BY KRIS LUNDGAARD
Christ prayed in John 17:24 for us to be with him and see his glory. The particular glory he wanted us to see was his exaltation at the right hand of the Father. It wasn’t the only glory he wanted us to see, but his exaltation is the way all of his glories become magnified in our eyes.
All the glory of Christ that we’ve looked at so far was under a cloak while he was in the world. But in his exaltation the cloak is ripped away so that we can see the wonder of who he is and all he did. And when he appears and we see him as he is, what we’ll see is this exalted glory (1 John 3:2): the glory that the Father gave him before the foundation of the world (John 17:5, 24) and poured out on him when he ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of God (Luke 22:69; Acts 2:33; Heb 1:3).
But don’t think that the glory of his exaltation is the glory of his becoming God. He had always been God and couldn’t not be God. The glory of his deity may have been hidden under the cloak of his humanity while he was in the world, but when he rose on the third day he was “declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:4). This declaration of his glory is called the exaltation.
A total eclipse doesn’t reduce, by a single photon, the natural beauty and light of the sun. During the eclipse, to us on earth, the sun looks dark and dead, but when it emerges from behind the moon, it again shines with its original glory. In the same way, the divine nature of Christ was “eclipsed” when he took the “form of a servant” (Phil 2:7) and became a poor and despised man in this world. But the eclipse is over. His glory now shines in all its infinite luster. And when those who knew him here as a “man of sorrows” saw him in all the boundless glory of the divine nature, their souls burst with joy and admiration. This is one reason he prayed for them to be with him and to see his glory: he knew what unqualified satisfaction it would be to them forever.