What is glorification?

Question 07016.

Glorification is the final stage of salvation, the point at which the believer receives a glorified body and is made entirely like Jesus, with sin not simply restrained but permanently absent. It is the third tense of salvation. I have been saved from sin’s penalty, I am being saved from sin’s power, and I will be saved from sin’s very presence.

It is also the part of the doctrine we talk about least, which I think is a mistake. The New Testament writers reach for it constantly when they want to steady people under pressure, and a church that has stopped thinking about it has lost one of its main sources of nerve.

Where Glorification Sits

Romans 8:30 runs through the sequence in a single breath: those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. Notice the tense of that last verb. Paul uses the past tense of something still future, because in God’s reckoning it is as settled as the things already done.

That is a remarkable way to speak, and it is meant to reassure. Glorification is not a possibility depending on how the rest of your life goes. It is the guaranteed terminus of a road you are already on.

It also means that no genuinely justified person fails to arrive. Paul does not allow for leakage between the links. The same people who were called are the people who end up glorified.

What the Glorified Body Will Be Like

1 Corinthians 15 is the great chapter here, and Paul answers the question directly by contrast. The body that is sown is perishable, dishonoured, weak and natural; the glorified body that is raised is imperishable, glorious, powerful and spiritual. Spiritual there does not mean immaterial. It means animated and governed by the Spirit rather than by the fallen appetites of this age.

So the glorified body is a real body. Philippians 3:21 says that Jesus will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, and the risen Jesus ate fish, was touched, and was recognised. Whatever the glorified body is, it is not a ghost, and eternity is not a disembodied drift.

Continuity matters as much as change. It is your body, transformed, in the same way that the plant is the seed transformed. Paul’s agricultural illustration is chosen precisely to hold identity and difference together.

What Will Be Gone

Sin will be gone. Not managed, not resisted, gone. The believer in a glorified body will not be capable of wanting what dishonours God, and that is a thought worth sitting with for a while if you have spent years fighting the same battle and losing more often than you would like to admit.

Death will be gone, and with it the whole apparatus of decline that we spend so much of life pretending not to notice. Revelation 21:4 promises that he will wipe away every tear, and that death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more.

And the distance will be gone. 1 John 3:2 says that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. Seeing produces the likeness. That is glorification in one sentence.

When Does It Happen?

For the believer who dies before the Lord returns, the spirit goes immediately to be with Jesus, which is what Paul means by being away from the body and at home with the Lord. That is real and it is conscious and it is better by far, but it is not yet glorification, because the body is still in the ground.

Glorification proper waits for the resurrection. At the Rapture the dead in Christ rise first and those who are alive are changed, and 1 Corinthians 15:52 puts it in the twinkling of an eye. That is the moment the glorified body is received.

So there is an interval, and honesty requires us to say so. The believer between death and resurrection is with Jesus and is happy, and is still waiting for something.

The Greek Behind Glory

The word group here is built on doxa, glory, which in the Greek Old Testament translates the Hebrew kabod, a word whose root idea is weight. Glory in Scripture is not sparkle. It is substance, significance, the sheer weightiness of God’s presence. To be glorified is to be given a share in that weight.

That helps with a question people often ask, which is whether glorification means we become divine. It does not. We remain creatures for ever, and the gap between Creator and creature is never closed. What happens is that the image of God in us, defaced by sin, is finally restored and displayed without distortion. We become fully what human beings were always meant to be.

It also explains the strange New Testament habit of speaking about our glory as though it were already ours. Colossians can say that Christ in you is the hope of glory, and Romans can speak of the glory that is to be revealed to us. The deposit is present; the payment is future.

Glorification and the Rest of the Doctrine

Glorification is the last of the three tenses, and it is worth seeing how it depends on the other two. Because you have been declared righteous on the basis of the cross, your arrival is not in question. Because the Spirit is at work in sanctification now, there is genuine continuity between the person you are becoming and the person you will be.

What glorification adds is completion. Justification dealt with the record, sanctification deals with the character, and glorification deals with the nature itself. At that point the fight described in Romans 7 is simply over, not because you finally won it but because the battlefield has been removed.

For the doctrine that guarantees you will get there, see what eternal security is. Glorification is the reason eternal security is not an abstract comfort. It has an address and a date, even if we are not told the date.

Glorification and the Coming of Jesus

I hold that the church will be removed before the tribulation period, and that this event is imminent, requiring no preceding signs. That is why Titus 2:13 can call it the blessed hope, and why the New Testament repeatedly ties holy living to the expectation of an appearing that could happen at any moment.

This shapes how glorification is preached. If the Lord’s return required a long queue of prophetic events first, then the glorified body would be a distant abstraction. Because it does not, it is a live expectation, and 1 John 3:3 says that everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.

Whatever your position on the timing, the practical effect of the doctrine is the same. People who expect to see Jesus soon live differently from those who do not.

What About Creation?

Glorification is not only about us. Romans 8 says that the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God, and that it will be set free from its bondage to corruption. The whole created order is standing on tiptoe waiting for the day the redeemed appear in glory.

That gives the doctrine a scale that individualistic teaching tends to miss. God is not evacuating a few souls from a doomed planet. He is restoring a creation, and the glorified body of the believer belongs in a renewed physical world rather than in a cloud.

It also gives dignity to the present one. If matter has a future, then bodies, work, food and beauty are not distractions from spirituality.

Will We Know Each Other?

I am asked this more than almost anything else, usually by someone who has recently buried a husband or a wife. The answer is yes. Moses and Elijah were recognisable on the mountain. The risen Jesus was known by his friends. Paul expects the Thessalonians to be his joy and crown at the coming of the Lord, which requires that he will know them and they him.

Nobody in a glorified body will be less themselves. Relationships will not be diminished in glory. They will be purified of everything that spoils them here, which is jealousy, misunderstanding, self-interest and the fear of loss.

So the hope is not vague. It is personal, embodied and specific, and it is worth saying so at funerals plainly rather than poetically.

Why This Doctrine Steadies People

Paul’s own use of glorification is almost always pastoral rather than speculative. He raises it when talking about suffering, about bereavement, about persecution and about growing old. 2 Corinthians 4:17 calls present affliction light and momentary, and says it is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.

That is not denial. Paul had been beaten, shipwrecked and imprisoned, and he was not the sort of man to make light of anything. He was doing arithmetic, and the arithmetic came out that way because the other side of the equation is so enormous.

If you are worn down at the moment, this is the doctrine to preach to yourself. What you are carrying has a limit and an end, and a glorified body waits on the other side of it. The glorified body has no limit and no end.

So, now what?

So do not leave glorification to the last five minutes of a funeral service. It belongs in ordinary weeks, in hospital corridors, and at the kitchen table when the news has been bad. Everything wrong with you, including the things you have long since stopped expecting to change, is coming to a definite end.

What would it do to your week if you woke up tomorrow genuinely expecting to see him?

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

1 John 3:2 (ESV)