Think of God, the Father, as the glory, and think of Christ as another layer of His glory manifested in the Man Jesus. Christ is the express image of the Father’s person, and the brightness of His glory (Hebrews 1:3). This divine nature of Christ is the exact image of the Father. To speak of Christ is to speak of glory. These are interchangeable terms according to the apostle Paul, and author, Carey Newman, in his book Paul’s Glory-Christology. He quotes C.A.A. Scott in, “it is difficult to resist the conclusion that for St Paul… the Glory was an equivalent for Christ.”
We can better understand who and what ‘the Christ’ is by looking at Exodus 33:22 and Colossians 1:27. Also John 2:11; 11:40. When Moses said, “Please, show me Your glory.” God answered, “So it shall be, while My glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and will cover you with My hand while I pass by.” The Father used ‘My glory’ and ‘I’ interchangeably. The Father is His glory.
Christ is also the glory, interchangeable terms, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27)
Jesus existed in heaven with the Father as the Word (Logos) of God before the foundation of the world and God created everything through Him. On earth He had two natures, human (the Man) and divine (the Christ).
Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen affirms this by referencing Luke 22:42, “Not My will, but Yours, be done.” Jesus was born without sin because God was His Father. He had no sin nature, and His mind did not need transforming. He had a human nature (like Adam before sin), yet He heard the Father’s voice clearly and obeyed Him perfectly. He never broke fellowship and daily surrendered His will out of love for the Father. If Jesus had only one nature on earth, there would be nothing to surrender to another, nothing to sacrifice for the sake of love.
God is about intimate fellowship: one makes a request and the other willfully surrenders. Jesus, the Man, did not want to die. The pain, shame, loneliness, and sense of abandonment from His Father was excruciating. The Father was all He had ever known. With a perfect human nature Jesus never gave into His own will, because His mind did not need renewing.
Ours does. Every speck of it.
Jesus surrendered His will even to death, and continually aligned Himself to the Father while He lived. Separated from His Father on the cross, He truly experienced how we feel. Without a human nature, He could not have identified with our suffering. Without a divine one, He could not have reconciled us to the Father. Considering all this, 2 Corinthians 5:19 makes much more sense, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing” our “trespasses to” us, “and has committed to us the word of reconciliation.”
Carey C. Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology: Tradition and Rhetoric (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017), 3.
Kärkkäinen Veli-Matti, Christology: A Global Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2016), 68.
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