason, I think, is that if God has been able to glorify one Man. He has made a way for His being able to glorify every other man in Him. Not everyone believes in it.
Not everyone believes in the work that Christ did—but for those who do, God has the place of His glorified Man for them. As Paul shows in this chapter, this is not just that he has before him the prospect that he will, as they say, go to heaven when he dies. Paul is living now, not in relation to going to heaven when he dies, but what he says is, ‘I am safe here, and I am secure, and I have enough power, because I have the light of one glorified Man in my soul’.
Beloved, one thing that we need as much as anything—and the Lord is very gracious and very full in His present supply—is a more living and powerful link in our souls with the reality that there is a Man in heaven. There is one Man there already. How real is it to you?
How real is it to any of us? Mr. Pellatt speaks about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet and he lets in this sentence, ‘ Look till your heart catches fire’. (Closing Ministry of J. Pellatt, Second Series, p.92). Think of that. When did you hear a preacher say that in the last few years,
‘Look till your heart catches fire’? Beloved, has your heart caught fire by looking at a glorified Man? A Man out of this present scene altogether, and out of it, in one sense, because of the way in which He went through it, going through it in moral perfection, and to the perfect satisfaction of God. God has in one sense been obliged to glorify Him; but that obligation was as nothing compared with His delight in glorifying Him. But, have you looked at a glorified Christ until your heart caught fire? You can see that that is what had happened to Paul in this chapter.
Well, you might say, Paul had an advantage over me—when he, on the Damascus road, saw a light above the brightness of the sun that would have set him on fire anyway. Perhaps it would, but the light is still there, and the radiancy of the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ is still burning in heaven, and it is burning in order that it might the better set fire to souls down here at the present time. Think what a difference it would make to every particular meeting, every locality, if there was one man or woman in it whose heart was set on fire in relation to Christ in His glory.
Most of us, beloved, scarcely lift our eyes off the ground—we are converted and still bent double—still looking at the ground, still wondering where we will put our foot next. Paul is walking through the earth not only with his head up, but with his eyes up, and the light of the radiancy of the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ is so setting Paul on fire that whatever circumstances may come upon him here, he knows how to live through them. He does not live through them in resignation, but in triumph, and he says, ‘This is the very thing that the god of this world is against’. The god of this world is not against people going to heaven when they die. (Somebody said that Satan is not against that—in fact he has done a great deal to send quite a lot of people to heaven anyway). What he is against is a present testimony to the fact that Jesus is glorified. What he is against is the danger, from his point of view, that the light of the fact that a Man is glorified might again fill the world. It filled it for a moment, I suppose, at Pentecost when the Spirit came—everyone heard in their own tongues the great things of God. The greatest thing of God is that He has a Man in heaven, and people hearing in their own tongues the great things of God, would understand that God now had “glorified his servant Jesus”, Acts 3: 13.
Satan fears that the light of the fact that God has glorified a Man might again gain currency in the world, because immediately it would put people in their own souls beyond his effective reach. If you are living in relation to Christ glorified, Satan has no power against you, because the Man in relation to whom you are living has triumphed over him in the fullest and most comprehensive way and it is on that account that God has glorified Him.
We may lack a great deal, beloved, by the fact that we have not sufficient spiritual penetration in ourselves. Even though we have the Spirit available to us, we do not have the penetration to see something more of the fact that God has glorified Christ in heaven, and that the radiancy of that is available to us. If we could see Jesus, look up to heaven and actually see Him, our lives would be very different. John indicates that we do not know what we shall be; when He is manifested we shall be like Him—so far we do not see Him. Peter says, “Whom, having not seen, ye love” (1 Peter 1: 8), and a lot of our lives fall into deficiency because there is insufficient faith in, and insufficient grasp by the Spirit of the reality of the fact that there is a Man in heaven; and if God has one Man there. He will soon have the whole place filled with men like that Man who is in His body of glory already.
What triumph this is! What light it brings into life. Light has once appeared in the world, “the life was the light of men” (John 1: 4); but let that light come into the world again. How did the Philippians shine as lights in the world? Because they already had in their souls that God had given Him a name that is above every name, a name at which every knee is going to bow, and Paul says to the Corinthians, ‘I have a power like that as well, I have the light of the fact that Christ is in heaven and glorified’. Oh, the enemy is against that! He would obliterate every trace of the fact that God has glorified Jesus. If he could, that is the thing that he would erase first. He would not set about first erasing the history of the life of Jesus on earth. Of course not! He knows that men cannot imitate it if they try. He has the advantage over them; as one of the Puritans says, ‘he has the wind and the hill’. He knows they cannot imitate the life of Jesus as they are, but to know that there is a Man in heaven is an indication that every activity of Satan has been triumphed over by God and by that Man Himself, and the knowledge of that is something that Satan cannot overthrow. Christ is beyond his reach in His glory.
Paul says, ‘I have the radiancy of the knowledge of the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ’. This is one of those chapters, as you get many times with Paul, where he seems to roll one word on another in order to convey something of the effect that the impression has made on his own soul. He adds words that, in one sense, are almost redundant to each other, but you can see that he is enjoying the glory that God has given to a Man. Why? Because it is making all the difference to the life of Paul.
This is not a chapter of resignation.
Paul already has the victory in this chapter, and he knows how to live because Christ is glorified. Resigned to circumstances? ‘Well’, he says, ‘if we see no apparent issue, our way is not entirely shut up’. There is always a way out. “Persecuted, but not abandoned”; do you expect to be abandoned? The glorified Man is alongside you and He has already accomplished the victory over the worst things that might come against you.
‘Well’, Paul says, ‘I want the life of Jesus manifested in my mortal flesh’. How are you going to get that? A lot of good christian people would like to manifest the life of Jesus in their mortal flesh. The only way to the imitation of Christ is to bear about in the body the dying of Jesus. He has left us a model that we might follow in His steps (1 Peter 2: 21); that is one side of things. Peter would have remembered the words of Jesus where, for instance, He said,
“Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10: 37), and where He said, “I have given you an example that, as I have done to you, ye should do also” (John 13: 15), and so he says, He has left us an example that we should follow His steps. But the source of power for the christian now is not Christ in His humiliation, it is Christ in His glory—and, if we live at all, we do not live on account of a Christ in humiliation, but on account of a glorified Christ. If you want the life of Jesus manifested in your mortal body, it is the life of the glorified Jesus that you want manifested. It is the life that has already triumphed, the life that is only awaiting the Father’s time to display the fulness of the triumph that is His.
Paul says that “He who, has raised the Lord Jesus shall raise us also with Jesus, and shall present us with you”; that is to say, Paul is clearly anticipating in this section that he might die before the Corinthians to whom he was writing. He says, He raised the Lord Jesus, and He will raise us also with Jesus—that would imply that Paul expected to die; but, “He shall present us with you”—he does not say to the Corinthians ‘You will all die’, he does not say ‘God will raise all of you’, “He will present us with you”—the living who remain—that is who Paul is writing to. The dead raised and changed, and the living who remain changed as well—the triumph about to be displayed. One wonders sometimes (a thing into which we cannot penetrate) at the patience of the Father while He waits to give the word for Christ to take up everything that is His and to display it. The Father has the patience and Christ has the patience to await the fulness of what the One who was here in His humiliation secured for the Father and for Himself.
“Shall present us with you” is Paul in a sense taking a position behind the Corinthians, as if the presenting of the Corinthians was the great thing; but Paul says, ‘We shall be there too, He will present us with you’. Paul is looking through to the public demonstration of the glory on account of which he lived. You do not wonder that Mr. Raven said that if you do not understand the world to come, you do not properly understand christianity. A lot of us think of the world to come as something on a rather lower level. The world to come, as far as the earth is concerned, will not have the heavenly privileges and access and liberty that we shall have as belonging to a heavenly family; but we already have in our hearts the fulness of what it will be when Christ reigns in glory.
You could have that in your heart now. Everyone could have it—sick or well, rich or poor, old or young—that Christ is reigning in glory.
So Paul says, ‘We do not look at the things that are seen’—they are of small account. We would be turned aside, I think, if we looked at the things that are seen, but we look at the things that are not seen, and they are eternal. They are already outside the time scene with which we have to do. We cannot understand eternity but it is a great thing to get some impression of what it is as completely outside time, where God can view the whole scope of His work at one sweep, see time stretched out before Him see the beginning and end of it, see everything that will be accomplished in it, as He sees everything that has already passed in it, and see the culmination of His own work when He winds up that creature thing that He has created which we call time, and then has in fulness what He has secured through the glory of Christ. Beloved, we can live on account of eternal things already. We look not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen. The things that are seen are for a time, but the things that are not seen are eternal. And the eternal things are the scene into which the glorified Man has already entered. That is the world that you touch when you begin to live on account of a glorified Christ.
Therefore I say that Paul does not in this chapter set out to preach a gospel that will convert the heathen Corinthians from their sins or to prove where the remission of sins can be found.
All that he could preach if the occasion demanded, but here he is in a sense (although it is in a letter) preaching to the assembly, preaching to those gathered in the light of the assembly, and what he is saying to them is not raising the question of their sins, but teaching them how, on account of the glory of the Christ, they may live through circumstances, be they what they may.
Well, beloved, he would invite us into it. He says in the first chapter of the first epistle that Christ sent him to preach glad tidings. I think that all the time, as he wrote to the Corinthians, he was getting closer and closer to the glad tidings with which he had been commissioned. In 1 Corinthians 15 you can hear the trumpets blowing as Paul writes it—the wonderful triumph of the resurrection of Christ! But there, while Paul goes on to eternity, he does not really get far beyond the resurrection of Christ. Here, he touches Christ glorified, and that, beloved, is the message that belongs to the assembly, that it is connected with a Man who is glorified, and this gives people power to live, no matter what their circumstances may be. Therefore I say that there is a gospel that teaches you how to live, and Paul would draw you into it. And in so far as I have any service tonight, I would draw you into it. I would love to draw people into the capacity to live on account of a Christ who is glorified, whose glory is the particular butt of the enemy, but whose glory will outshine everything in the day when Satan is confined, first for a thousand years, and then sent to his own place—the glory of Christ will remain, and, beloved, those who have believed in Him will remain with it. Well, may he encourage us with it, for His name’s sake.
Preaching at Buckhurst Hill
10 February 1974