Suffering and Glory

For it was fitting that he...should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. For He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one origin. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers…” – Hebrews 2.10-11

In the second chapter of Hebrews we are shocked to discover that the God of the Universe is not ashamed to identify with depraved humanity – with we who inhabit a world which GM Hopkin’s rightly described as “smeared with toil,” which “wears man’s smudge and shares men’s smell.” He through whom and for whom the world was made; who upholds the universe by the strength of His power; who is and was the exact radiance of His Father’s glory – the perfect imprint of His nature – this Lord, this God called us brothers, brothers!

He made Himself “a little lower than the angels,” friend to a fallen race of men – of fallen gods (Ps. 82.6) – in order that we could be redeemed, bought back, and reunited with the same Father from whom we both originate. Perhaps most magnificently, He not only did all this so that we could be made like Him, but so that we could be with Him in glory.

How did He do it?

First, by symbolically identifying a group of people as His own, the Jews; second, by speaking to them through their fathers and prophets; later, by delivering them from physical bondage in the desert of Egypt. Afterwards, in the wilderness where they wandered, He gave them bread from Heaven; and covered the ground with quail, all the time saying that He did so in order that they would know He was Yahweh, the benevolent, all-knowing, ever-existing, creator God. To these great lengths, He gladly went.

But even if all this was – or at any rate should have been – enough for them and, inadvertently, us, to come to know His character, it wasn’t enough to save us.

So He went further by becoming the bread. He suffered on the hill called Golgotha so that we could be delivered from spiritual bondage in the desert of our own souls; the blood He shed, by a kind of miraculous transfusion, became – and forever outside of time remains – our life, our sustenance and nourishment, the thing that will protect us from damnation and decay.

Of course, it is He who made us to desire glory (the inverse of damnation) and eternal life (the inverse of decay). This desire – this “eternity in our hearts” – is not some aberration, some narcissistic consequence of Eve’s indiscretion or Adam’s abdication. It is part of our divine make-up (1 Peter 5.10). No saint in honesty can look with disparaging eyes upon the promise of being awarded a crown. We hold fast to the promise that “if we endure with Him, we will also reign with him” (2 Timothy 2.11-12).

But what we oft fail to recognize – what we sometimes, even, shudder to suppress – is the knowledge that, in order to identify with Him in glory, we must first be willing to identify with Him in suffering. It is only “if” we endure that we will reign; and "if" we suffer with Him that we will be glorified with Him (Rom. 8.17).

Thus Paul promises that “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (3.12); or as the same verse is translated elsewhere, “they will suffer." We all want to identify with Him in glory; but who wants to identify with Him in suffering, or to endure the shame of persecution?

If we must endure, where, and to whom, can we look to find the courage to face such suffering?

We look to Christ, “the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” We take time to consider “Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that [we] will not grow weary and lose heart” (Heb.12.3); we gird ourselves up, summoning every ounce of the strength He has given us, every shred of resolve, to remember “that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed in us” (Rom. 8.18).