All of Christ's life, then, is typical of our future lives, in this world or in some other world. It would be easy to prove this out of Scripture. Everything asserted of Christ [pg 253] is, somewhere and in some way, asserted also of his disciples, and of all Christians. Is he said to be one with God? “I and my Father are one.” They also are said to be one with God: “That they all may be one, as we are one; I in them, and thou in me. As thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.”
Was Christ said to know all things? It is also said of his disciples, “Ye have an unction from the Holy Ghost, and know all things.”
Did Christ work miracles? He says to his disciples, “Greater works than these shall ye do?”
Did God give to Christ glory which he had before the world was? He himself says of his disciples, “The glory thou gavest me I have given them.”
Did Christ rise from the dead into a higher life? We shall do the same. “As we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.”
Christ, in his high and perfect life, may be regarded as a prophecy of what man is to become: we may look on him as a revelation of the higher laws of human nature, as a type of all humanity.
As regards his atoning death, his reconciling sufferings, the same thing is true. As he died for man, so must we die for each other. Thus says the apostle John: “Herein is love; not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” And again, “Because he laid down his life for us, we ought also to lay down our lives for the brethren.”
And Paul, after having spoken of “Christ's having made peace by the blood of the cross,” says of himself that he rejoices in his own sufferings for their sake—rejoices to “fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ;” that is, make up any deficiency in Christ's sufferings for them. “Christ's sufferings,” he says elsewhere, “abound in us,” [pg 254] his disciples. “We are partakers of his sufferings,” says the apostle Peter. If he thought Christ's sufferings entirely different in their nature and meaning from all other sufferings, he would scarcely have said that he “partook” of them.