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Chapter 2

FIGURING, TRANSFIGURATION AND TRUTH

Life has its Prelude in Creation,
but this is the Drama of its Culmination

There are the intellectual understanding of spirituality, the personal experience of it and the divisions of the latter to consider when one comes to reality, spirituality and the knowledge of God.

First, as seen in Chapter 1, there are the cosmoi,  spheres, areas of operation, of functional differentiation: the physical, the mental and the spiritual. Inside the physical are many, including the physiological and the chemical, geological and astronomical. Similarly, within the mental are the reflective and the experimental, the visual, where it is 'seen' and the verificatory, where it is shown. Again, within the spiritual, there are the knowledge of what is spiritual, presuming an understanding of it, the experience of it, ascertaining the import and direction of it, as in finding the flow of a river when one is swimming in it, and discerning its direction, and then the relationship with it, when it is not a psychic reflex or mental illumination but an interpersonal friendship.

That is of man, the chief point: he is without a base, logically, a basis psychologically, a foundation morally, a melding physiologically, a reality-creator mentally to make the logic reality within and the logical coherence outside meet and co-operate, but IS with the power to verify or reject in terms of rationality and reality. This is precisely because, made by God, he DOES have access to truth. It may be by a sort of foggy memory, when his construction attests it, his guilt insists on it, or an ultimatum from truth, that if it is not there HE CERTAINLY CANNOT know that, OR what he is about. It may be through rigorous, rational demonstration, or in many other ways. All coheres in import as the petals, perfumes, configurations, artistic colour compositions and exotic delicacy of a supreme rose. What seeks to be a substitute, fails repeatedly, abysmally and is not even in contest rationally.

What accentuates this ultimatum is the simple fact that when man does consent to find the base, basis, foundation, source of melding and reality, coherence and organised and directed interaction with unitary meaning, ascending from the order of electrons, atoms, molecules, organs, organisation, mental co-ordination, psychic perception and spiritual-moral means of checking at EVERY level, then all is covered, coherent, comprehensible. To be sure, this is not in infinitude, since only God is infinite; but in the imagery of the mind, the experience of the heart, the configurations composed by the spirit of man and the construction of his thought and imagination, the intensive logic of his exploration at the outset and the onset evidentially. When all being brought back to discipline by the testings of investigatory analysis, of theories, of imaginations BY imagination and by logical order alike, then certain results are as clear as day, and possessed of even greater reality.

That is light in time; this is light beyond time.

There is now^*1 no depth, no dimension, no function, no co-ordination, no meaning whether organic or psychic, personal or operational, which lacks logical explication, and none which retains incomprehensibility, nor any discord WHEN and only when, the multiply stranded data are investigated from biblical perspective. Then all stands explained, not with the essence of divinity, who knows in the sweep of overall creation, but with the essence of humanity, which then can know and see, and can understand from beginning to end, the whole structure of creation and the entirety of manhood, both its meaning and essentially its method, its power and its portent, its limits and its condition, its qualities and its questings, its furies and its intimations of immortality, its fusses and its fumings, its testings^*2 and its investings, its heroism and its hedonism, its sacrificial marvels as in friendship, patriotism and in parenthood, its kindness and its devilishness, each in its place and time.

While we now see as in a glass, a mirror, without the finality of direct sight, yet as in a photograph or depiction on a map, the motivation, message, method, power, glory and majesty, purpose and precision, sovereignty and majesty, domains of creation and their underlying methods of testimony are revealed. As in a military map, it is indeed NOT the same as seeing the territory in a helicopter, and then on the ground; but it is as there, a configuration exposed, a motif manifest, a situation expounded, a purpose exposed, a test defined and a testimony irrefutable.

Not only does it possess these characteristics, as defined and depicted in the Bible and by Christ and the prophets of the Bible, but what is other lacks them categorically as shown in Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny, SMR and other works noted below. Reason attests it (SMR), evidence verifies it (TMR), the coincident spheres in their inter-relationship in life, confirm it and validity insists on it^*1 .

It is however the direct knowledge of God, the God of the Bible by the MEANS the Bible insists on, the Gospel it refuses to vary in any way whatsoever (Galatians), through the power and ministry of the Holy Spirit which - as in flying an aircraft rather than talking about flight - confirms the wonder in both the work and the rest it entails and enables. Hence it is scarcely surprising, but greatly to be admired, that Jesus Christ said this (John 17): "This is eternal life, that you should know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent."

In this Chapter, we are now to look at a unique experience of three of the disciples, the apostles, which gives not only the sense so often felt, but here set to sight, of the presence of God, but the centre of it operationally. This is shown and made manifest in His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, and this not only with sight and sound, but with lustrous majesty in the sharpest contrast with the freely adopted humility for work purposes, that Jesus Christ had taken in the flesh (as foretold, for example, in Isaiah 53:2).

Thus we come to that overwhelmingly practical, intensively personal and extensively impactive matter of the transfiguration of Jesus Christ, as seen in Luke 9. In this, Christ having indicated to three to follow Him, went to a mountain and there a lustrous luminosity, a brilliance of both whiteness in a splendid candour of cleanness and beauty as in an unfolding dawn so overcame the disciples that one of them, Peter, thought to build three sacred places. One would be for Christ and the others for the two seen to be discussing with Him, a gory topic. With Christ the glory and the gory would often meet, both in His preliminary statements of what must be, in His references to the prophecies which attested it over  the preceding centuries in the Bible, and in the treatment accorded Him over the climacteric period of the Cross; just as in the arising from the dead, impervious to presentation as a body rotting, unavailable for mockery or memorial alike.

What however precisely was the gory in the glory at this point in the transfiguration ? That, it was the "death which He was to accomplish" in Jerusalem. That is one of the mainstream impacts of Christ, practicality and spirituality, humility and majesty, power and intimacy, one not made available to the chewing teeth of spiritual locusts, or the poisons of artful spiders dressed as men, but freely shown to those willing to find, to look, to seek, to experience, to observe and to test, as did Thomas after that death was ACCOMPLISHED and the new issue became the resurrection of the body, which he INSISTED on testing and verifying.

 

LUKE 9:27-36

 THE TRANSFIGURATION AND THE THREE WHO SPOKE

WHY, in the transfiguration, that magnificent exposure of the transcendental deity of Jesus Christ, when His face and clothes shone in a brilliant illumination as if spot-lighted from heaven itself, when He was seen conversing with Moses and Elijah, when a voice from heaven declared, "THIS is My Beloved Son, hear Him!: why was Elijah there with Moses as the disciples looked in awe?

WHY ? It is clear that Moses might be there, since in Deuteronomy he had been led of the Lord to predict the coming of the prophet greater than he, whose word would be incapable of dismissal. He was, in this respect, a John the Baptist of the Old Testament. We could readily understand why then he would be seen, this Moses, the one to whom came the Old Covenant with its Levitical laws and symbols of Christ. It is clear why he would be appear in the presence of Christ who in Himself would fulfil the sacrificial point of these, and so in Himself, as in Hosea 13:14, institute the New Covenant.

This, it would be like the handing over of the baton in an athletic contest, Moses is there as the old runner, in the presence of Christ, the final runner, the end runner, the One for whom in this case the whole race was constructed. But why was Elijah there too ? What special significance did he have relative to this same Jesus Christ ? Did he explicitly predict His coming ?

No, in this case, it seems it was not so much as one predicting, but as one who in himself was a TYPE of Christ who was then to come, that Elijah was now given appearance while Christ was transfigured. Therefore, consider the amazing respects in which Elijah figured as a type of Christ, that is, as an expression of some of His features, in advance, like a memory in advance of the action, since to God time is no limit, barrier or condition.

Notice first, then, that the discussion, between the three, centred on the death which Christ was about to 'accomplish' in Jerusalem (Luke 9:31). It is then, not only about WHO He was and is, the beloved Son of God as foretold in Isaiah 42, 49, 54, the commander and the witness, in Himself the New covenant and light to the Gentiles, He of whom it is said, in Psalm 2, “blessed is the one who trusts in Him!” and again, “Kiss the Son lest He be angry, and you perish in the way,” this ultimate Judge and direct criterion over all men, who will “strike the earth with the rod of His mouth,” (Isaiah 11), and with the breath of His lips – “slay the wicked”: His rest “glorious”. That is majestic and grand.

It is however also centred on WHAT HE IS TO DO, as those three spoke as witnessed in the transfiguration of Luke 9. He was to ACCOMPLISH something, a death. It was to be a work of imposing character, majestic mould, intrinsic wonder, that of the the Child called Wonderful, the Mighty God (Isaiah 9), growing to be called Man of Sorrows (Isaiah 53). That grief was for good reason; for speaking of those healed by Him, Isaiah 53 tells us that on Him was laid the iniquity of us all.

In what way then could Elijah be SPECIALLY related to Christ, Moses having his place in terms of his prediction of Him as the prophet who would finally displace himself ? It was that in some parts of Elijah's life, he appears as a remarkably clear type of Christ. Let us look then at some of these.

ELIJAH AS TYPE OF CHRIST

FIRSTLY in OVERVIEW

¹⁾ Elijah was as far as action was concerned, again and again, left alone. Thus he ONLY went to the wicked King Ahab, to challenge him in the name of the Lord, advising that there would be no rain for 3 years (I Kings 17:1). He alone was to go into the wilderness, and there he waited by the brook Cherith while the waters lasted.

So Christ alone was called to become the Saviour, final and total, for Israel, and not for that people alone, and confronted Satan at the very first, through the devil's agent, Herod, who was so keen to exterminate Him that he slew children under two in an effort to ensure He would be extinguished.

Christ also went into the wilderness, where Satan tried Him, sought to tempt Him, to induce the desire for a name in THIS world, a fame, a power, a sensation, a sustenance, as he tempts many called to Christ as would-be pastors, who succumb and become this-world ministers, mere symbols, far from spiritual, fall-men, who are willing to be seduced by this world's culture, if only they may have a place, salary and accceptance, or perhaps fame as well.

²⁾ When Elijah had at last been met by Ahab, after the 3 years were over, and the King was very ropable, challenging the prophet as the one disturbing Israel, he met this by telling the king that on the contrary it was he, this royal misfit, who was disturbing the land. Hence a challenge was arranged and it would be at Mt Carmel.

If Elijah called on the Lord to light the sacrifice, without earthly means, and those who with Ahab were following the cultural god called Baal, did the same, then the one who secured the celestial fire to consume the sacrifice would be the one shown experimentally to be true. The case was extreme and Elijah saturated the whole area with water so as to eliminate any doubt; just as Christ was thrust with a sword, hung for some 6 hours to drip and be choked and crushed in lung and spirit if it could be done, so that there could be no doubt.

At Mt Carmel, Elijah issued the necessary challenge, as many must do today, just as we also perform this office as must all faithful pastors and churches. "How long!" he queried the people, "will you halt between two opinions ? If the Lord be God, follow Him; but if Baal be God, follow him." The words were clear, the options presented simple. But "the people answered him not a word."

It is as today, so many in so many countries has one found who will NOT heed the warning of cultural assimilation, a crude substitute for Christianity with another Gospel, another God, another impact and another Jesus, who truncate the love of God, or divorce it from truth and justice, who make of Him an embracive name while they have truck with apostates, people who deny His deity, His mission, His morals, His name and still call the burnt out residue for some reason or other, a church! Was Israel still a people of the Lord ? Their day would come soon enough for their destruction, but for this time, here was the demonstration either to add to their sins, or to bring some from their sleepy squalor to spiritual life.

The case now is not different. Some churches continue in obvious collusion with anti-christ principles, procedures and people (cf. Revelation 2:16ff., 21ff.); they proceed as if their OWN name were sufficient, just as some thought in Christ's day that being 'children of Abraham' was guarantee of spirituality or godliness (John 8). Not so. As John the Baptist indicated, God could raise children of Abraham from the stones. Spiritual things may be given physical emplacement, but the spiritual realities are unique and it is these that matter. God is one, and nothing else has any place by Him, for foolish as are the Jehovah's Witness camps, there is no one LIKE the Almighty in heaven (Psalm 89), and Christ is His EXACT image! (Hebrews 1), whose throne is called the throne of God! Christ IS God.

There is no hiding place in this world, whose boss at its own level, is none other than the devil as Christ taught (John 14:30-31), so that to love this world is to be an enemy of Christ (James 4:4).

As to those, however - like those who insist on staying now in Churches where Christ and the Bible are no longer required unchanged - to whom Elijah issued this challenge: they answered never a word. They sat tight. They hoped it would not require any sacrifice on their part. They did not want to stick their necks out, to join the ranks of those dissident from this world and its received institutions. They wanted to have God if you can have one of those, ALONG WITH the structure and the institutional respectability of their position.

It is so today. You cannot however do this, merely mouthing words while betraying Christ. If the Lord be God, follow HIM; but if these cultural mutations which seek to merely use the name of God, if these be God, then follow them! You cannot indefinitely halt between two opinions.

Within hours of this declamation and confrontation near to Mt Carmel's summit, hundreds of Baal's prophets were dead, just as Japan, insisting on its ruthless attack on the USA, found suddenly, that hundreds of thousands of people had been smitten. You cannot halt indefinitely, hoping for a better surrender pattern. You act and become what you are going to be, and then are treated accordingly. Deception has a place in the liberties God has created, when these are misused as now, so vilely and violently; but it is not the last place. The last place is damnation, judgment or salvation, deliverance. Christ is the hinge of that door, indeed He is the door itself. Without Him, no entrance (John10).

The Culture is King religious alliance, those of Baal, for hours into mid-day heat sought for Baal to light the fires under the sacrifices, and Elijah chided and mocked them, Perhaps he is hunting, holding a conversation! he derided. When his own time of test came, as Christ's came on the Cross, from which taken, His power led on to the resurrection (cf. John 2), declaring His authenticity through the Spirit (Romans 1:4, I Corinthians 15): what then ? Then,  there was action!

Christ's body did not rot. It would have been ever so simple if it has done so, and become an historical exhibit, like Lenin in his tomb, air-conditioned or whatever the means may be. It was never so permitted; for the stone moved, He went away, in His body remaining available, He being worshipped by Thomas, eating fish with His disciples (Luke 24:42). Meanwhile, His work till His return He duly set (Luke 24) and empowered (Acts 1-2).

Elijah, speaking to God and imploring Him to show the people that their hearts were being restored, DID send fire and the saturated sacrifice was consumed, and great was the abundance of flames (I Kings 18:38). Christ sent His Spirit as foretold (Luke 24:49) and thousands were won (Acts 2-3).

Thus there is this multiple parallel with Elijah as a type of Christ.

ELIJAH AS TYPE OF CHRIST

SECONDLY in ITEMISATION

He was:

¹⁾  ALONE as testifying of the truth publicly, in confrontation and continually,

²⁾ ALONE as facing the King (just as Christ faced Pilate, John 18,  and as a babe escaped Herod),

³⁾ ALONE as personally putting in his own person, the challenge to the powers that be (Mark 14:53-65),

and

⁴⁾ ALONE as being the cause of the outpouring. It was of fire with Elijah, just as it was of His Spirit with Christ at Pentecost (cf. John 17, Luke 24, Acts 2), thus bringing salvation to the land.

This Elijah was used to do, in first showing distinctively and according to His written word, the power of God in practice and in life; secondly in bringing in the death penalty as prescribed (Deuteronomy 13) for those who misled in the theocratic state of Israel, concerning God,  and who taught amiss for other gods: this to hundreds of the false prophets; and thirdly in continuing his work politically, and spiritually through Elisha.

Christ did not come to destroy the world but that the world might through Him be saved (John 3:17) and accordingly, it was by the outpouring of the Spirit of life that He brought in deliverance, and those who saw where the spiritual death was, in the Temple worship now displaced, in the autocratic liberals of His day, these voluntarily left it and embraced life.

⁵⁾ Nor is this all. As he proceeded in his various special ministries, and after Mt Carmel, Elijah was in the midst of extreme humiliation and felt it to the uttermost. He was so alone, no better than his fathers, he felt, now pursued by an angry Queen (her nice priests were slain, she was incensed and sought the death of Elijah, placed under curse); and under the juniper tree he was bemused. So in some degree of parallel, Christ at Gethsemane, was seeking His Father - "If it is Your will, take this cup away from Me. Nevertheless, not My will but Thy will be done!" Although Elijah did have some 7000 others in the land who had not bowed to the idol, they did not appear in his work very much in the huge crisis; and although the disciples were for Christ, at the arrest, there was dispersion after this. He had to stand alone in the name of the Lord.

⁶⁾ We need to reflect that Elijah restored the broken altar, and that Christ restored to useful reality, the misused altar of the Temple (cf. Isaiah 1), by making Himself in all His own purity as the Son of God, the altar, Himself the priest who offering HIMSELF, and of Himself the temple in which it was so offered.

⁷⁾ Elijah accepted the supreme test of a highly visible and obvious thing, fire from heaven to consume sodden material, as far more amazingly, in parallel did Christ, of having His OWN flesh not rot, but raised. In each case it was experimentally easy to show it. The thing could be displayed or it could not, His work would continue or it would not. It did, and His flesh was not available for observation of rotting, just as the fire was available for observation that it was hot.

⁸⁾ Elijah used no deputy, and required no army or troupe to participate in the test; nor did Christ in His, the disciples having fled, or been afar off, and none being permitted to fight for Him (Matthew 26:53ff.).

⁹⁾ Christ's ministry was one of some 3 years and for such a period was there no rain in Israel by the word of God. As with Elijah, near the first was the sojourn in the wilderness. There is a resemblance here also, for in this period, Elijah raised the dead (I Kings 17:17-24), just as Christ's raised the widow's son at Nain, and Lazarus for example, acting with singular power and leadership, in His case supreme, amidst the shambles of official religion in Israel in His own day.

¹⁰⁾ Afterwards came the ascension of Christ, just as Elijah was taken off in the chariot of fire to heaven; and before this came the amazing works of Elijah duly ordered, including his political appointment at a spiritual level and his training of Elisha to carry on the work, just as at Pentecost came the power of God to the apostles, appointed to carry on the work.

¹¹⁾ Even in the comparison of Christ's ascension and the taking up by chariot of Elijah there is a type of relationship. Thus in the case of Elijah, after he went, prophets asked Elisha if they could look for his body somewhere, as if it might physically have fallen down into some receptive earth, and might be found perhaps in some valley. Elisha reluctantly let them go at last, but it was as he indicated, a futile excursion. Heaven is not on this earth! So with Christ, Mary looked for the body of Christ in the well-known and marked tomb, a singular one, but when she could not find it, she asked the One whom she took to be the gardener if He knew who had taken it or to what place! The parallel is striking here.

¹²⁾ Thus, just as Christ indicated to the people, that where He went, they - the unbelieving taunters,  could not come (John 8:21-23), so where Elijah went, those young prophets could not come, for they were on earth, and he had been taken to heaven. Elijah had been TAKEN up to heaven, but Christ without a conveyance, as with the chariot, ascended of Himself, just as He descended in the  first place. Thus, as in John 3:13, there is none like Him, for said He, the Son of man "is in heaven", this being His place by nature and being, Godhead in the Son. He alone so ascended, having first descended, heaven His place from eternity.

¹³⁾ Finally, just as Elijah gave out the word from the Lord that the widow's cruse would not fail, nor her flour, in the famine, so Christ declared that if you seek first His kingdom and His righteousness all these things would be added to you.

APPLICATION

There are two applications. Firstly, there is that to the Christians.

Each of us who, being Christian, hear this address today or any other day, should realise that it is not only as in general, necessary to follow Christ in this singularity of testimony, He to make it, we to be faithful to it; but we must also be willing to meet our tasks without apparent help; for though there WERE 7000 others who had not bowed the knee to the cultural substitute for the worship of God in that former time, yet Elijah as we have just seen, in much had to act alone. Sentries at night are the same in a battle-field, so let each one of us be found faithful at his or her post in this 'night', which Christ declared to be coming. Let us work while we have the light within and the scope so to act, for "the night is coming when no man can work" (John 9:4) and it is near (as in Revelation 13 cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5).

Faithfulness, under trial, if need be when you have to act alone, it is as perfume from the frangipane, as silver streams in Spring sparkling amidst the corn, as canola in its shimmering plateaux of a yellow surface of its own, above the ground, like roses that secrete a hidden perfume of additional beauty beyond the petals, like mountain sentinels in the wilderness.

Be therefore faithful to the end, and the Lord will reward you, who is our shield and our exceedingly great reward. He Himself is the heart of it, for there is none like Him, the triune splendour of His beauty the very soil and ground of all beauty of spirit, of art and of circumstance. To worship Him is also to serve Him, as Christ not only spoke in PRAYER before the cross, but lay ON it in PERSON practically, after that. May the Lord bless deeply, who heed.

Secondly, there is the application to those not, as yet at least, to be found in Christ, incorporated by His power in His kingdom, attested by His Spirit (Romans 8:16), invested with His merits (II Corinthians 5:17ff.), pardoned in His peace (Isaiah 55) and motivated and commissioned by His grace (Matthew 11:27ff., Luke 14:27ff., Romans 5 & 8). The mystery of life is indeed sweet when the haze of craze which bedevils this earth being swept aside by the wind of truth, and the impulsions which are so readily transmitted in those kept contained in it  being expelled, this brilliant combination of beauty and judgment, wonder and the aweful, often the most awful, this world becomes a site for fellowship with the God who made it and us all.

Consider well what you do, for as we are persons, so as persons are we to be judged; and sitting on a fence is not only uncomfortable, but a prelude when the ground shakes, to falling. To despise, dump, or even be dim about what is offered to mankind through such a majesty as that of God our Creator, and such a murder as that of Christ the Saviour of all men (in process) but especially of those who believe (in practice), it is like divorcing from the best wife conceivable, departing from the most glorious employer and deleting the best of all that is to be found on the screen of life. It CAN be and often IS done, and is ever to be lamented.

Repentance shows regret for what has been done on one's own part, where this is amiss, especially in not being at peace with God through the blood of Christ.  On the other hand,  futile regret when it is too late and one has gone the way of the godless - in which are included the paths of idolatry and pretence, dealing directly with gods or direly without them - is a thing from which one would beckon, and  call. The love of God has done all; the reception of His ransom in Christ is not a dictation, but an invitation.

How great is the God who so governs, and how judicious is He who gives to all their time, and achieves all in His own ultra-time knowledge. This, as with an author, it is wrought before even our time was invented (Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:29ff.); and He who is not willing that any should perish, who omits none to whom His love comes effectually, receives His own in the knowledge of eternity and the compassions of mercy. Call upon Him, then, for "the Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth" (Psalm 145:18).

 NOTES

*1

See in different features and overviews:

The assemblage:

Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ.

The trilogy,

SMR,

The investigatory analysis,

TMR,

The overview of:

The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy

The eight major sections of

Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny

The Five  Volume Set on the Creation topic -

The gods of naturalism have no go!

and the

The Twin Volumes:

Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer.

*2

See

TRIALS, TESTS and TRIUMPHS in TEMPTATION

with the book of Job as focus.