TESTED

TESTED & TRANSFIGURED

“And some eight days after these sayings, it came about that He took along Peter and John and James, and went up to the mountain to pray.” Luke 9:28

Had Adam never wandered from the pathway of the Divine command, or sinned, or fallen, he would have never died, but having come to the end of his probationary life, and completed his course, he would have been metamorphosed, changed, in the same manner, and prepared for the super-earthly life that lies beyond-that life which we know so little, and which in anxious moments sometimes we doubt altogether, which surely exists, infinite in its mystery. Perfected as we shall be through His threefold sanctification process.

                Jesus at the hour of transfiguration came to that point of the perfecting of His human personality. By an infinite mystery God created a new man in the creation of Jesus.

                Through all the years of His youth and Manhood up to this moment, He had faced all the temptations to which man must be subject, mastering them being victorious over them:

physical

spiritual, and last & subtlest of them all

vocational.

                The last breath of that temptation had come Him when Peter has said God have mercy on Thee, not this way of the Cross! With stern and absolute heroism Jesus said "Get thee hence, Satan, thou art an offence to Me." That was the last victory over vocational temptation.

                Then immediately passing to the Mount, His life perfect and complete; every temptation having been met and mastered; the whole citadel of His manhood held through, all the prior period of years inviolate; He was transfigured before them.

This was eight days after He had told them He was headed for the Cross, die, be buried, and then rise from the grave. Their problem was how in the world could He Who is Perfect, die? They just could not even conceive this thought. Transfiguration reveals the Divine intention as to the process of human life. Beginning in weakness and limitation, passing through difficulties and temptations, gaining perpetual victory over temptation by abiding only and at all times and under all circumstances in the will of God, at last, all the testing being ended, the life is passed into the presence of God Himself, and into the light of heaven, not through the gate of death, but through the painless, glorious process of transfiguration as Paul says in 2 Cor 3:18.