Human and Christian Destiny

"Man as created was already crowned with glory and honor, for made in the likeness of the enthroned Glory, a little lower than the angels of the divine council, man was invested with official authority to exercise dominion as priest-king in God's earthly courts. Yet, the glory of man's royal functioning would be progressive as he increasingly fulfilled his historical task of subduing the earth, his ultimate attainment of functional glory awaiting the eschatological glorification of his whole nature after the image of the radiant Glory-Spirit. Ethical glory also belonged to man as created and in this respect man would have gone from glory to glory had he not sinned, moving on from a state of simple righteousness to one of confirmed righteousness.

Man in the Fall became destitute of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23) -- at least such was the effect of the Fall apart from the intervention of divine grace. Actually, by the common grace of God, a measure of the glory-image was preserved in spite of the Fall. Scriptural references to postlapsarian man as still the image of God (Gen. 9:6; James 3:9) show that man continues to be the image of God after the Fall and that he is so even without personal experience of redemptive renewal. According to Genesis 3:22, man had in the very course of the Fall manifested the official-functional glory he had been given by engaging in judicial action after the manner of the divine council. Of course, he did so in such a way as to be guilty of gross malfeasance and forfeited his right to continue in office. But by the common grace of God this official glory of man was perpetuated and constitutes the primary if not the total basis for the Bible's attribution of image-of-God status to fallen man even apart from re-creation in Christ. By falling into sin, man lost his ethical glory. The covering of glory was replaced by the nakedness of shame. Though still possessed of an official glory by common grace, man was stripped of righteousness, holiness, and love of the truth. Whatever semblance of ethical glory was maintained by common grace, such does not clearly figure in the Bible's identification of postlapsarian man as still the image of God. Fallen man is a naked Image.

Man re-created in the image of God is restored to the hope of the formal-physical image-glory of resurrection immortality and Spiritual existence. Meanwhile, God, who has prepared for the new man the covering of eternal glory, gives him the earnest of the Spirit (II Cor. 5:5). In his redemptive renewal man is re-created after the image of God in true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness (Eph. 4:24; Col. 3: 10) and with respect to this ethical glory-likeness to God man is transformed from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord (II Cor. 3:18; 4:16; Rom. 12:2). Beyond the official-functional glory the new man has in the realm of common grace, he has through his union with Christ in the Spirit a part in Christ's enthronement in the heavenly sphere (Eph. 2:6). In this respect too there is movement from glory to glory, for the blessedness of Christian death is the “first resurrection," the intermediate state, where the believer, perfect in righteousness, is present with Christ to live and reign with him (Rev. 20:4-6), [53] and beyond the second (i.e., bodily) resurrection the overcomers, possessed of the fulness of formal and ethical glory, participate with the enthroned Christ in the consummation of man's official royal glory (Rev. 3:21)" Images of The Spirit, 31-32.

-- An excerpt from Dr. Meredith Kline's book, Images of the Spirit