Chapter 214—Amazing Transformations
For we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men.
1 Corinthians 4:9
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The Lord Jesus is making experiments on human hearts through the
exhibition of His mercy and abundant grace. He is effecting transformations
so amazing that Satan, with all his triumphant boasting, with all his
confederacy of evil united against God and the laws of His government,
stands viewing them as a fortress impregnable to his sophistries and delusions.
They are to him an incomprehensible mystery. The angels of God, seraphim
and cherubim, the powers commissioned to cooperate with human agencies,
look on with astonishment and joy, that fallen men, once children of wrath,
are through the training of Christ developing characters after the divine
similitude, to be sons and daughters of God, to act an important part in the
occupations and pleasure of heaven.
To His church, Christ has given ample facilities, that He may receive
a large revenue of glory from His redeemed, purchased possession. The
church, being endowed with the righteousness of Christ, is His depository, in
which the wealth of His mercy, His love, His grace, is to appear in full and
final display. The declaration in His intercessory prayer, that the Father’s
love is as great toward us as toward Himself, the only-begotten Son, and that
we shall be with Him where He is, forever one with Christ and the Father, is
a marvel to the heavenly host, and it is their great joy. The gift of His Holy
Spirit, rich, full, and abundant, is to be to His church as an encompassing wall
of fire, which the powers of hell shall not prevail against. In their untainted
purity and spotless perfection, Christ looks upon His people as the reward of
all His suffering, His humiliation, and His love, and the supplement of His
glory—Christ, the great center from which radiates all glory.
All heaven is watching those agencies that are as the hand to work out
the purpose of God in the earth, thus doing the will of God in heaven. Such
co-operation accomplishes a work that brings honor and glory and majesty
to God. Oh, if all would love as Christ has loved, that perishing men might
be saved from ruin, what a change would come to our world!
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