Insofar as someone has Christ, he therefore has everything involved with the person of Christ – his life, his sanctification, his death, resurrection, and glorification. Hence Marshall’s insistence that when someone believes in(to) Christ, it is there that the process of glorification has begun to take place.

Puritan pastor Walter Marshall concludes his magisterial work on a believer’s sanctification, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, with the simple but profound dictum that “Sanctification in Christ is glorification begun as glorification is sanctification perfected.”[1]  What makes this statement work so well is, in fact, those two little words “in Christ.” Marshall understood that any benefit a believer has, he has because of union with Christ. And insofar as someone has Christ, he therefore has everything involved with the person of Christ – his life, his sanctification, his death, resurrection, and glorification. Hence Marshall’s insistence that when someone believes in(to) Christ, it is there that the process of glorification has begun to take place.

Underlining this truth is the idea that God’s grace toward believers is not some thing, some substance, given apart from Christ but rather that God’s grace is Jesus Christ. Many Christians often confuse grace as some impersonalized stream of blessings which God dispenses to us after we believe in Jesus – as if, once we believed in Jesus, then there’s this unlocked treasure chest behind our Lord which, full of God’s grace and blessings, we now have access to. No! Grace is Jesus Christ and all the benefits of who he is in himself for us. I’ve heard Iain Hamilton memorably express the truth this way, that “the Gospel is not a string of blessings that God gives to us. The Gospel is Jesus Christ given to us with all the blessings we need for life and godliness contained in Him!”

Thus, we can say that our glorification is really only our participation in Christ’s glorification. Paul, writing to the Philippians says that in the resurrection, our lowly, earthly bodies, will be transformed and conformed to Christ’s glorious resurrection body (Phil. 3:20-21). What began with Jesus in 30 A.D. now reverberates down through history and happens “again and again” with everyone united to Jesus. Thus Paul, in Romans 8:11, can say that “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”

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