Some Thoughts

Something I think we lost due to the Fall is the capacity to behold Christ in the brightness of his concentrated glory.

But, in the wake of our High Treason, God didn’t drop the eternal sword on mankind. Instead, he made a promise about a coming deliverer, and then graciously dropped a kind of glory-prism into reality: the nation of Israel. With this prism, he began to display all the colors of the promised one on the mural-wall of redemptive history. No one man could’ve done justice to the character of Christ. No one color could’ve displayed the fullness of his beauty. No one story of faithfulness or deliverance or judgment or comfort could’ve revealed all that God had in store. So he spread his colors over thousands of years, over a long line of Christ-types, “in many parts, and in many manners,” “precept upon precept,” in different genres, stories, and events. He displayed the hues of redemptive history as a backdrop to prepare us for the appearance of history’s main character: Jesus, the Christ, the light of the world.

And so, early on, he gave the prism a little turn and something of Christ appeared in the story of Noah–perhaps in his role as a covenant mediator. When God came to destroy mankind, Noah said “Great idea, the people are rotten. I’ll build an ark.” Noah was “a righteous man,” and obedient; as would be the man, Christ Jesus. But Noah wasn’t enough; so another turn of the prism threw the colors of Abraham on history’s wall-mural. When God came to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham–obedient like Noah, but compassionate unlike Noah–dared to open his mouth and intercede for the condemned. Christ, too, would be obedient and an intercessor for his people. But even these two weren’t enough. And so another twist of the prism, and we see Moses; another move of the hand and up on the wall appears Joshua, then David…and on and on until, after our eyes had drunk in all the pre-revelations of who the man Christ would be, and what he would do as Prophet, Priest, and King–after our eyes had adjusted to all the colors, it was time for them to merge back into one, bright-burning white light. It was time for the history-prism to be removed from before the light-source, and for the full-on radiance of the glory of God in the face of Christ to be shined into reality.

And so into time and space broke the concentrated glory of Christ. And while here, he taught us how all the colors and patterns and stories of the Old Testament were aspects of his glory–of his person, his role. It was from him that all those aspects and shades flowed out, and it was to him that they were all pointing; it was from him that they were dispersed, and it would be in him they would again converge: the final, full-beamed concentrated light of Christ himself. (Of course, the many colors “were not that light, but they bore witness of it.”) Between the blinding light of pre-redemptive history, and the burning light of the soon-coming consummation of history, there stands the refracted glory of Christ in the colors of redemptive history. For Christ alone is the meaning, and the goal, of all history.

And as we are born again, schooled in the meaning of reality and history by the Holy Spirit as we read the Scriptures, we slowly regain the long-lost capacity to behold the soon-coming, concentrated glory of Christ. Our eyes of faith grow stronger as we, beholding the face of Christ, slowly become more and more like him. For now, we see as in a glass, darkly. But then, we shall see him as he is: face to face–for we will be partakers of his glory, and we shall be like him. No longer shall his glory be refracted; instead, it shall be forever reflected…