1. He is the effulgence of God’s glory. Many expositors prefer another rendering: “the reflection of His glory.” This would mean that God’s self-manifestation, shining on an external substance, is reflected, as from a mirror, and that this reflection is the Son of God. But such an expression does not convey a consistent idea. For the Son must be the substance from which the light is reflected. What truth there is in this rendering is more correctly expressed in the next clause: “the image of His substance.” It is, therefore, much better to accept the rendering adopted in the Revised Version: “the effulgence of His glory.” God’s glory is the self-manifestation of His attributes, or, in other words, the consciousness which God has of His own infinite perfections. This implies the triune personality of God. But it does not imply a revelation of God to His creatures. The Son participates in that consciousness of the Divine perfections. But He also reveals God to men, not merely in deeds and in words, but in His person. He _is_ the revelation. To declare this seems to be the Apostle’s purpose in using the word “effulgence.” It expresses “the essentially ministrative character of the person of the Son.”[2] If a revelation will be given at all, His Sonship points Him out as the Interpreter of God’s nature and purposes, inasmuch as He is essentially, because He is Son, the emanation or radiance of His glory. 2. He is the image of His substance. A solar ray reveals the light, but not completely, unless indeed it guides the eye back along its pencilled line to the orb of day. If the Son of God were only an effulgence, Christ could still say that He Himself is the way to the Father, but He could not add, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.”[3] That the revelation may be complete, the Son must be, in one sense, distinct from God, as well as one with Him. Apparently this is the notion conveyed in the metaphor of the “image.” Both truths are stated together in the words of Christ: “As the Father hath life in Himself, so _hath He given_ to the Son to have life _in Himself_.”[4] If the Son is more than an effulgence, if He is “the very image” of God’s essence, nothing in God will remain unrevealed. Every feature of His moral nature will be delineated in the Son. If the Son is the exact likeness of God and has a distinct mode of subsisting He is capable of all the modifications in His form of subsisting which may be necessary, in order to make a complete revelation of God intelligible to men. It is possible for Him to become man Himself. He is capable of obedience, even of learning obedience by suffering, and of acquiring power to succour by being tempted. He can taste death. We might add, if we were studying one of St. Paul’s Epistles (which we are not at present doing), that this distinction from God, involved in His very Sonship, made Him capable of emptying Himself of the Divine form of subsisting and taking upon Him