The Glory of God is missing in your Christianity.

Because we fail to appreciate the revolutionary truth of the Glory of God, we have become focussed with an over-personalized faith that has damaged our families, our communities and our politics.

One of the foundational documents of the Christian Reformation, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, tells us that “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.”  The statement is absolutely true, but most of us have no idea what it even means.

The author of “the Message”, version of the Bible, Eugene Peterson wrote:

“One of the severe handicaps under which the church operates is the cover-up of the Glory with respectable substitutes such as acceptance and honor, success and ‘relevance.’ Over and over again, we miss it.”

Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (2005 ), Loc 2088

He is right, and it is a big deal.

In this reflection, I will show you what the Bible means by “Glory” and how this core understanding has the potential to revolutionize your understanding of the world and also points a way forward for your family, and our politics.

Last week I wrote about Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I have a dream speech’. Towards the end of his speech he spoke of the culmination of his dream and described it by quoting Isaiah 40:4-5

Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.

And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

As I wrote last week, I am unsure whether Martin understood the deep significance of those words and how truly they did describe the culmination of all that he had been saying,

I hope by the time you have finished reading this you will understand why Martin’s dream changed the world and also be provoked to dream yourself in a way that could only be brought to a culmination by quoting those words from Isaiah.

If someone was to ask you what Glory was what would you say? 

According to the Oxford dictionary, the normal English usage of the word means “High renown or honor won by notable achievements,” or “Magnificence or great beauty,”  or “Praise, worship, and thanksgiving offered to a deity”, or “A luminous ring or halo, especially as depicted around the head of Jesus Christ or a saint.”

None of these common meanings would be of much help to Martin Luther King Jr. 

To begin to understand the meaning of the word we need to understand how central it is in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel of John, where it is referenced 42 times!

There is general agreement that John was written after the previous gospels, and it is almost as though John is concerned to make sure that some things he thought were important don’t get lost. If that is true then he certainly saw glory as important.

John stands in contrast to Matthew, who references glory four times, Mark who uses it 2 times and Luke who mentions it 22 times.

Following the gospels, glory continues to be a major theme and is referenced 117 times in the rest of the New Testament.

We don’t understand Glory

A brief look at some just some of the many times glory is used will make it clear that there is a disconnect with the way the word is used in modern English and what the authors of the bible meant by it.

I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.

John 17:22

How would high renown or honour, magnificence, praise, or a luminous ring possibly be something that helps the followers of Jesus be one in the same way that the members of the Trinity are one?

There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Romans 3:22-23

How do you fall short of high renown or honour, magnificence, praise, or a luminous ring? It was clear that Paul had something else in mind.

And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings…

Romans 5:2-3

How would high renown or honour, magnificence, praise, or a luminous ring be something that would create the kind of hope in which we would boast?

Nowhere is the gap between our normal understanding of the glory of God and the biblical usage of the word more apparent than in the moment that Jesus declares that he has been glorified.

If you were to take the Oxford definition seriously there would only be two moments you would expect Jesus to say “Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him.” Either the moment when Jesus meets with Moses and Elijah on the mountain, or when he comes into Jerusalem and the crowd is shouting “Hosanna” would be possibilities if the Oxford definition. They are not and it is not.

The actual moment that Jesus declares he is glorified comes at possibly one the worst moment of his life. It is not a public spectacle, it is not a beautiful moment There is no-one praising or worshipping, and there were no halos.  

Jesus utters the fateful words shortly after washing his disciple’s feet in an attempt to set an example for them (John 13:15) and then announcing to the friends with whom he had spent the last three years, “one of you is going to betray me”(13:21). 

It is hard to imagine the heaviness he must have felt as he looked into his Judas’ eyes and says “what you are about to do, do quickly.” And then, here it is:

“When he, [Judas] was gone, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him.”

John 13:31

The moment Jesus declares that he is glorified is in the context of one of his best friends betraying him. Nothing in the Oxford definition or our common understanding of glory makes sense of what he could have meant by those words.

So what is the Glory of God?

To understand what was in Jesus’ mind we need to turn back to a pivotal part of the story of Moses and the formation of the nation of Israel: Exodus 33. 

This part of the story comes directly after Moses has come down from an initial meeting with God on Most Sinai where he received the ten commandments, only to find that Aaron had created a golden calf while he was gone. He was so frustrated that he threw the tablets to the ground, destroying them. It must have been a bewildering time.

Some time later, Moses meets with God in the little tent he rather unimaginatively calls “the tent of meeting,” which is pitched some distance away from the rest of the camp. I love the picture of Moses’ relationship with God we get in this passage. Exodus 33:11 tells us that “the Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”

It is in this tent that Moses pleads with God not to leave him alone, which God agrees to in a beautiful way: “I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.” (33:17). Almost as if that wasn’t enough, Moses then asks “Now show me your glory.”

In Hebrew, the word ‘glory’ is kabod which means weight. As soon as we understand the original Hebrew meaning of the word we can start to discern the yawning gulf between our normal understanding and what the Bible means. When Moses asks to see God’s glory he is, in effect, asking to see the full weight of who God is.

God agrees to the request but with the proviso that Moses will only see his back, “for no one may see me and live.”

In the next chapter, as God reveals his glory to Moses, it doesn’t look anything like any of the Oxford definitions:

Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

Exodus 34:5-7

Richard Bauckham points out the obvious fact that instead of being about high renown or honor, magnificence, praise, or a luminous ring: 

“He (Moses) hears from God himself God’s identity: his name …  and his character…. The story seems to suggest that God’s glory is the radiance of his character, of his goodness, of who he truly is.”

Gospel of Glory (2015), Loc 1163

So the Glory of God is not about praise, or bright lights or about honor, it is his moral nature, his character. The revivalist Charles Finney saw this truth in 1843, when he declared that:

God considers his goodness, his moral attributes, as making up his essential glory. His glory does not consist in his natural attributes–his power, his wisdom, his omnipresence, his eternity–these are awful, they are fearful for us behold. But his glory lies in his goodness, his moral character, his justice, benevolence, holiness, mercy.

In reflecting on this passage, a contemporary Jewish Scholar, Rabbi Lance J. Sussman, points out:

God self-describes as first and foremost, an ethical being. In fact, it would be even more accurate to call God in this passage “the Ethical Being” or, perhaps, the ethical ground of all being.

I imagine that the reason so many Christians have misunderstood the biblical notion of Glory is that we haven’t been steeped in the Old Testament in the way that any of the writers of the New Testament or any Jewish person today would have been.

So what is God’s character?

As we read Exodus 34 we see a list of words and phrases that God uses to describe himself and how he relates to humanity. All of these can be grouped under three main headings: God’s attributes of Compassion, Mercy and Justice.

The attributes of Compassion

God’s first disclosure of himself to Moses was about his deep love. The best picture we have to describe the Hebrew word (rahûm) translated by the N.I.V. as ‘the compassionate‘ is the tender love and attachment of a mother towards her children. 

God re-enforced this point with a number of other words and phrases to emphasize different aspects of this profound truth. The Hebrew is translated in the N.I.V. as abounding in love, faithfulness, and maintaining love to thousands.

Can you grasp the revolutionary significance of this? Love is at the centre of who God is, and therefore is at the centre of how the world works. If this is true then the people who will be most effective, most trusted and most whole in our world will be those who are most loving, who are most able to deeply connect to others.

Given this claim by the God of the universe, we should not be surprised by M. Scott Peck’s claim in his groundbreaking book The Road Less Travelled, that:

Genuine love, with all the discipline it requires, is the only path in this life to substantial joy.  When I genuinely love I am extending myself, and when I am extending myself I am growing.  The more I love, the longer I love, the larger I become

Kindle Edition (2002), Loc 2190

The English word Compassion is only really an approximation of rahûm but it does help us glimpse one dimension of the nature of God’s love. The word comes from a Latin root that literally meant “to suffer with”, which I expect informs the Cambridge dictionary definition:

a strong feeling of sympathy and sadness for the suffering or bad luck of others and a wish to help them:

The threefold nature of the definition of Compassion provides a helpful window into both the original Hebrew and M. Scott Peck are reaching for.

The kind of love that God is talking about in Exodus 34 is firstly a feeling, secondly, it is empathy and thirdly it is inherently an impulse to action. God cares, God understands and God acts in history as a result of his love.

Loving people care, they empathize with those they love and they are motivated to act on the basis of their care and empathy. These are the people we admire, and these are the people that as M. Scott Peck says, know joy.

The attributes of Mercy

Another dimension of God’s love is reflected in his response to our mistakes.

Our universe was created by a God who is gracious and merciful who is slow to anger, and who forgives wickedness, rebellion, and sin.

Fundamentally all these words reflect a deep commitment to the wellbeing of another person at the expense of the one making the commitment. God was making it clear to Moses that his nature was one of commitment to relationship, even when that commitment was not reciprocated.

In a universe created by a merciful God, then those who are most able to forgive and sacrifice for the sake of others will be the ones who gain the most respect from people who instinctively know what a good person looks like.

The Attributes of Justice

Understandably perhaps, the last part of Exodus 34:7 is often left out when the passage is quoted. We like Compassion and we appreciate mercy, but God’s justice seems a little intense:

“Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

Exodus 34:7b

One immediate complaint any thinking person would make to this passage would be that it hardly seems fair that children get punished for what their parents did. Hebrew scholar, Dr. Douglas K. Stuart, says that the common reading of this text is actually a misreading:

It does not mean that God would punish children and grandchildren for something their ancestors did but that they themselves did not do. Rather, it describes God’s just punishment of a given type of sin in each new generation as that sin continues to be repeated down through the generations.

New American Commentary: Exodus 34:7

So what God is saying is something like he said to the prophet Ezekiel:

The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

Ezekiel 18:20

There is an uncomfortable truth that is well described by the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament:

God’s law is an order of life that cannot be changed or challenged. It is righteous because he is righteous. His ways are right; they thus give us life and security.

(TDNT – Abridged) ???? dík? [justice

The core message of God’s justice communicated to is, perhaps surprisingly, best described by an Academy Award winning film director:

“We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them—or else, by keeping them, rise through them to the fullness of freedom under God.”

Cecil B. DeMille

The God who created the world created it with boundaries, and those boundaries are not negotiable. Either you live within them, or you break yourself against them. There is no other option.

So in Exodus 34, we see that God’s glory is his character, and his character is seen as both the love and grace of his compassion and mercy and also the truth of his justice.

At a simply human level, it seems impossible to reconcile true compassion and mercy with real justice. Throughout the history of the church, some have focussed more on God’s mercy and compassion and others on His justice, but God himself makes it clear to Moses that it is not either/or.

As we start to understand that God’s Glory is his character or moral nature, we start to feel the weight of bible verses we might have skipped over in the past.

Jesus came in order to be the full expression of the Justice, Mercy, and Compassion of God’s Glory.

The first time that the gospel of John talks about glory, it is claiming that Jesus is its embodiment:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14

Right there at the start of his Gospel, John is using the language of Exodus to position Jesus. What isn’t immediately obvious to English readers of the bible is that the Greek word that is translated as “dwelling” is literally a reference to the Tabernacle God directed Moses to build at the centre of Israel’s camp. The scholars who translated the New English Translation point out that:

The author is suggesting that this glory can now be seen in Jesus (note the following verse). The verb used here may imply that the Shekinah glory that once was found in the tabernacle has taken up residence in the person of Jesus

N.E.T. Bible notes John 1:14

In case anyone is wondering, John then makes his point clear by saying “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father.”

John finishes the verse by saying that the glory we see in the Son is “full of grace and truth.” In a few words, John is summarising the Justice, Mercy, and Compassion of Exodus 34:5-7. Grace covers all of the words we grouped under the headings of Compassion and Mercy, and Truth captures the heart of the Biblical understanding of God’s justice.

Author Richard Bauckham writes:

John presents the incarnation of the Word, Jesus Christ, as the eschatological fulfillment of the Sinai covenant, a revelation of glory that fulfills the Sinai covenant by qualitatively surpassing it: And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Only One from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Gospel of Glory (2015), Loc 1173

As Paul wrote, we see the full weight of God’s glory in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).

It is this understanding that begins to make sense of Jesus’ own words after his betrayal. When Jesus announced said “now is the Son of Man glorified,” he was referring to the event that Judas’ actions had set in motion.

Contrary to many people’s understanding, the dark moment of the cross is actually the place where the full weight of God’s glory is most clearly seen.

It is only on the cross that depth of the Compassion and Mercy at the heart of God’s character can meet the stark truth of his Justice.

As we start to understand that God is both grace and truth, He is justice and mercy, we start to understand the truly cosmic scale of what happened on Calvary.

Why is Glory important for your family, community, and politics?

As I wrote last week, Martin Luther King Jr. believed the world was built on moral foundations that bend toward justice, a belief that was strengthened by a quote he found from British historian, James Anthony Froude:

One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with distinctness; that the world is built somehow on moral foundations; that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run, it is ill with the wicked.  But this is no science; it is no more than the old doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets.

The God who reveals his character to Moses is also revealing the nature of the world itself. In reflecting on Exodus 34, Rabbi Lance J. Sussaman says:

The God of the Middot (attributes) is also a universal God, with a universal set of behavioral norms for all people. The God of the Middot does not self-describe as the God who took the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt but rather as a God for all people who need to strive to be like God in order to fulfill their nature as having been created in the image of the One and only God.

The Glory of God is the moral foundation on which our world is built.

This is what Isaiah meant when he wrote:

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his Glory.

Isaiah 6:3

and what Paul meant when he wrote:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

If the world was created by a God with a discernable character, then we don’t have to spend our time wondering how we build a healthy society, a healthy family or a healthy church: the pattern is clear.

Bible scholar Christopher Morgan writes:

God’s sharing of God’s Glory with us does not elevate us beyond our humanity or our nature as creatures but actually enables us to live in full humanness as image bearers of God.

The Glory of God (2010), p 186

The character of God, expressed as his Glory, is important because it helps us understand ourselves, our families, our society and our politics. It represents both a call and a template for action. As Richard R. Melick Jr. writes says:

“Those who understand Jesus’ glory by faith, are called to act according to what they have seen.  They represent God’s glory on earth by the values they hold as well as by their actions.^”

The Glory of God (Kindle Edition), (2010) Loc. 1875

As we understand God’s glory as his moral nature and also understand that his nature is reflected in the way the world works, then we start to understand the implications for our families, communities and politics.

Justice, Mercy and Compassion are not just good ideas… they are the ingredients of a healthy family, a healthy community and a political system that works.

The issues at the heart of any family breakdown, corporate collapse or political failure will always be either a lack of justice or mercy or compassion, or all three.

As the classical bible commentator, Matthew Henry opines:

God has been pleased therein to twist interests with us, so that in seeking his glory we really and effectually seek our own true interests. 

Jesus is our hope of Glory

One of the dangers in starting to see the shape of the moral fabric of the universe is that we can try to work up the will to live perfect lives. Paul wants his readers in Rome to know that is simply not an option:

There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Romans 3:22-23

For Paul, Jesus came for much more than to save us from our sin, he came that we might glorify God in our whole lives:

To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Colossians 1:27

Paul understands that the Holy Spirit’s job is to help transform us so that glorifying God is our natural response to the complexities of day to day life:

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:17-18

Understanding that glory is the justice, mercy and compassion of God’s own nature and therefore the pattern of the universe, helps also to understand Jesus’ prayer for his disciples and his plan for impacting the world:

I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

John 17:22-23

Jesus knew that the unity of the church would only be possible through the glory of God, his justice, mercy, and compassion which he gave them as a gift. He also believed that the truth of who he was would ultimately be proved through the way his disciples maintained their commitment to each other despite their differences.

For those who have managed to read this far, I hope you can now see why understanding the true nature of the glory of God is of critical importance to anyone who calls themselves a Christian and is looking for their bearings in a confusing world.

The end of the story

The promise of the Bible is that one day:

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Habakkuk 2:14

In the last chapter of the bible’s last book, we see that promise finally fulfilled:

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.  The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.  The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it.

Revelation 21:22-24 

I hope you have glimpsed the remarkable truth of the glory of God.