God's intent in His salvation is to lead many sons into glory (Heb. 2:10). God is leading us onward into glory. He is not leading us into a heavenly mansion or into any kind of blessing for eternity in the physical realm. He is leading His many sons into the eternal glory of God.
The glorification of God's conformed sons is the redemption of their body (Rom. 8:23). Before we can be glorified by God, we must already be conformed to the image of God's firstborn Son (v. 29). We cannot be infants, children, or even middle-aged; we must be mature sons of God. A mature son of God is one who has been conformed in his maturity of life to the image of the firstborn Son of God.
On the one hand, Jesus Christ as the firstborn Son of God expresses the divine attributes, and on the other hand, He expresses the human virtues. In the four Gospels, Jesus was a pattern, a model, of a person who expressed God's attributes in His divinity and the human virtues in His humanity. As a man, He expressed divinity and humanity. In His divinity, He expressed the attributes of God, such as love, light, holiness, and righteousness. In His humanity, He expressed the human virtues, such as meekness, forbearance, and humility. In His divinity, He was very lofty and high, but in His humanity, He was a lowly person who lived a lowly life.
In the four Gospels we can see Jesus as a person who displayed God's attributes and the human virtues, but in a poor sinner we can see nothing of God or of the human virtues. Instead of the virtues of humanity, we can see all the sinfulness of humanity. After being saved, most Christians do not understand that God's intention is that they express God not only in the human virtues but also in His divine attributes. As a result, they seek only to improve their character and conduct in their human living, not realizing that this kind of seeking is contrary to God's intention.
A Christian should be a God-man with two natures, humanity and divinity. First, we are human; then we are divine. We are divine because we have been born of God (John 1:12). We have received the divine life with the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4), and the divine essence has entered into our being. We are not merely sons born of Adam; we are also sons born of God. We have had two births, a human birth and a divine birth. Hence, we are God-men, exactly like Jesus. On the one hand, we should live a high human life with all the human virtues, such as meekness, humility, and forbearance. On the other hand, we should express divinity in all the divine attributes, such as love, light, holiness, and righteousness.
We need to realize that glorification will take place on the conformed sons of God, that is, on the mature sons. Today we cannot be glorified because we are not yet mature. We are in the process of becoming mature. When we are fully mature, glorification will come. Glorification may be likened to the blossoming of flowers. When a flower such as a rose blossoms, that is its glorification. A rose cannot blossom unless it has a bud. If there were simply a stump with leaves and branches, the process of blossoming could not take place. But when a bud appears, it grows and grows until it reaches maturity. At that time it blossoms. The blossoming of the bud is its glorification.