God promises His glory for the saints

God reverses the tables. We who “have fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), are promised His eternal glory in Christ.

King David is a good example of a sinner who was promised to receive God’s glory. “With Your counsel You will guide me, And afterward receive me to glory” (Psalm 73:24, NASB 1995). “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; The Lord gives grace and glory; No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11, NASB 1995). No good thing in heaven is going to be held back from the saints “who walk uprightly.”

The Lord Jesus Christ suffered and entered into His glory. He sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven.

After we have suffered a little while, “the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you.” We will be with the Lord Jesus in His glory.

This eternal glory involves the whole person. For example, our physical body is “sown in dishonor,” but “it is raised in glory” (1 Cor. 15:43). When Christ returns He “will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself” (Philippians 3:21, NASB 1995). This frail, feeble, hurting, declining human body will one day be changed into a perfect resurrection body.

I love what C. H. Spurgeon wrote about the resurrection body of the believer: “The body of a child will be fully developed, and the dwarf will attain to full stature. The blind shall not be sightless in heaven, neither shall the lame be halt, nor shall the palsied tremble. The deaf shall hear, and the dumb shall sign God’s praises. We shall carry none of our deficiencies or infirmities to heaven. . . neither shall any of us need a staff to lean upon. There we shall not know an aching groan or a weak knee or a failing eye. ‘The inhabitants shall no more say, I am sick.’”

He goes on, saying it shall be “a body that will be incapable of any kind of suffering: no palpitating heart, no sinking spirit, no aching limbs, no lethargic soul shall worry us there. No, we shall be perfectly delivered from every evil of that kind. Moreover, it shall be an immortal body. Our risen bodies shall not be capable of decay, much less of death. There are no graves in glory. Blessed are the dead that died in the Lord, for their bodies shall rise never to know death and corruption a second time. No smell or taint of corruption shall remain upon those whom Jesus shall call from the tomb. The risen body shall be greatly increased in power: it is ‘sown in weakness,’ says the Scripture, but it is ‘raised in power.’. . . It will be a ‘glorious body,” and it will be raised in glory,’ to that the whole of our manhood shall participate of that wonderful depth of bliss which is summed up in the word—‘glory.’”