OUR FATHER WHOSE GLORY IS GIVEN TO THE SON OF GOD

The Lord Jesus, having spoken to His disciples about the changing season where He would go to Jerusalem and face death at the hands of the religious and political leaders, taught them that their involvement in the kingdom He was ushering in would require them to follow His example by taking up their crosses the way He was going to take up His.

He explained to them that the economy of the kingdom of God worked counterintuitively  by sacrifice where working to preserve oneˋs own life caused the loss of the life while losing oneˋs for the sake of Jesus would result in the recovery of that life.

In the kingdom of God where eternal values are being traded for, the Lord Jesus counsels His disciples to value nothing of the world because even if they acquired the entire earth, what help would that be to them if they lost their soul?

In another transactional analogy, the Lord asked His disciples what they would offer to retain their own souls. The loss of oneˋs soul is the loss of oneˋs being and continual conciousness and in face of the extinguishing of oneˋs conciousness, would not even oneˋs life be a reasonable trade for the retention of the soul seeing that life on earth is temporal while the concious soul would be eternal?

The soul, if preserved in Christ, would, if one was to give their life to Christ for His Kingdom, be rejoined in eternal life so that a person would experience a contiguous progression of their being from the temporal realm to the eternal realm.

Matthew chapter 16 verses 24 - 28 says this;

24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. 

26 What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 

27 For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.

28 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

If a person gave up their lives for Christ, they would see the Son of Man in His Fatherˋs glory with His angels where what they forfeited and what they did in obedience would be compensated for in the form of a reward.

Jesus concluded this elucidation by declaring to His disciples that some of them standing there with Him,  having given up their lives and livelihoods to follow Him, would see Him in the context of His kingdom before they died and the truth of His words would be made clear to them.

Amen.

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