We do not always know it when we have The privilege to be God's messengers. Nor who shall be His messengers bo us.
Those who always see the King in His beauty of holiness cannot fail to gain some of His radiance, even as Moses came down with shining face from his long communion with God in the Mount.2
1. We are transformed into the same image. Same as what ? Possibly the same as we behold ; but more probably the phrase,
^ A. Maclaren, The God of the Amen, 94.
* Dora Farncomb, The Vision of His Face, 47.
2 COR. III. i8 97
especially " image " in the singular, is employed to convey the thought of the blessed likeness of all who become perfectly like Him. As if he had said, " Various as we are in disposition and character, unlike in the histories of our lives, and all the influences that these have had upon us, differing in everything but the common relation to Jesus Christ, we are all growing like the same image, and we shall come to be perfectly like it, and yet each retain his own distinct individuality." " We being many are one, for we are all partakers of one." Perhaps, too, we may connect with this another idea which occurs more than once in St. Paul's Epistles. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, for instance, he says that the Christian ministry is to continue, till a certain point of progress has been reached, which he describes as our all coming to " a perfect man." The whole of us together make a perfect man : the whole make one image. That is to say, the Apostle's idea perhaps is that it takes the aggregated perfectness of the whole Catholic Church, one throughout all ages, and containing a multitude that no man can number, to set forth worthily any- thing like a complete image of the fulness of Christ. No one man, even though he be raised to the highest pitch of perfection and his nature be widened out to perfect development, can be the full image of that definite sum of all beauty; but the whole of us taken together, with all the diversities of natural character re- tained and consecrated, being collectively His body which He vitalizes, may, on the whole, be not a quite inadequate repre- sentation of our perfect Lord.
Just as we set round a central light sparkling prisms, each of which catches the glow at its own angle, and flashes it back of its own colour, while the sovereign completeness of the perfect white radiance comes from the blending of all their separate rays, so they who stand round about the starry throne receive each the light in his own measure and manner, and give forth each a true and perfect, and altogether a complete, image of Him that en- lightens them all, and is above them all.
^ " When I was a little boy," says Pastor Chu, " I saw a funny little insect like a piece of stick. My mother told me this was a mingling (a kind of caterpillar), and that it never had young ones. When I asked my father how this could be, he told me that when it wanted a young one, it stood opposite a piece of stick and spoke
2 COR. & GAL. — 7
98 TRANSFORMED BY BEHOLDING
to it saying, ' You're like me, you're like me/ until finally little buds appeared and shaped themselves to arms and legs, and by- and-by the living insect stood before it. Of course, we know that this is a fable, made up by some one who saw a chrysalis or a mantis, but I will use it as an illustration. Here are we in the world, and Satan comes and stands opposite to us. ' You're like me, you're like me ' he says to us, until — oh the shame and sorrow of it — we do grow like him by listening to him, and evil tempers bud forth and evil words and deeds, till we are very children of the devil. But, thank God, that is not all ; for One comes down and stands opposite to us and He says * Be like me, be like me,' until, thanks be to God, the evil tempers will fall away and holy tempers take their place; and by looking at Him we do grow like Him, changed from glory to glory into the same image." ^
Madest Thou man in Thine own image. Lord? How then has man defaced that work of Thine, Until on that which Thy hand made so fair, Thou lookest vainly for the marks divine ?
Selfish and wayward, we have turned from Thee, Albeit for Thyself Thou madest us — Have fixed our thoughts and hopes on things below, And lost the likeness to our Maker thus.
Yet Thou hast loved us with a love so strong — Thou hast desired us, though we left Thy side. That — changed, and marred, and sin-stained, as we are — Apart from us Thou art not satisfied.
And Thou hast brought us to Thy feet again: 0 now, at last, fulfil in us Thy plan! Undone, and helpless, at Thy feet we pray, Eemake us, by our perfect fellow-Man ! ^
2. The transformation is "from glory to glory." It is pro- gressive. Holiness that is meant for such changing of the re- deemed into the likeness of their Eedeemer must be progressive rather than instantaneous.