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Christ met the demands of the law in its federal and penal aspects, paying the penalty of sin
and meriting everlasting life. Therefore His justification had to follow and He had to be put in
possession of the reward. Since He was a public person and accomplished His work publicly,
justice required that the exaltation should also be a public matter. The exaltation of Christ has a
threefold significance. Each one of the stages was a virtual declaration of God that Christ met
the demands of the law, and was therefore entitled to His reward. The first two stages also had
exemplary significance, since they symbolized what will take place in the life of believers. And,
finally, all four stages were destined to be instrumental in the perfect glorification of believers.
3. THE STATE OF EXALTATION IN MODERN LIBERAL THEOLOGY.
Modern liberal theology, of
course, knows of no state of exaltation in the life of Christ. Not only has it discarded the legal
idea of the states of Christ altogether, but it has also ruled out all the supernatural in the life of
the Saviour. Rauschenbusch closes his Theology for the Social Gospel with a discussion of the
death of Christ. Macintosh says that “the difficulties in the way of accepting the ordinary
traditional notion of the ‘resurrection’ of Jesus, as a reanimation of the dead body, its
miraculous transformation and final ascension to ‘heaven,’ are, to the scientific habit of
thought, practically insuperable. . . . An undischarged burden of proof still rests upon those who
maintain that it (the body of Christ) did not suffer disintegration, like the bodies of all others
who have died.”[Theology as an Empirical Science, pp. 77, 78.] Beckwith admits that the Bible,
and particularly Paul, speaks of the exaltation of Christ, but says: “If we translate the Apostle’s
notion of exaltation into its modern equivalent, we shall find him saying that Christ is superior
to all the forces of the universe and to all known orders of rational beings, even the highest,
saving only the Father.”[Realities of Christian Theology, p. 138.] And George Burman Foster
frankly declares: “According to orthodoxy, the Son of God laid aside his divine glory and then
took it up again; he alienated from himself certain divine qualities, and then integrated them
again. What is meant is at bottom good, namely, that the great and merciful God serves us, and
is not too good for our daily human food. Perhaps the form of the orthodox doctrine was
necessary when the doctrine was excogitated, but that terrible being, the modern man, cannot
do anything with it.”[Christianity in Its Modern Expression, p. 144.]
B. THE STAGES OF THE STATE OF EXALTATION.
Reformed theology distinguishes four stages in the exaltation of Christ.
1. THE RESURRECTION.
a. The nature of the resurrection.
The resurrection of Christ did not consist in the mere fact
that He came to life again, and that body and soul were re-united. If this were all that it
involved, He could not be called “the first-fruits of them that slept,” I Cor. 15:20, nor “the