The Hope of Glory

by E. C. Dargan - 1919

Sovereignty In Salvation

THE text fully and beautifully implies the absolute sovereignty of God. His name is not mentioned, but he is described as one for whom all things exist and by whom all things came into being. He is the origin and the end of all things. This thought is concentrated into the statement, that in accomplishing the salvation of sinners he is the supreme actor, and that the sovereign act of salvation is brought to its accomplishment by the provision of a perfect Saviour. Not the free will of man, not even the voluntary self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, can conflict with, much less overthrow, the supreme fact that the salvation of men is a sovereign action of God. So far from being a harsh and forbidding doctrine, this truth should be and is fraught with sweet and strong consolation. The thoughts of the text bring out and enforce this divine sovereignty very plainly and in several ways.

I. GOD BRINGS MANY SONS UNTO GLORY

Here answer is made to the earnest question of the disciples when once they asked, ”Lord, are there many that be saved?” At that time Jesus did not answer the question directly, but urged upon his hearers that the way to death was broad and easy and the way to life was narrow and difficult, so that it was incumbent upon each one to strive to enter in. Many indeed are lost. This thought should fill us with sorrow and impel us to earnest efforts to make known the saving grace of God. But let us gladly rejoice in the multitude of the saved. It is not a struggling few, but a glorious company of the redeemed who shall reach the eternal rest and glory of the heavenly world. This vision of the saved many was vouchsafed to John in the visions given to him on the Isle of Patmos. In Revelation 7:9 we are told of the multiplied thousands who praise God and rejoice together. It is a great multitude which no man can number, of all nations and kindreds and people.

These are more than saved. Our text tells us they are sons. We must not think of salvation, either in its beginning here or its completion hereafter, as being merely deliverance from the burden and the penalty of sin. It is entrance into the filial relationship with God and the development of that sonship to its perfection in the eternal life. To receive the blessing of sonship now and in the consciousness of it to come to God as our Father (Rom. 8:14, 15) is one of the most precious of the believer’s privileges. This consciousness of sonship to God, mediated to us through the saving work of Christ and wrought into our own thought and feeling by the action of the Holy Spirit, grows to its fullest realization in the future life.

This is shown to us in our text by the use of the word ”glory.” In a former discourse this term was expounded as carrying with it the idea of a state of consummate excellence. Here let us recall some of the things involved in this general conception. In the Scriptures the glory of God is a frequent expression for the highest dignity and excellence of the divine nature and person. So also the thought of glory as a state of human perfection involves the vision and enjoyment of God. The old theologians had an expression for that. They called it the beatific vision, the thought of seeing God in his beauty as the Psalmist indicates (Psalm 27: 4). We can only describe these things in terms of our present experience and language. Glory is to see God in all the perfection of his being and of his nature. Moreover, as John tells us, it is to be partakers in our measure of that glory. When we see him as he is, we shall be like him (1 John 3:2).

Glory also means the triumph of Christ’s kingdom and redemption. Those who are brought as sons unto this state of supreme felicity share in the joy and triumph of the Saviour. He, for the joy that was set before him (Heb. 12:2) endured the cross; and that joy would be the triumph of the cross. So they who shall be brought to share in the final reality of redemption shall see the thing which they loved and worked for in its victorious consummation, and their own deliverance fully accomplished with that of the redeemed multitude. We must always remember that salvation, while necessarily personal, is not selfish. It must be both individual and social. It would not be a joyous heaven unless others with ourselves were saved. Heaven is no lonely condition. Every one who is redeemed rejoices in the redemption of all the rest. It is wrong in thought or feeling to separate these things, for they cannot be separated. One of our beautiful hymns reminds us of the ”social joys” in the golden Jerusalem. To be a sharer in a perfect state is indeed a blessing beyond words.

Hence we are brought to consider that the glory to which the sons of God are brought means the expansion and perfection of their own personal excellences. It means the full attainment of all our best hopes and aspirations. It holds before us the entrancing conception of a conscious realization of our best selves. It means that the soul can at last be perfectly satisfied with itself where self-satisfaction can not be itself a sin.

II. GOD MAKES THE CAPTAIN OF THEIR SALVATION
PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERING

The sovereignty of God in saving men is brought out in the method he has chosen for the accomplishment of that divine purpose. Men having neither wisdom nor virtue sufficient to accomplish their own salvation by coming of themselves unto glory, God provides for them a Saviour. He is called ”the Captain of their salvation.” The Greek word here means more than that military term would suggest. It describes one who takes the lead in anything, and so an author or originator, one who comes to be the chief leader or the prince; and it is thus that Jesus is here described. In the matter of saving men from their sins and bringing them to their perfection, he takes the lead and accomplishes the fact. Thus it is not merely salvation in the abstract which God provides, but a personal living Saviour, a founder, a leader, a perfecter of the great process and consummation which we understand by the one word salvation. We need continually to emphasize this fact in our thinking and in our deepest consciousness of religion. The reality of it and the final fulfilment of it grow out of our personal union with the Saviour. Salvation is not the result of a mere intellectual process of accepting a truth or a set of truths, nor of feelings of depression and relief in regard to sin. Everywhere our Lord himself, and those who have taught us of him, make this emphatic. His constant plea is to believe in him, to trust him, to come to him. To sum it up in a phrase: Salvation is by a Saviour.

Our text tells us that he is a perfect Saviour, as it is said elsewhere, ”able to save unto the uttermost those who come unto him.” Notice that the word ”perfect” here describes his perfection in office rather than in character. He was a perfect man, he is a perfect man; and with, this he is a perfect Saviour. He was perfectly fitted to be the Saviour of men from sin, as one may be perfectly fitted for some great office and duty. The text tells us how the Captain of our salvation was thus perfectly fitted for his task of saving men. It is a wondrous thought; it was through sufferings. He could not have been a perfect Saviour without the sorrows through which he passed.

We are not left at a loss with regard to the nature and meaning of the sufferings which he endured in order that through them he might be a perfect Saviour. In the context, in other places throughout the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in other Scriptures, the meaning of this profound statement is made clear and emphatic. We may summarize it by saying that Jesus suffered death, in order that he might deliver from death; and temptation, that he might deliver from temptation.

He suffered death. And this means not only the pain and trial of death whether anticipated or actually endured in the final conflict, but death with its religious connotation, death as a penalty, death as the consequence of sin. This is made clear to us in the verse which immediately precedes our text, that ”because of the suffering of death, he was crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God he should taste of death for every man.” Whatever death means as a pain and penalty to human nature, that Jesus endured because he had taken upon himself that human nature and identified himself with it in its pains and penalties. This is indeed a wondrous statement that he tasted death for every man. It was as if he suffered the accumulated pain of each and every man’s death. And this, as we learn from other Scriptures, means that he was man’s substitute; that in his own death he offered a sacrifice for sin, thus taking the guilty sinner’s place. More definitely is this brought out in Heb. 7:26, 27: ”For such a high priest became us... who needeth not daily, like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people: for this he did once for all when he offered up himself.’’ Again in Heb. 10:4-10, the sacrificial meaning and voluntary character of our Lord’s death are set forth, the statement closing with the words that ”we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” In many other Scriptures this great truth is solemnly declared. Jesus himself spoke of giving himself a ransom for many. Paul builds the great argument of Romans around the sacrificial death of Christ, and through all the New Testament this truth is again and again brought to the front. That this death of Christ is the ground of a real deliverance from sin also appears in many of these passages. Further along in this chapter we are told that Jesus became partaker of the humanity of man that through death he might bring to naught him that had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. This does not mean only the deliverance from the dread of death as a calamity but from the consequences of death in all its spiritual darkness and suffering. The teaching, then, is that Jesus could not have been a perfect Saviour from death and its consequences unless he himself had endured death and have found in it the bitter cup from which he shrank in Gethsemane and yet accepted as the necessary condition of salvation to mankind.

The other form of suffering suggested in the context is that of temptation. The greatest sorrow of humanity is its conflict with sin. All through the course of human history this is the shadow that falls, this is the burden that oppresses, this is the sting that pierces, this is the horror that alarms, this is the failure that shames, this is the disappointment that grieves. All that sin means in human consciousness, in human life, in human history, in human punishment by death and after death, this is the distinctive human sorrow.

We fall into sin through temptation. Our first parents fell in that way and all men and women have fallen in that way ever since the first sin. And Jesus could not have been a perfect Saviour from sin unless he had been tempted and have conquered temptation, just as he died and yet conquered death. So in the beautiful language with which this second chapter closes, we are told ”It behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.” His temptation was not a mere show: it was the agony of a wrestling human soul. He was sinless because he conquered sin. It was somehow necessary that it should be a real temptation to him in order that his victory over it might be a real victory for himself and for us. All that was human in him gathered itself in strength to withstand the onslaught of the tempter. Thanks be to God he came off victor there, but it was not without suffering on his part. He did not wave the tempter away by the hand of divine sovereignty, but met him like a human hero and drove him conquered from the field. So he becomes our refuge in temptation. He knows what it means to be tempted, though he did not know what it was to fall. Yet our falls invite his sympathy and receive it. He looked upon Peter and the shamed apostle went out into the dark and wept. He restored him to his love in the scene at the lakeside and appointed him the guide of his sheep. Thousands of those who have known Christ’s saving grace have also comfortably acknowledged the strength of his saving power in temptation. He knows to the uttermost what we are, and therefore he can save to the uttermost those who come unto God by him. Thus through the suffering of temptation and of death he was made a perfect Saviour, perfect in sympathy, and perfect in sacrifice. It was God who so loved the world as to give his only begotten Son who made such a deliverance through him possible. And so we come back to the point from which we started - the providing of a perfect Saviour through whom many sons may be brought unto glory is the outflow and effect of sovereign grace. One thought remains.

III. AS CREATOR AND SOVEREIGN GOD IS
GLORIFIED IN THIS WORK

Striking indeed is the expression here. Such a mode of procedure, it is said, ”became him.’’ It was perfectly suited to the dignity and the character of God to bring many sons unto glory by perfecting for them a Saviour through the discipline of suffering. Let your minds dwell on this point. This way of salvation for men became God. What poor judges we are of what is becoming to God! Who are we to say that such a course of action was not in accordance with the highest ideal we can form of God? It is a sorrowful fact that all along from the first promulgation of the gospel men have been found who objected to this plan of salvation as unbecoming to God. In unforgetable language Paul tells us this in 1 Corinthians 1:23: ”We preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumblingblock, and unto Gentiles foolishness.” To the one class the cross of Christ was an offense. Pilate realized this when he refused to alter the inscription over the cross. The Jews were horrified that one who claimed to be their Messiah and their King should suffer the death of a criminal under Roman government. And as they were in some sense accomplices to the deed, all the more was it an offense to them to have it proclaimed of them, as Peter did, that though they through lawless hands crucified their Lord, God had on that account appointed him a Prince and a Saviour. And the offense of the cross has not ceased except to those who have found it the power of God unto salvation. There is even a dainty phase of Christian thought that shrinks from the cross and the blood. Too often to others than scandalized Jews it is true that the atonement by blood has become an occasion of annoyance and of criticism, instead of acceptance and of joy.

Then there is the wisdom of the world that looks upon this way of salvation as a folly. The supercilious Greek and the haughty Roman alike turned away from the preaching of the cross of Christ. To them it seemed absurd that deity should be reduced to an expedient like this to purge away human sin and effect reconciliation between God and man. Alas, it must be confessed that the successors of these philosophers are still among us. There are many who take that position today, attacking the justice of the divine procedure and frankly rejecting it because of its apparent inadequacy.

We oppose to both of these misconceptions the simple statement of the text and the trend of New Testament teaching elsewhere. So far from being unworthy of God, we are here told that this divine, sovereign procedure became him. Think of what that means, that a course of conduct and action should be exactly what is becoming to the great God, the ideal of wisdom and justice and love. Let us simply think what we mean by the word ”becoming.” We see a lovely woman beautifully attired, and we say her dress becomes her. It suits all her charms to be clothed as she is. It enhances them. And thus becomingly dressed she appears in the social circle radiant and fair in her beauty. We take a high-minded honorable gentleman, devoted to everything that is noble and pure and unselfish and strong; he adopts in difficult times a certain line of conduct, and we say he has acted becomingly. He has done what a gentleman ought to do under the circumstances in which he was placed. Such a line of action and only such a line of action became him. But how imperfect are such illustrations when we come to think of what is Becoming to God. What beautifies his beauty and glorifies his glory, what meets the requirements of his justice, what answers the demands of his wisdom, what enhances the perfection of his holiness and adorns the unspeakable fullness of his love - that is becoming to God. And here we are told that to provide through sufferings a perfect Saviour who should lead the children of men into the glory of heaven and of eternal salvation was an action becoming to God.

Shall we not, therefore, accept that which is becoming to God? In this great essential truth of our religion we find our confidence and our hope. That which was an offense to the Jew and a folly to the Greek has been proved to be the power of God unto salvation to thousands and thousands of all ages and times. It does not lose its power today. The simple child sorrowing for its conscious sins may here find forgiveness and strength. The man stained and blurred with the conflicts of sin has often found here his pardon and peace. The aged saint goes tottering to the grave leaning with assurance upon the divine promise. Here the aching heart of humanity has found its healing balm. Here the utmost agonies of suffering and of death have been met and overcome. Here the fadeless hope of eternal life has sprung up in the soil of our earthliness and blossoms into fragrance and beauty. Here mind and heart alike find their resting place in the sovereign, saving grace of God.

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