In Matthew 16:1-20, when Jesus asked Peter, “Who do men say that I am?” His answer was, “You are the Christ, Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”
It was never Jesus’ job to reveal Himself. It is the Father’s job to not only draw people to Jesus (John 6:44), but also to reveal that Jesus is His Christ. Interestingly, it is Jesus’ job to reveal the Father to those He chooses. “No one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. (Matthew 11:27)
The Father was not to give His glory “to another” OTHER than the Messiah (Christ) (Isaiah 42:8), and the Messiah gave His glory to us (John 17:5,22, Colossians 1:27). Christ the Messiah was one with the Father by way of the glory. It is the glory of God that makes things one (John 17:22).
Now we are carriers of this glory-treasure that is hidden “in earthen vessels” (2 Corinthians 4:6-7), until we discover it and activate it, hence Paul’s commands to “put on Christ” (Romans 13:14) and “stir up the gift” (2 Timothy 1:6).
~
It is not automatically activated upon receiving Jesus. It takes a true disciple to go deeper with God. That is a choice we make to choose Him, although He chose us first (John 15:16). Author, Larry Thompson, wrote in his book Riches of Glory, “We are born of imperishable seed, but as long as the seed remains inactive and not germinated, then nothing manifests.”
Jesus commanded “His glory into us.”
“This treasure in our earthen vessel is now, not when we get a glorified vessel. We are fellow-workers with the Father of glory, manifesting His glory wherever we go.”
Jesus “restored the glory. Now we restore the glory wherever we go, in all that we say and do.”
Thompson, Larry, Riches of Glory: Secrets of the Kingdom Series (St Helens, OR: Streams of Glory Ministries, 2019), 41.
~
When we speak of the person of Christ, we are speaking of a Man who operates in the fulness and brightness of the Father’s glory in exact representation of His person (Hebrews 1:3), or in the case of a man (or woman) in the process of being transformed into glory, the Holy Spirit is transfiguring us into the image of Christ from one glory level to another (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Jesus took off His garment of glory to put on our garment of flesh and entered our world to die, rise, and ascend to the right hand of the Father. From there He poured out His blood upon the mercy seat before the Father for the forgiveness of our sins, and He put the garment of glory back on.
He gave us the same garment to wear even in this life by pouring out His Spirit of glory into us, to be awakened more and more. To the degree that we activate the glory within us will be the degree our lives reflect Christ in this world. We do this through abiding in the word and allowing Jesus’ word to abide in us, through repentance from dead works and leaving the world of sin, through communion and fellowship with Christ and the church, through actively and daily separating the precious from the vile so we can be as God’s mouth (Jeremiah 15:19), and through speaking the words we hear the Holy Spirit declaring to us, and doing the works we see Him doing.
