Unto the Image of the Son of God
Before Adam had taken a single step beyond the borders of Eden, God had already shed blood on his behalf. The man and the woman stood in the garden with the fruit still in their mouths and the fig leaves still green about their loins, and the Lord God, who had every right to leave them in their exposure, took an animal, slew it, and made from its skin a covering for the very creatures who had just betrayed Him. “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them” (). The first act of God after the fall was an act of judgment, and the second was an act of covering, and in that small and quiet scene the whole shape of the gospel is already visible.
My argument in this essay is that the salvation of man is, from its first movement to its last, an intercession of God: a divine intervention that originates in God, is carried out by God, and is brought to completion by God. Man did not begin his own rescue, could not pay his own debt, and cannot by his own effort be conformed to the image of the Son. Every decisive act in the history of redemption, from the covering of Adam’s shame to the incarnation of the Word, from the cross to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who groans within the saints, is God stepping between man and the ruin he chose. Because this is so, the believer’s understanding of it is far from incidental to his spiritual life. What a Christian believes about the intercession of God governs whether he walks toward union with God or wanders in a fog of opinions that cannot carry him there.
The essay moves in nine stages. I begin with the necessity of right theology, and with the history of the Church’s divisions as a witness to that necessity. I then turn to the sovereign energy of God that brings all things under His feet, and to Eden, where the first intercession took place. From there I trace the long preparation through Noah, Abraham, Moses and the law; the incarnation, in which God purchased the Church with His own blood; the knowledge of Christ that saves and sustains; the example of Enoch, who walked with God; the indwelling Spirit who alters the state of the man in whom He dwells; and finally the goal toward which the Spirit’s intercession presses, the conformity of the saints to the image of the Son. I close at the Eucharistic table, where the God who intercedes gives Himself to be received.
Why Theology Cannot Be Left to Opinion
Theology is often treated as the concern of specialists, a matter for seminaries and councils, while the ordinary believer is told that what really counts is a sincere heart. That division cannot survive contact with the Scriptures or with the history of the Church. Theology governs the development of doctrine, and doctrine governs the progress of the soul. When a man’s theology is false, misinformed or underdeveloped, he places obstacles in his own path toward God, and the poor quality of his doctrine soon becomes the poor quality of his prayer. The quality of his fellowship with God, the stature he will attain in the spiritual life, the resilience of his hope in suffering, all of these depend upon whether what he believes about God is true.
The standard of that truth is a Person. “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (). Our Lord Jesus Christ is the embodiment of all that is true, and theology must therefore be found in the truth about Him and in what He has made possible through His incarnation. St Paul understood that the whole edifice of Christian hope rests on this foundation and on nothing else: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (). Our hope rests on the incarnation, on the crucifixion and on the resurrection. Remove any of these, or misunderstand them, and faith has no reference point and no foundation. A believer who intends to build lasting convictions must therefore understand these mysteries thoroughly, in continuity with the apostles and the ancient tradition of the Church, because everything that will define the quality of his spiritual stature relies upon them.
The Witness of the Schisms
The history of the Church over two thousand years bears this out with painful clarity. When one studies the great divisions of Christendom, one finds that nearly all of them were matters of doctrine. Men did not break communion lightly, and they did not break it over trifles; they broke it because they could not hold fellowship with one another, or with God, on the basis of what they judged to be false theology.
The first great division arose around the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The Council confessed that Christ is one Person in two natures, fully divine and fully human, united without confusion and without separation. A body of churches in the East, whose heirs today include the Coptic Church of Egypt, would not receive this definition; they held that Christ has one nature, at once divine and human, in one Person. The churches that received Chalcedon insisted on the two natures, and when the others would not accept that confession, communion was broken.
The second great division came between Rome and the Byzantine East over the procession of the Holy Spirit. For roughly a thousand years the Church had confessed together that the Spirit proceeds from the Father. Rome then added a clause, the filioque, declaring that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son. The East refused the addition, and Rome and the churches of the East went their separate ways.
The third came about five hundred years ago, when Martin Luther, a monk, and the Reformers who followed him, John Calvin among them, broke from the Roman church because they would not accept her teaching, especially as it touched salvation. They brought into the doctrine of salvation a juristic and legal vocabulary which neither East nor West accepted, and the Reformation followed. From these schisms, and from the further fractures that followed them, have come a multitude of movements: the Latter-day Saints, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, and the charismatic groups. The further one moves from the centrality of the gospel and the theology of the Church, the lower the quality of doctrine becomes. At the far end of the spectrum one meets what can only be called a theology of opinions, a liberal theology in which a man may teach what he pleases, and in which heresies flourish that do great damage to the spiritual progress of the Christian and to his walk with God.
This matters because the true aim of the Christian life is union with God through the redemptive work accomplished in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. A theology that has drifted far from that aim cannot bring a soul to it, however sincere the soul may be.
The Church Is a Body
The same honesty must be applied to the doctrine of the Church. God brought the ecclesial community into being through His apostles, and through the bishops they appointed, and through a long line of apostolic succession, for the establishment of the apostolic and Catholic Church of Christ in the earth. When a body of teaching has drifted so far from the purpose for which that community was founded, intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge that some who use the name of the Church may not, by definition, belong to it. To be part of the Church is to be in communion with the Church.
The Church cannot be reduced to an invisible fellowship that exists everywhere and nowhere, as though she were merely a spirit drifting over the denominations. The Apostle forbids that reading: “For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones” (). A body has flesh and bones. It has members joined to one another and to their head, and its unity is concrete. To base one’s faith on an abstraction is neither healthy nor safe, because once the Church becomes whatever anyone imagines her to be, there remains no principled reason to stop short of those who deny the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, as the Mormons do, or of other religions altogether. The religion of Christ requires that we aspire to perfection and excellence in theology, because that is how we grow.
The Sovereign Energy of God
Why should God intercede for mankind at all, and how can we be confident that His intercession will succeed? The answer to the second part of that question begins in the third chapter of Genesis, in the middle of the catastrophe. Man has committed treason, the woman has been deceived, the serpent has carried out his treachery, and yet God already has a plan. When He pronounces judgment on the serpent, He does not improvise a response on the spot. His words reveal a purpose formed long before the scene began, and they show that nothing creation does can thwart or destroy the purposes of God.
This confidence rests on the foreknowledge of God. God knows all things, including the free actions of every created will; He knows what each creature will do at every moment, and He holds every contingency within His counsel, so that all things are brought at last into alignment with His purposes. St Paul speaks of this when he describes the coming of our Lord: “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself” (). The word translated “working” is energeia, energy or operative power. There is a power inherent in God that is able, and continually at work, to bring all things under subjection to His will, His plan and His purposes. Nothing can drift so far from Him that it passes outside the reach of His authority. Creation cannot become so rebellious that God Himself cannot restore it and bring it back.
David saw the same truth in prophecy: “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool” (). The oracle is both descriptive and predictive. The word is “until”, and it carries no condition. Since the enthronement of God the Son, the energy of God, flowing from His throne, has been at work to bring all things into subjection beneath Him.
This energy was first entrusted to man in the beginning. God blessed the man and the woman and said to them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (). Dominion and subduing are the language of bringing things under rule; this was the energeia given to Adam before he fell. The same power works in the Church. It works also in marriage, where the Apostle instructs, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord” (), an ordered subjection that is one of the expressions of this divine energy in the household. It appeared when the seventy returned from their mission: “And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name” (). To be subject is to come under, and the demons came under the name of Christ. All of these are expressions of the prophetic word spoken concerning our Lord, that all things would be brought into subjection to Him. Even when creation rebels against God, His purposes, His plans and His will have the final word, and “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time” ().
Eden: The First Intercession
The Seed of the Woman
In His judgment upon the serpent, God announced the coming of a deliverer: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (). The promise speaks of Jesus Christ, and the wording itself points toward a conception of divine proportions. In the order of nature a woman does not produce seed; seed is reckoned through the man. To speak of the seed of the woman is to speak of a child who would come into the world without the seed of a man, which is exactly what took place when “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman” (). The first promise of the gospel already contains the virgin birth in embryo.
The Coats of Skins
The same chapter reveals something more tender about God, something of His redemptive nature and His love. Before the fall, “they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (). After it, “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (). Their nakedness had become shame, and their own attempt to cover it was made of leaves that would wither within days.
It was God who covered them. “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them” (). The material is significant: skins, leather. For a skin to be taken an animal had to die, and most probably it was a lamb. God took that animal, slew it, and clothed the man and the woman so that He might cover their shame. Even when they had committed transgression and treason against Him, He covered their sin. The Apostle Peter writes that “charity shall cover the multitude of sins” (), and God was the first to show what that means. The first death in the world was a death on man’s behalf, and the first garment of mercy was provided by the hand of the One man had offended.
Exile as Mercy
What follows has often been read as pure punishment, but the text itself gives a different reason. “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” ().
God states His own reason: lest man eat of the tree of life and live for ever. God was preventing man from living eternally in his sin. It was God Himself who ensured that sin would remain a temporary condition of human life and would not be sealed into man’s nature for ever. He had already told the serpent that the seed of the woman would crush his head, and He would not now permit man to live for ever in sin, for ever estranged from his Maker.
To see the force of this, one must remember the original warning: “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (). The death that came upon Adam that day was spiritual before it was physical. He was cut off from God. Something in his nature had become incompatible with the nature of God, so that between them there was now friction, conflict, a chasm, what the Apostle elsewhere calls “the middle wall of partition” (). When man ate, he incurred the penalty: “For the wages of sin is death” (). He could not pay that debt himself, because by nature he was now bound for death. A debtor who has become insolvent in his very being cannot settle his own account. Only God could do anything about the fall of man.
This is why the intervention of God in the story of salvation must be called divine, in its essence and in its origin. Even the expulsion from the garden belongs to that intervention. To drive man out was to preserve him, because had he eaten of the tree of life in his fallen state, he would have secured an eternal existence in sin and rendered himself unredeemable. The flaming sword at the east of Eden guarded the way to the tree of life, and in guarding it, guarded man’s hope.
The Long Preparation
The day Adam left the garden was the first day of a human life without God. That loss would be reclaimed only thousands of years later, when God prepared a body for Himself, entered the world through the womb of a woman, took on human flesh and human nature, and saved man. The Epistle to the Hebrews places the words of the Psalm in the mouth of the Son at His coming: “Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me” ().
In that coming He did two things which must be distinguished. He saved man, and He redeemed man. Salvation concerns deliverance: man is rescued from what held him. Redemption concerns the reclaiming of ownership: man, who had sold himself into another’s hand, is bought back and restored to the One to whom he belongs. Christ does both, and He alone can do both, because only God can save man.
Between Eden and Bethlehem, the whole history of mankind is woven through with the actions of God for the sake of this salvation. In the days of Noah, when God found a righteous man, “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God” (), He commanded him to build an ark, because He was about to destroy the world. Even though the multitudes would perish, God would preserve a remnant, and in preserving that remnant He preserved the human race.
In the covenant with Abraham the same purpose comes into sharper focus. God tested him: “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of” (). On the way up the mountain Abraham told his son, “God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering” (). When the knife was raised, God stayed his hand, and “Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son” (). God provided a ram, though Abraham had spoken of a lamb, and the difference carries meaning. That ram was a substitute, yet it was not the final sacrifice. The last expression, the final icon of the ultimate sacrifice, would be a lamb, the Lamb whom God Himself would provide. Centuries later John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (). Abraham’s prophecy had found its fulfilment.
The same divine purpose runs through the deliverance of Israel from the bondage and sufferings of Egypt under Pharaoh, through the institution of the priesthood, and through the giving of the law. The law was a placeholder until Christ should come: “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith” (). In every generation God was involved purposefully and intentionally, working toward the salvation of mankind.
All of these were archetypes, shadows and portrayals. They pointed to the reality without being the reality, because, as Hebrews says, “in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins” (). That is why the sacrifices had to be repeated every year, without end: they were placeholders, and a placeholder cannot finish anything. It was ordained that Christ should appear at the end of the age and finish what the shadows could only signify: “but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (). God waited until the end of the age for the incarnation, and then He came as a man and died for man.
God Purchased the Church with His Own Blood
Christ is fit to be the sacrifice and fit to be the Saviour because He is more than a man. He is God. St Paul’s charge to the elders of Ephesus makes this plain in words that ought to stop every reader: “For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God. Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood” ().
The Apostle says that God purchased the Church with His own blood. God has blood only if God has taken human flesh. St Paul is telling us that it was God who saved man, and that He did so with His own blood. Christ is God in the form of a man, and never merely a man whom God made use of. If Christ does not fully assume human nature, man is not saved, because only what God has taken up can be healed; and if the One who assumed that nature is not God, man is not saved either, because only God can save. Both halves of the confession are necessary, and God has accomplished both: “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory” (). God, the uncreated, the uncaused cause of all things, was manifest in the flesh.
By the incarnation, the crucifixion, the burial and the resurrection, God interceded thoroughly for mankind. The theological force of that confession is the reason thousands upon thousands of martyrs across the history of the Church have died rather than surrender it. Christ must be God, or man is not saved at all.
This is also why every rival religion labours to eliminate the divinity of Christ. None of them has difficulty speaking of the historical Jesus. They will grant Him a place as teacher, prophet or moral example, provided only that divinity is not attributed to Him. The Scriptures have a name for that refusal: “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist” (), and again, “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist” (2 John 7). If the Messiah is not God, humanity cannot be saved. Humanity is saved through His humanity only because the One who was human was also God.
The Knowledge That Saves
If nothing kept God from becoming man, from dying, rising and saving for the redemption of mankind, then nothing will now make Him turn His back on us, unless we turn our backs on Him. He died for us while we were still strangers to Him: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (). A love that went to the cross for its enemies will not abandon its friends.
The danger lies on our side. The Apostle Peter warns those who have received the knowledge of Christ and then turned away: “For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them” (). To have benefited from the knowledge of Christ and then to return to wicked ways is to fall into a worse state than one who never knew Him.
Here the reason for insisting on right theology becomes plain, because this knowledge is the very thing that saves us. It draws us nearer to God. It sustains patience and faith in suffering, and strengthens us to resist temptation. It is the knowledge by which every stronghold the enemy erects is overthrown, for “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds” (). It turns men burdened by sin and wickedness into saints, and makes a man a son of peace (). It sets him free from sin, as our Lord promised: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (). It gives him liberty to walk on the highway the prophet foresaw: “And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness” ().
This knowledge also gives the believer the power of ascent, the capacity to approach God with boldness as a son: “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (). The way of that approach was opened by Christ Himself: “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh” (). Israel did not have this way. Moses did not have it. It was opened when the veil of His flesh was torn on the cross, and at that moment “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom” (). A pathway direct to God was opened, and Jesus alone provided it.
The same knowledge grants access to the sufficiency of God’s grace. When St Paul was buffeted by “the messenger of Satan” and besought the Lord three times for relief, the answer came: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (). It enables us to face the world with integrity and without compromise in our convictions about who our Lord is. It makes us stand before councils and never deny Him, but confess Him as Lord and Saviour, for He has promised: “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven” (). The Greek word for that confession is homologia, the public acknowledgement of Jesus Christ, and it is the fruit of a mind that knows whom it has believed.
This knowledge must be the bedrock of our reasoning. St Paul resolved when he came to Corinth “not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified”, and his preaching came “not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God” (). The power of God and the wisdom of God have a name in the Apostle’s mind, for to those who are called, Christ is “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” ().
At its root and at its core, the goal and reward of Christianity is God Himself. It is communion with God. Every other good the faith brings is a fruit of that communion or a means toward it.
Enoch Walked with God
Seven generations from Adam there arose a man named Enoch, “the seventh from Adam” (Jude 14), born in the line of Seth. A reading of the genealogies shows that Enoch’s life overlapped with the life of Adam himself, so that he could have spoken with the first man. It is not hard to imagine what he might have heard: how it was in the garden, how Adam heard “the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (), how he named the animals, what glories he was permitted to see. Adam was the first man to know God, the first to have knowledge of his Creator, the prototype of every human being who would ever seek Him.
The Scriptures say very little about Enoch, except this: “And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters: And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years: And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (). For three hundred years he walked with God, without backsliding and without weakening, and he sustained that walk until God called him away into eternity. He did not die. He was not found. God took him, and in that sense he has been alive for more than five thousand years, the oldest man there is.
How he walked with God, what he did, how he attained to such a reality, the Scriptures do not say. The door is closed. What the Spirit of God has shown us is the possibility itself: that it is available to man to walk with God, and to do so perfectly, without contradiction, until God takes him. When St Paul comes to resolve the mystery, he gives it a name: “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God” (). Why did God take him? Because he pleased God. He gave God joy. And it was this same Enoch who saw the end of days and prophesied, “Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints” (Jude 14).
These are the heights to which God invites us, and Christ builds the road by which we may climb them, so that we may be enriched and enter into the riches of God. Those riches lie beyond money and material possession. To possess God is itself the perfection of prosperity, because the man who has God has everything. The knowledge that ushers us into that reality begins with the incarnation, with the God-man Jesus Christ, and the knowledge He imparts to our souls is meant to change our state.
The Indwelling That Changes the State
Man was made to be a dwelling place, and whatever dwells in him alters him. Our Lord describes the return of an unclean spirit: “Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first” (). The presence of those spirits altered the state of the man, his state of being and his state of consciousness. Yet an unclean spirit is infinitely inferior to the Spirit of God. If so lowly a presence can change a man’s condition so profoundly, what must the indwelling of the Holy Spirit accomplish?
“What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” (). The presence of the Spirit within us should alter our state as truly as the unclean spirits altered the state of that unhappy man, but toward the opposite end: not unto destruction, but unto deification, unto conformation to the Son of God. Deification, the theosisTheōsisNot that we become God by nature, but that by grace we are drawn into His life: “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). of the Fathers, is the work by which God makes man a partaker of the divine nature, healing and transfiguring him by grace until he bears the likeness of Christ.
The Old Testament already testifies to this altering presence. When Samuel anointed Saul, he told him that he would meet a company of prophets and that “the Spirit of the LORD will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man” (). The very presence of the Spirit of God alters a man’s state: his consciousness, his awareness, his being. He is the Holy Spirit who makes man holy, who sanctifies man, who changes the image of man.
It follows that if all of these are absent from a Christian’s experience, something is wrong. There is an antinomy, a contradiction between what is professed and what is lived. It cannot be that a man professes the presence of the Spirit while his experience runs contrary to that indwelling, because there is a consistency in God. Our Lord said, “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?” (). God does not give the name of His Spirit while withholding His work.
This is why foundation and theological continuity matter so much. Without them it is difficult for a believer in the twenty-first century to find in his life a reality that matches that of the apostles in the first. Two thousand years stand between them and us, and that gap must be bridged by a theological and doctrinal heritage strong enough to sustain what they experienced. People ask where the power of old has gone. The better question is where the theology of old has gone, and the faith of old, because it was these that made the power a reality.
The End of the Spirit’s Intercession
The eighth chapter of Romans shows us the ultimate goal of the intercessory ministry of the Spirit of God. “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren” ().
The Apostle first tells us what the Spirit does, and then for what purpose He does it. The Spirit intercedes so that we may come into the fullness of what God determined beforehand. When the intercession of the Holy Spirit is perfected within the saints, this is its outcome, and until this outcome is realised that intercession is not yet complete. The Son spoken of here is the only begotten Son of God, God the Son who became flesh, Jesus Christ. To be conformed to His image is the destiny God set for His people.
That determination was made before time began. St Paul writes to Timothy: “Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God; Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (). The calling was given to us in Christ Jesus before the world began, determined before the ages and before the dispensations of time, and is now made manifest in the appearing of the Saviour.
Only the Spirit can bring us into it, because only the Spirit knows it. “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God” ().
The adoption of the saints is complete when the intercession of the Spirit has reached its fullness in them, when that predestination is fulfilled and they are conformed to the image of the Son. God’s purpose was that Christ should be “the firstborn among many brethren”, and the emphasis falls on the many. The only son God receives is one who is like unto the Son of God. That is the adoption of sonship.
So each believer must put the question to himself honestly. Am I becoming more like Christ, more conformed to His image? Is there continual change in my state, a renewal that the Apostle describes as being “renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” ()? If not, an anomaly is at work, because what God intended is not taking place. When that happens the problem does not lie with God; it lies with the one who is meant to be changed. St Paul reminded the Ephesians of the standard by which they had been taught: “But ye have not so learned Christ; If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus” ().
He wrote to the churches of Galatia with the anguish of a mother: “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you” (). Wherever Christ is not yet formed in us, a work of intercession is still required, and a work of travail. We must measure our progress the way God measures it, and His standard is Christ. Every gift, every manifestation and every demonstration of His power has this end in view: “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (). Every grace God confers, every blessing and every work of His in a believer’s life is assigned to that purpose, that His Son might be the firstborn among many brethren.
Conclusion: At the Table of the God Who Intercedes
The argument has travelled from a garden to a table, and at every station it has found the same truth. Unless God intercedes, man cannot be saved. Unless God intercedes, man’s shame will not be covered. Unless God intercedes, man’s sin cannot be forgiven. Unless God intercedes, man cannot be changed, and he cannot be conformed to the image of the Son. The coats of skins in Eden, the guarded way to the tree of life, the ark of Noah, the ram on Moriah, the deliverance from Egypt, the shadows of the law, the blood of God poured out on the cross, the torn veil, the indwelling Spirit groaning within the saints: all of it is one intercession, and all of it is God’s.
Everything therefore comes down to one need: we need God, and we must strengthen our communion with Him. Hence He calls us to the sacramental union found in the holy mysteries of the Eucharist, where He has declared that here is His body and here is His blood. “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (). This is His invitation to His table, to partake of Him and to commune with Him through His body and His blood.
When He instituted the sacrament, He said, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me” (). The remembrance He asks for is of Himself as the God-man, God who became man and took human flesh for the sake of man, so that He might save him thoroughly, fully and perfectly. The sacrament recalls the incarnation, the passion, the crucifixion and the resurrection, and none of these did He do for Himself. He did them for our sake. Taking the cup, He said, “Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (). By this blood the saints overcome the accuser of the brethren: “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony” (). It is “the blood of the everlasting covenant” (), by which the New Covenant is ratified and all sin remitted. By it our sins have been atoned for, our lives made new, eternal life offered to us.
The offering of Christ is the only sacrifice that has ever truly mattered, the only one the Father has ever truly accepted: the sacrifice of Jesus the Messiah, our Saviour, our God who became man and assumed flesh for the sake of man. He came, He died, He rose again, and “after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; From henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool” (). The same energy that will bring all things under His feet now works in those who receive Him, renewing their strength, so that their youth “is renewed like the eagle’s” ().
The eschatological horizon of all this is the one Enoch saw, the Lord coming with ten thousands of His saints, and the saints coming with Him are those in whom the Spirit’s intercession has been completed. Until that day the Church gathers at the fountain of life, drawing strength, life and vigour from the God who has never once ceased to intercede for her. Salvation was His from the first covering of shame in Eden, and it will be His when the last of His many brethren bears the image of the Firstborn.
