Becoming Like Jesus

I’ve titled this article “Becoming Like Jesus” because I want to explore how we become like Jesus by seeing Him in Scripture. Admittedly, I spend more time talking about what precedes this becoming than about the process itself. Yet I think it’s important that we understand what comes before so we don’t try to manufacture external holiness while missing spiritual growth at a heart level. Think of this as a primer to how we should think about spiritual growth. The whole article is relevant to how we become like Jesus, even though much of it is not directly about it.

Too often we pursue Christlikeness in unbiblical ways. We do this when we use the wrong method: trying to be more disciplined (habits, diets, schedules, plans, etc.) rather than simply beholding Christ. We also do this when we have the wrong focus: looking at our actions rather than digging deep to understand the motives behind them. We do this when we have the wrong goal: immaculate behavior rather than a transformed heart. I hope this article can be a helpful corrective to these errors.

To be a Christian is to be a disciple of Christ. This means, among other things, that we are trying to be more like Him. How does that happen? In 2 Corinthians 3 we see that the Holy Spirit makes us more like Christ by showing us who Christ is. As we know and love Christ, we are made more like him.

But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.
— 2 Corinthians 3:18

In this verse, the Apostle Paul tells us how we become like Jesus. He tells us how sanctification happens. He teaches that we are changed into godly people by seeing and savoring Jesus. We become like him as we see his glory and through that sight are changed into His image.

But before this can happen, our spiritual eyes must be opened so we can see him. So we will begin by trying to understand this (how our eyes are opened to see Christ) before we consider how we actually become like Him.

Spiritual Blindness

We can’t see Christ until God removes our spiritual blindness. The phrase “We with unveiled faces are beholding the glory of Christ” implies that there is a veil that must be removed for us to see Christ.

In verse 13, Paul recounts how Moses put a veil over his face to cover the glory of the Old Covenant. Moses had been on the mountain with God, and when he came down he was radiating glory because he had been in God’s presence. The Israelites couldn’t handle that glory, so Moses veiled his face. God’s glory was concealed from them.

As Paul goes on to say, the same was true of his Jewish contemporaries. They couldn’t see the glory of Christ. But in this case, the veil was not external (on Moses’ face) but internal (their minds were blind). They couldn’t understand who Jesus was as their Messiah; they couldn’t understand the significance of his life, death, and resurrection. They couldn’t see his glory.

The same is true for many in our day who hear of Christ but reject him. They don’t receive him because they are spiritually blind to God’s glory. If we look through 2 Corinthians, we find three sources of this spiritual blindness.

First, this spiritual blindness comes from hatred for the truth. When Paul describes his gospel ministry in chapter 2, he says, “To some we are the aroma of death leading to death, and to others, the aroma of life leading to life.” Though the same gospel is proclaimed, some people receive it as good, beautiful, true, and life-giving. It is an aroma of life, like smelling freshly baked bread or a sweet rose. But others experience it as death. To them, the gospel is foolishness. It is objectionable, a stumbling block, an offense. It repulses them like curdled milk or a roadkill skunk. 

Jesus touches on the same theme in John 3: “This is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” Though Christ is true and beautiful, some people don’t accept him because they love their sin more than they love Christ. There’s something going on in the heart that keeps them from coming to Christ. This blindness centers on our affections — what we love and what we hate. Those who are spiritually blind to Christ are blind because they love their sin and hate the truth.

Since we are all born in this bondage (cf. Eph. 2, Rom. 3, 5), all of us would follow these sinful desires straight to hell apart from God’s intervening grace. We, by nature, hate God and His gospel. This blinds us to the glory of Christ.

Second, this spiritual blindness comes from self-righteousness. Many of the Jews thought that the law was given to show them how to be righteous on their own. They turned the law into an instruction manual for gaining God’s favor, thinking that if they kept it perfectly, God would accept them. They saw law-keeping as a means of experiencing spiritual life.

But Paul says instead that the law is a “ministry of death” (2 Cor. 3:7). This doesn’t mean that the law itself is sinful (cf. Rom. 7). It is good because it reveals God’s righteousness. But in so doing it reveals our sin, and so we experience it as something that produces death rather than life. Though it is good, it reveals our sin, so it becomes a killing thing instead of a life-giving thing.

Though the Jews tried to please God by keeping the law, their efforts only produced self-righteousness and its corollary — self-love. They loved themselves, especially their attempts to be righteous. They couldn’t see Christ because they were preoccupied with the law and with their conformity to it. They thought they were good enough on their own. Their self-righteousness kept them from looking to Jesus for salvation; they refused to turn from their self-reliance to Christ.

Similarly, many of us know God’s commands and try to keep them but have never realized that our obedience is an insufficient covering for our sin. We don’t realize that our sins need atonement.

Half the people who go to hell go because they don’t think they need a Savior. They have never realized that sincere attempts to obey God are not enough to restore their relationship with him. They don’t know that they need Christ’s righteousness, not their own. Because they think they are pretty good people, they are blind to Christ’s glory as their redeemer.

Third, this spiritual blindness comes from the devil. Paul says, “the god of this age” has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Cor. 4:4). Notice the connection between spiritual bondage and the truth of the gospel. Satan (the god of this age) blinds the minds of unbelievers. He keeps them from understanding who Jesus is and what he has done for them. That manifests in various ways:

• He keeps them thinking that Jesus is just a nice person, but not their Savior.
• He keeps them thinking that Jesus doesn’t know about their problems and doesn’t care about their suffering.
• He keeps them thinking that Jesus is weak, unable to sovereignly rule over every earthly ruler.
• He keeps them thinking that Jesus is inaccessible, distant, or aloof.

Satan does everything he can to keep people from seeing the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).

So there are three layers to this veil that keeps us from seeing Christ: our love for our own sin, our love of ourselves and our efforts to be righteous on our own, and our mental blindness under Satan. This is the veil.

Spiritual Sight

In 1 Corinthians 3:18 (quoted at the beginning of this article) we read that the veil has been taken away. Now, with unveiled faces, we can behold the glory of the Lord. But how does God remove the veil?

In verse 14, Paul says, “This veil is taken away in Christ” (some translations say “through Christ”). And in verse 16, he says, “When one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.” So when we turn to Christ, this veil is removed.

Yet we have a bit of a conundrum. We must see Christ to have the veil removed, but the veil keeps us from seeing Christ. We are blind to the very glory we must see in order to be able to see.

Because of our spiritual bondage, we can’t break through our blindness on our own. Instead, God breaks into our blindness by His light. In 2 Corinthians 4:6, Paul connects God’s creation of physical light in Genesis 1 to his creation of spiritual light in our regeneration. The God who created light in the beginning now creates light in our hearts. He shines the glory of Christ into our hearts. He overcomes our blindness, piercing through with a vision of the glory of Christ.

This light is the truth of the gospel, but it is more than mere facts. It is seeing Christ himself in the gospel. This light is a true glimpse of Christ’s perfection, of his glory.

This light overcomes all three sources of our blindness. Though we previously hated the truth, God makes us alive (Eph. 2) and gives us a new heart (Heb. 8) so we love Christ rather than being repulsed by Him. Though we previously loved our self-righteous works, God shows us Christ’s perfection so we can see our inadequacy, abandon our futile efforts to please God on our own, and trust Christ’s righteousness instead. Though our minds were previously blinded by Satan, God removes Satan’s blinders so we can see Jesus in Scripture.

Seeing Jesus

With veiled faces, we cannot see the glory of Christ. He appears to us to be uncaring or harsh or inaccessible or weak. But God, by His grace, shines into our hearts so we can see and love Christ as our Savior. We can now see Christ the Lord as revealed in the gospel.

Paul describes this vision as beholding “as in a mirror the glory of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18). Though we usually use a mirror to see ourselves, the picture here is of looking through a mirror to see something or someone else — like I might use a rearview mirror to see my boys in the backseat of our van. This mirror is the gospel, through which we see Christ.

This is an important distinction. The mirror itself is not Christ; it is that which we use to see him. This means that the truths of the gospel are not the main point. We can get the facts of the gospel right and never see Christ. The mirror is not the point. What we see through the mirror is the point.

Now that our faces are unveiled by God’s grace, we are able to hear God’s truth and hear Christ Himself. When we read the Bible, we see Jesus in all of His glory. When we look in the mirror of Scripture, we see the Lord Christ — specifically the glory of the Lord Christ.

Which leads to another question. What is this glory? The glory of the Lord is the shining forth of His goodness and beauty. His glory is more than transcendence or power or moral perfection. At the heart, his glory is about his supreme goodness and beauty. He is the perfect expression of everything enjoyable and delightful and true.

Maybe the best glimpse we get of this goodness is our pleasure in the things God has made purely for our enjoyment. Eating a perfectly ripened peach or watching the sunset over the ocean are small tastes of God’s glory. He made them for our enjoyment so we would be reminded that he himself is supremely enjoyable.

We can try to understand this by considering his attributes. God’s glory is his love and mercy; his grace and forbearance; his justice, vengeance, and wrath against every evil act. These are his glory going to work in the world. God’s glory is his perfection.

His perfection is of such purity as to expose the filth of even the smallest sin. This is why God’s glory is so frightening. He is supremely lovely. Sometimes we have a distaste for the idea of God’s glory because we think it is terrifying. But we shouldn’t think of glory primarily connected to terror; we should think of it connected to goodness and beauty. It is terrifying to us precisely because we are not good and beautiful. We are stained by sin, so we are rightly terrified by his glory. Because His goodness and beauty are so pure, even the smallest sin is enough to damn us when we are exposed to His glory. Yet his glory is not fundamentally about terror; it’s about goodness.

Since the Lord Jesus is God with us, everything that is true of God’s glory is true of Christ himself. Scripture describes Him as “the radiance of the glory of God” (Heb. 1), the shining forth of the glory of God. In Colossians 1:15, he is called “the image (manifestation) of the invisible God.” In 1:19 he is described as having the fullness of God. In John 1, he is the one who was in the beginning, who was with God, and was God. Jesus is the eternal God made knowable in human flesh.

Beholding and Becoming

What Paul says next is crucial to our sanctification experience. Having said that we can see the glory of the Lord Christ now that we are unveiled, he tells us that it is this very sight of Christ that changes us to become like him. “We all…beholding…the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory…” (2 Cor. 3:18).

We must notice the relationship here between beholding and becoming. Beholding does not just precede becoming. Beholding does not just parallel becoming. Rather, beholding produces becoming. We become like Jesus as we see, know, and love Him.

This is the heart of what it means to be a Christian: We see Christ, love Him, and become more like Him. As we look at his glory, our hearts are rewired to love what he loves and hate what he hates. As we see his tenderness, his patience, his anger at sin, his grace toward our failings — and we love him for those things — we begin to change. We gradually transform into His image. We become like Him in our loves and in our hates.

We should not think of spiritual growth as something detached from Christ, as if holiness and righteousness are realities separate from who He is. Rather, Christ is holiness. Christ is righteousness. He is everything we ought to be. He is our example to follow, and we become sanctified as we look to Him.

The goal is not merely that our actions change. We must first be changed at a heart level — in our affections. Nearly every choice we make is downstream from our desires. Even our rationality is often controlled by what we want or by what we fear. We can often rationalize to justify why we should get what we want, because our desires are the engine of our minds and our actions.

I think this is why Jesus calls lust “adultery” and hatred “murder” (Matt. 5:21-30). Righteousness requires more than moral actions; it requires a transformed heart. God’s purpose in sanctification is not just to keep you from sinning. He wants sin itself to repulse you. The heart of spiritual change is a changed heart. Unless this is happening, we are not experiencing the fullness of God’s intention to make us like Christ.

There is one more thing to see in this verse: sanctification is incremental. It is “from glory to glory,” one step at a time. We’ve all had times where we wished the work was done, or at least that we were a lot farther along. But God is more patient with us than we are with ourselves, and he takes us one step at a time in making us more like Christ. Spiritual growth is progressive; we’re changed by degrees from glory to glory.

But again, this progress happens primarily as we grow in love for Christ. At the bottom of all true spiritual growth is an increased love for Christ coupled to an increased understanding of who He is. Knowledge and affections grow together. As we pursue greater knowledge of Christ in Scripture, we will develop deeper love for Him, and through that, we will become more like Him.