The Cross in the Experience of Our Lord

Testimonies of How God's Word impacts Lives

R. A. Finlayson

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781781912119

Part One
The Creator as Redeemer

Chapter 1
The Creator as Redeemer

‘But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.

For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.

For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:3-6).

It is this passage on which I would like to dwell, hoping to gather in your thoughts around this great thing that had happened when the Holy Spirit shone into our hearts with the light of the knowledge of God’s glory, radiant from the face of Jesus Christ.

The situation that Paul and his fellow-workers met with at Corinth was sad and discouraging in the extreme. But it is a situation that has been all too familiar to the gospel preacher since that day. The gospel was ‘hid’ to many in Corinth, a closed book, a mystery impenetrable. And it was a hid gospel for the saddest of all reasons, ‘The god of this world blinded the eyes of them that believed not’.

Here were two processes going on. They believed not, they closed their eyes to the light they had, and then the god of this world removed their sight, and now they cannot see, for the god of this world took away their vision. They refused to believe, and now they cannot believe. What use is it then, to preach to such people the gospel of Jesus Christ? What use is it to uplift Christ before the eyes of men and women who are sightless? This is a dilemma that the gospel preacher still finds himself in. He is commanded to uplift Christ in the gospel to men who have no eyes to see him, to men who cannot receive him!

Paul faced that problem in all its implications, and he fell back on God, on the God who saved him, and the God who did such great things in his own experience. That was indeed the Creator-God, the God who made the worlds, the God who brought light out of primeval darkness. He was the God who shone in their hearts and gave a new light, ‘The light of the knowledge of the glory of God’, and that light reached him and his fellow believers ‘in the face of Jesus Christ’.

Now that is where you and I stand today. We are dealing with a Creator-God, and his creative work has been manifested in us, and we are assuredly witnesses to the fact that nothing is too hard for the Lord. We are miracles of creative and redemptive grace. Let us think together of the wondrous work of divine illumination, when God shone in our hearts with the light of the knowledge of his glory when first we met Jesus. And we are to ponder the great and glorious fact that, while once we were darkness, now we are light in the Lord, so that we may walk as children of light.

Let us consider the three great facts that we have in this passage. First of all, how did God do this great work of illumination in our hearts? Then, what kind of light did he bring to our hearts? And then, through what medium did that light reach us? What is the firmament from which the light of divine illumination has shone upon our darkened hearts to give us new perception, new understanding, new light in the Lord?

The way of Illumination

First of all then, how has God done this great work of illumination in our hearts? It is the God who caused the light to shine out of the darkness who has shone in our hearts. Here Paul brings us back to the God of Creation, and lets us see him at work once again on a new creation, and he seems to find in the old creation an emblem and a token of the new. It may indeed be true that that is why God has given us such a clear and full account of his first creation, that we might follow his footprints, and see the Creator-God becoming the Redeeming-God in Jesus Christ. For we do believe that the first creation contains, to the spiritual eye, a blueprint of the second creation, and that if we follow the footprints of the creating God we shall see there tokens of the Saviour we have met in Jesus Christ. For we believe that the work that God has done in our hearts none but the Creator could do. We believe that it was the God of Genesis who came to work out a new creation by his own almighty power.

For here again God is at work as of old with a creative word. You remember that when the world of old was shrouded in the darkness of night, God came forth with majesty and uttered the great fiat, ‘Let there be light!’ That word was a putting forth of creative power, and it cleft, like a beam of light, its way through the night; it scattered the darkness, and light dawned upon a dead and deserted world. We believe that that is precisely what God, in Jesus Christ, has done in our hearts where the darkness and deadness and desolation of death had reigned. When friends spoke to us of Jesus and asked us to look upon his pierced hands and side, we could not see, we could not understand, we were like Robert Murray McCheyne, who testified in his own experience:

I oft read with pleasure, to soothe or engage,

Isaiah’s wild measure, and John’s simple page,

But e’en when they pictured the blood-sprinkled Tree,

Jehovah Tsidkenu seem’d nothing to me.

That was the testimony of many souls. But in a day of grace, a word of authority came from God; it was truly a creative word, it cleft a way for itself into the night that covered our nature, and what was impossible for human power and human skill to do, God, by a word of authority, did himself. He broke our darkness, he scattered the clouds that enveloped us, and lo! the day dawned, we saw light, spiritual light, God had spoken a creative word.

And God is at work as of old in a progressive development of light. We remember that, in the first creation, light came progressively. It was not the sun in its meridian splendour that shone; indeed there is evidence that the sun had come at a much later period than the light. But the light did come, it came to wax and grow. And it is significant that at every period in God’s creative work, we read, ‘And the evening and the morning were the first day, the evening and the morning were the second day’, and so on. Why should it be evening and morning? This is not after the manner of man’s toil; he works from morning to evening. It is not enough to say that this is a Jewish division of time. We have to get behind that Jewish division of time, and ask how it came about that the Jew was taught to regard time as moving from evening to morning. It was God’s pattern of workmanship. He is always facing the light, his back is on the evening, his face is towards the waxing light, and the rising sun. And if that was true in the natural creation, it is blessedly true in the spiritual creation. When God shines in our hearts with spiritual illumination, it is twilight with our souls; we see, though we see but dimly.

Yet God comes with waxing light, and as God’s work develops, the light progresses until, eventually, it reaches noonday splendour. Our face is towards the sun-rising, and our souls are looking towards the meridian splendour of God’s fully developed work, and of God’s self-revelation to our souls. We are always going from the evening to the morning as the work of grace progresses in our souls.

We know that God is at work once again, in an ordered sequence of events, as he was in the first creation, for we know that there was a sequence in the divine operation. But the light was a harbinger of all life upon earth. As long as night had shrouded the world there was nothing on earth but desolation and death; nothing could live where the earth was enveloped in darkness; in the outer cold of space there was nothing but death. But when light came, things began to happen on earth. Not only did the clouds lift and the darkness break, and the day dawn, and the mountains of snow and ice melt, but life came with the light. The grass began to grow in the field, the trees in the forest, fish were placed in the ocean, birds in the air, beasts in the field, and eventually man came. But the light was the prerequisite of life, and the harbinger of every blessing that God was to give to the world.

In like manner, is it not true that while the darkness of nature shrouded our hearts, there was nothing there but desolation and death? As long as we are ignorant of God in Jesus Christ we are spiritually dead; there can be no life at all as long as we are estranged from God, and aliens to his life and love. But when that light shone into our hearts, then life came. It was a harbinger of every blessing; every growth and every development in our being came because the light of the knowledge of Jesus shone into our hearts.

Is it not true then, that we, who have been saved by grace, have felt the creative power of God? Is it not true that the God who laid the foundations of that first creation, and brought light out of primeval darkness, is the God who has shone into our hearts, and laid the foundations of a new creation which sin will not mar, and the flesh and the Devil cannot destroy? Yes, our dealings have been with the Creator-God who made himself known savingly and redeemingly to us in Jesus Christ his Son.

The Nature of the Illumination

And what light did God bring to our darkened hearts? It is called here, ‘The light of the knowledge of the glory of God’. Let us try to examine the nature of that light. It is always difficult to examine the light. Even natural light evades investigation to a large extent. Yet we know there are several kinds of rays that blend together to make what we ordinarily call white light. Light can be broken up into its component rays, so we think God has broken up here spiritual light into three component rays.

First of all, the quality, the very nature of the divine illumination. It is God’s own glory that came back to our desolate hearts. You see, that was the dignity and the honour of man in his first creation, that he was the depository of God’s glory. God gave to the man he made in his image his own fellowship and his own glory. Sin came and desecrated the temple of man’s nature, and God departed and took his glory away. And the fires on the altar of man’s heart went out, and the temple of the human soul was left desolate, desecrated, and unclean. And that was the state of man by nature.

But when God came back in redemption, it was the divine glory that returned to the temple that had been cleansed, and to an altar on which the blood of Calvary had been sprinkled. And God returned in his glory to the desolate and darkened heart of man, for it was the life of God in the quickening of the Holy Spirit that came to us in the day of our redemption. We became partakers of the divine nature, and the uncreated glory of God returned to the temple of the human soul. That is really the nature of the light, it is the glory of God’s life and God’s presence and God’s fellowship, that has come to us.

But here it is called the knowledge of the glory of God. Well, you know how little knowledge we have of natural light, how little knowledge we have of the sun in the heavens. Sometimes by means of the spectroscope, or by means of the natural spectrum we call the rainbow, we do get a glimpse of the multi-splendour and glory of the light of Nature. Yet, to a large extent, the glory of the sun is hid from us. In its blazing light it is beyond our perception and our understanding. Yet an amazing thing has happened when God shone into our hearts: he gave us the knowledge of his own divine glory. He came nigh to our understanding, to our apprehensions, and our final faculties were brought into close, intimate touch with the glory of the invisible God. God in Jesus Christ came within reach of finite man. And now our whole manhood can embrace the knowledge that he has given us. Our minds can see, our consciences can interpret, our hearts can feel, our wills can respond, and our whole being can go out in loving perception and in willing apprehension of the knowledge of God’s glory that he has given us. ‘And this is the life eternal, that they may know thee, the only true God’. That is the wonderful thing that has happened in our redemption, that God in Christ has drawn so near that we, who are finite creatures, can behold God in Christ and say, ‘We see God, we know God’. And in that knowledge of God there is life eternal.

But it is called here, ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God’. When knowledge becomes light, it is transmuted into a living force and a living reality. Knowledge is not always light. There is such a thing as natural knowledge, natural understanding, natural perception of the deep mysteries of nature. But that knowledge produces not one spark of light. But when we get a knowledge of the glory of God, it is knowledge that is transfused into light, knowledge that takes hold of all our faculties, and knowledge that makes use of all that God has given us, till we become ‘light in the Lord’.

You remember, that is what happened in connection with the two travelling to Emmaus. Three wonderful things happened when the Stranger talked with them in the way. First, they had a heart-emptying experience. As they poured out their disappointment, their disillusionment, and their well-nigh despair, before the Stranger in the way, their hearts were emptied of false knowledge, of prejudice, of darkness, of misunderstanding. And then a second thing happened. There was a heart-filling experience, when the Lord took out of the Scriptures the things concerning himself, and made these things known to them; and enabled their understanding, with renewed vigour, to grasp the meaning of the things they heard but did not understand before, a heart-filling experience. But before he left them he did something more, he kindled that knowledge into a fire till their hearts burned within them. And it was the fire that brought light and energy and power and purity into their experience.

And that is what the Spirit of the living God does when he enters the darkened natures of men. He brings the glory of God nigh to us, and he empowers and re-invigorates our faculties to perceive and apprehend the glory of God who has come nigh to us, and there he makes that knowledge, not a dead perception, but a living flame. He baptises us with the Holy Ghost and with fire, and it is when that knowledge of God becomes a burning fire within us that we feel its drive and its power, its cleansing and consuming influence. Then we know the meaning of ‘The light of the knowledge of the glory of God’. That is what happened when our hearts were illumined.

The Medium of Illumination

From where did that light come to us? What was the medium through which it reached us? What was the firmament from which this sun shone? ‘In the face of Jesus Christ.’ What is meant by the ‘face’ of Jesus Christ? It is the visible appearance of Christ, the Person of Christ. Just as you say to a friend, ‘I was glad to see your face’, meaning, yourself, in intimate acquaintance. So the ‘face’ of Jesus Christ means the incarnate God, God manifested in the flesh. That is how the glory of God could become a matter of knowledge and light to us. God veiled his own glory in the manhood of Jesus Christ, and he veiled that glory not to conceal, but to reveal! And he so veiled his glory that, when those closest to him beheld him, they said, ‘We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth’. The Incarnation is a concealment of the glory of God, that it might be revealed to us. It was God drawing a veil over his uncreated glory, that the souls of his people might look and live, that souls might see his glory in the face of Christ and not be consumed. That is the meanin...

Table of contents

• Testimonials
• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: The Creator as Redeemer
• Part Two: The Cross in the Experience of Our Lord
• More Books from Christian Focus
• Christian Focus