John 12:23-24 And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit
Christ as the second of the Triune God possessed the divine glory from eternity past
Christ’s humanity through His incarnation became a shell to conceal the glory of His divinity…John 1:14 tells us that the very God became flesh. This flesh, this humanity, became a shell to conceal the glory of Christ’s divinity
Christ’s divinity is itself the divine glory. Just as God is light, divinity is glory
When Christ was in the flesh, in His humanity, His flesh was a shell that concealed His divinity and thereby concealed His glory
Because the divine glory was concealed within the shell of His flesh, it was necessary for Him to be glorified [cf. 12:23; 17:1, 5]. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol
5, “The Issue of Christ Being Glorified by the Father with the Divine Glory,” pp. 318-319)
Today’s Reading
In Luke 12:50 the Lord said, “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how I am pressed until it is accomplished!” The Greek word translated “pressed” can also be rendered “constrained.” The Lord was constrained in His flesh, which He had put upon Himself in His incarnation. He needed to undergo physical death, to be baptized, that His unlimited and infinite divine being with His divine life might be released from His flesh. The Lord Jesus therefore desired to be released from the constraint of the shell of His flesh. He referred to this release in John 12:24…If the Lord Jesus as a grain of wheat had not died, He would have remained the same. But He fell into the ground and died, and that death released Him from His human shell. His incarnation caused His divine glory to be concealed in His flesh, but through His death His glory was released for the producing in His resurrection of the many grains, which become His increase as the expression of His glory
The release of the glory of Christ’s divinity was to cast fire on the earth (Luke 12:49)…This fire is the impulse of the spiritual life, an impulse that comes from the Lord’s released divine life…When Christ was baptized with the baptism of His death on the cross, the glory of His divinity was released
From the time of His resurrection a fire has been burning on earth. This fire started from Jerusalem, and then it spread through Judea and Samaria to the uttermost part of the earth. Today this fire is burning all over the earth
In His human living…the Lord Jesus prayed that the Father would glorify Him, and the Father answered Him by resurrecting Him [cf. Acts 3:13]
Such a glorification is a transfer, transferring Christ from the stage of His incarnation into the stage of His inclusion, in which He, as the last Adam, became the life-giving Spirit in resurrection
If we glorify a certain person in the sense of praising and exalting him, this kind of glorification does not transfer him…However, God’s glorification of Christ transferred Christ from one stage to another stage. He was in the first stage, the stage of incarnation, but He was transferred out of that stage into the second stage, the stage of inclusion. In the stage of inclusion He, as the last Adam, became the life-giving Spirit in resurrection
Through His glorification in His resurrection Christ became the firstborn Son of God, possessing both divinity and humanity, and became the lifegiving Spirit, the pneumatic Christ, and regenerated all His believers to be God’s children, God’s species. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 5, “The Issue of Christ Being Glorified by the Father with the Divine Glory,” pp. 320-321, 326-327, 332)