A53708:454
Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ
Meditations and discourses on the glory of Christ, in his person, office, and grace with the differences between faith and sight applied unto the use of them that believe / by the late Reverend John Owen, D.D.
London: printed by B.A., 1691
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Chapter 12: Differences between our beholding the Glory of Christ by Faith in this World, and by si…
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
1. THE Object of it will be real and substantial. Christ himself in his own person with all his glory, shall be continually with us, before us, proposed unto us. We shall no longer have an Image, a Representation of him, such as is the delineation of his Glory in the Gospel. We shall see him, saith the Apostle, face to face; 1 Cor. 13. 12. which he opposeth unto our seeing him darkly as in a glass, which is the utmost that faith can attain to. We shall see him as he is, 1 Joh. 3. 2; not as now in an imperfect description of him. As a man sees his neighbour when they stand and converse together face to face; So shall we see the Lord Christ in his glory, and not as Moses who had only a transient sight of some parts of the Glory of God, when he caused it to pass by him.
THERE will be use herein, of our bodily eyes, as shall be declared. For as Joh says, in our Flesh shall we see our Redeemer, and our eyes shall behold him, Chap. 19. 25, 26, 27. That corporeal sense shall not be restored unto us, and that glorified above what we can conceive, but for this great use of the eternal beholding of Christ and his Glory. Unto whom it is not a matter of rejoicing, that with the same eyes wherewith they see the tokens and signs of him in the Sacrament of the Supper, they shall behold himself immediately, in his own person. But principally, as we shall see immediately, this vision is intellectual. It is not therefore the mere Human Nature of Christ, that is the object of it, but his Divine Person as ⟨p. 146⟩that nature subsisteth therein. What is that perfection which we shall have (for that which is perfect must come and do away that which is in part) in the comprehension of the bypostatical Union, I understand not; but this I know, that in the immediate beholding of the Person of Christ, we shall see a glory in it a thousand times above what here we can conceive. The excellencies of Infinite Wisdom, Love and Power therein, will be continually before us. And all the glories of the Person of Christ, which we have before weakly and faintly enquired into, will be in our sight for evermore.