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| Whether the Sentence of John is to Be Understood of Our Future Likeness with the Son of God in the Immortality Itself Also of the Body. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter
18.—Whether the Sentence of John is to Be Understood of Our
Future Likeness with the Son of God in the Immortality Itself Also
of the Body.
24. But the Apostle John says,
“Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and it doth not yet appear
what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall
be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”923 Hence it appears, that the full
likeness of God is to take place in that image of God at that time
when it shall receive the full sight of God. And yet this may also
possibly seem to be said by the Apostle John of the immortality of
the body. For we shall be like to God in this too, but only to the
Son, because He only in the Trinity took a body, in which He died
and rose again, and which He carried with Him to heaven above. For
this, too, is called an image of the Son of God, in which we shall
have, as He has, an immortal body, being conformed in this respect
not to the image of the Father or of the Holy Spirit, but only of
the Son, because of Him alone is it read and received by a sound
faith, that “the Word was made flesh.”924 And for this reason the apostle
says, “Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be
conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born
among many brethren.”925 “The first-born” certainly
“from the dead,”926 according to the
same apostle; by which death His flesh was sown in dishonor, and
rose again in glory. According to this image of the Son, to which
we are conformed in the body by immortality, we also do that of
which the same apostle speaks, “As we have borne the image of the
earthy, so shall we also bear the image of the heavenly;”927 to wit, that
we who are mortal after Adam, may hold by a true faith, and a sure
and certain hope, that we shall be immortal after Christ. For so
can we now bear the same image, not yet in sight, but in faith; not
yet in fact, but in hope. For the apostle, when he said this, was
speaking of the resurrection of the body.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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