God Reveals the Invisible Truth

Transfiguration| Matthew 17:1-9 Pastor James Preus| February 9, 2025

Jesus did not want the news of His transfiguration to be known until after His resurrection. But after His resurrection, He wanted a trustworthy account to be given of it. So, He did not take all twelve of His disciples up the very high mountain where He was transfigured, but He took three: Peter, James, and John. Why did Jesus take three disciples? Because in Deuteronomy 19, God commanded, “Only on the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses shall a charge be established.” (vs. 15) Peter, James, and John provide sufficient witness to establish the truth of what they saw.

When Jesus and His three witnesses reached the top of the mountain, Jesus was transfigured before them, shining white as light with divine glory. And Moses and Elijah were speaking with Jesus. Moses and Elijah are two witnesses from the Old Testament. Peter, James, and John are three witnesses from the New Testament. So, at Jesus’ transfiguration we learn something about the Bible. The Bible, humanly speaking, is a trustworthy book. Unlike other so-called holy books, the Bible stands up to the scrutiny of the test of truth. Mohammad was the only author of the Koran. No one else heard Allah or the angel speak to him. Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon and other Mormon scriptures by himself. No one else saw the alleged golden tablets. But the Bible was written by forty authors over 1,500 years, with countless human witnesses to the events recorded.

The Bible is a human book. And as human books go, it is trustworthy. However, the Bible is not only a human book. The Bible is a divine book. St. Peter reminds us that no prophecy of Scripture was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The words of the Bible are not simply man’s words, but they are the very words of God. The Bible is God’s book.

So, when God the Father interrupted Peter and said, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him.” He was declaring that all of Scripture is about Jesus (John 5:39) and that Scripture is Jesus’ Word. Listen to Jesus! How do we do that now? Jesus is in heaven? We listen to His Word from Holy Scripture. The Bible is about Jesus. And the Bible is Jesus’ Word. It is how He speaks to us today.

As the Bible is a human book with dozens of human authors, yet also a divine book with one Author, so Christ Jesus is a human and divine person. And as the Bible does not carry the faults of other human books, which are untrustworthy, filled with mistakes and even lies, but is fully trustworthy and true, profitable for salvation and training in righteousness, so also Christ while being fully human, does not carry with His humanity the faults of mankind. He is completely sinless and blameless. Yet, as the Bible hides under the disguise of humility in ordinary paper and ink, so Christ hides His divinity under the disguise of lowliness. Yet, as the Bible remains God’s holy Word even under such lowly disguise, so Christ remains God even when divine light is not emitting from His face.

Jesus did not become God on the mountain of transfiguration. And He didn’t stop being God when the light was hidden again and He walked down the mountain in His former appearance. Jesus was God as He lay as a baby in the manger. And Jesus was God as He hung on the cross. The miracle on the mountain was not that Jesus shone with brilliant light. The miracle was that Peter, James, and John did not die when they saw it. Rather, it is a miracle when Jesus hides that light under humility.

Peter wanted to keep Jesus there in his heavenly splendor, but God said, no. Had Peter been listening to Jesus, He would have known that. Immediately before climbing that mountain, Christ told Peter and the other disciples that He was about to go to Jerusalem to suffer from the elders and chief priests and scribes, to die, and to rise on the third day. And immediately after His transfiguration, Jesus instructed His disciples to tell no one the vision until after He was raised from the dead. It is not enough for our salvation that God has become man, which Jesus shows indisputably to Peter, James, and John in His transfiguration. Christ must also pay our debt of sin and suffer and die for us on the cross. While Jesus is a perfect human, with no faults of His own, He must bear the faults of sinful man to save us from hell. The children of Israel were afraid to even look at Moses’ face at it reflected the glory of God. Yet, God would not even show Moses His face, lest Moses died, but only His back. How much less could we bare to see our Lord’s uncovered face full of majesty and glory while still in our sin!

So, Christ must go to the cross. He must hide His glory, so that we may see His glory. He must show His glory by showing us God’s greatest love by suffering and dying for our sins, so that we may know the meaning of His divine light. The same Jesus, whose face shone brighter than the sun, is He who was nailed to the cross, whose face was covered in blood. He did this so that we would not only be able to see His shining face without fear when He returns to judge the living and the dead, but so that our faces too may reflect His glorious light for all eternity (Matthew 13:43). Yet, if Christ does not take our sins away, the light of His face brings only judgment and death to us.

And so, since Christ did not refuse to humble Himself for our sake, so that we might be saved from eternal hell on account of our sins, so we should not refuse to receive Christ in humility. As we could not bear to receive Christ in His divine glory unless He first took our sins from us, so we cannot bear to hear God’s voice in its majestic glory unless first our sins are cleansed through faith. Faith is the instrument through which we receive forgiveness of sins. And faith comes from hearing the Word of God. Yet, sinners cannot bear to hear God’s voice without fainting in fear. And so, God reveals His voice to us through the medium of Scripture and the Sacraments.

The Old Testament records both Moses and Elijah going up on Mount Sinai to talk to God. God hid them both in the cleft of a rock, so that they would not be killed by His majestic glory (Exodus 33:20-22; 1 Kings 19:9ff). They met with God, who exists outside of space and time, so that the future and the past are the same to Him. Moses came down the mountain with His face shining like the sun, reflecting God’s glory. Could He have seen Christ’s transfigured face from 1500 years later? Elijah went up the same mountain and heard God’s voice in a low whisper. Does Isaiah not prophesy of Christ that He will not cry aloud or lift up His voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed He will not break, and a faintly burned wick He will not quench (Isaiah 42:2-3)?  

The point is, the Word of God is eternal. Yet, in a Book written in history, we have the timeless Word of God. Moses and Elijah could not hear it without hiding behind a rock. Yet, we have it written clearly in the pages of the Bible. In the Bible, we encounter the Holy God, who makes His eternal will plainly known to us. The Psalmist confesses, “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (Psalm 119:34) God didn’t cause His Word to be written to hide its meaning, but to speak to us in a way that we could receive Him, so that we might receive Him in faith.

The Bible looks like any other book. Yet, that does not mean it is like any other book. Just as Jesus looked like any other man coming down that mountain, and later carrying His cross, yet, He remained the same God-man who emitted pure divine glory on the mountain and who will do so again when He returns on the clouds. So also, the Bible looks ordinary, yet it is God’s eternal Word. We don’t see the divine light shine forth from it, but it is still there. Likewise, we see ordinary water, yet it is a divine washing of the Holy Spirit with Jesus’ blood, which clothes the baptized in Christ’s righteousness. And it’s an ordinary voice of an ordinary man, who proclaims the Gospel to you, but as St. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians chapter 2, “when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” So, you have the promise from Holy Scripture, that the Word of God preached to you works in you with divine power. The Lord’s Supper looks like ordinary bread and wine, yet it is the crucified and risen body and blood of Christ Jesus, who sits at the right hand of God’s power, the same body, which shines like the sun.

We do not see this light shining from the Sacraments or the pages of the Bible, nor do we hear the earth shake at the voice of the preacher, yet God promises that these are His words and His works. The Scriptures and the Sacraments are divine, because they are God’s Word and sacraments. And so, they have power to create faith in your hearts, to forgive your sins, to strengthen your spirit against the attacks of Satan, yes, to give Christ Jesus your God and Lord to you.

God’s divine light in God’s Word and Sacraments is hidden from our human eyes. Only through faith do we recognize it. Yet, faith is not pretending. Faith is believing what is truly there, yet unseen. Jesus’ transfiguration reveals the truth we cannot see with human eyes yet. But it is the truth. Christ Jesus is God’s own Son. Remember that as you see Him in humility strive with Satan and win and suffer for your sins on the cross. That is God winning salvation for you, putting His divinity against your sin. Remember that when you hear His Word and receive His Sacrament. Were He to remove the humble disguise, you would die in fear. Yet, He gives them to you in humble disguise, so that in faith you might receive God’s power of salvation (Romans 1:16-17). What human eyes see as ordinary before us; God sees as the light of His Son. May our eyes of faith recognize it as well, that we may be prepared to receive Him when He again reveals His glory to us. Amen.