Question: "What is the glory of God?"
Answer:
The glory of God is the beauty of His spirit. It is not an aesthetic
beauty or a material beauty, but it is the beauty that emanates from His
character, from all that He is.
James 1:10 calls on a rich man to “glory in his humiliation,”
indicating a glory that does not mean riches or power or material beauty. This
glory can crown man or fill the earth. It is seen within man and in the earth,
but it is not of them; it is of God. The glory of man is the beauty of man’s
spirit, which is fallible and eventually passes away, and is therefore
humiliating—as the verse tells us. But the glory of God, which is manifested in
all His attributes together, never passes away. It is eternal.
Isaiah 43:7 says that God created us for His glory. In context
with the other verses, it can be said that man “glorifies” God because through
man, God’s glory can be seen in things such as love, music, heroism and so
forth—things belonging to God that we are carrying “in jars of clay” (
2 Corinthians 4:7). We are the vessels which “contain” His
glory. All the things we are able to do and to be find their source in Him. God
interacts with nature in the same way. Nature exhibits His glory. His glory is
revealed to man’s mind through the material world in many ways, and often in
different ways to different people. One person may be thrilled by the sight of
the mountains, and another person may love the beauty of the sea. But that which
is behind them both (God’s glory) speaks to both people and connects them to
God. In this way, God is able to reveal Himself to all men, no matter their
race, heritage or location. As
Psalm 19:1-4 says, “The heavens are telling of the glory of
God and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands; day to day pours forth
speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there
words; their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth,
and their utterances to the end of the world.”
Psalm 73:24 calls heaven itself “glory.” It used to be common
to hear Christians talk of death as being “received unto glory,” which is a
phrase borrowed from this Psalm. When the Christian dies, he will be taken into
God’s presence, and in His presence will be naturally surrounded by God’s glory.
We will be taken to the place where God’s beauty literally resides—the beauty of
His Spirit will be there, because He will be there. Again, the beauty of His
Spirit (or the essence of Who He Is) is His “glory.” In that place, His glory
will not need to come through man or nature, rather it will be seen clearly,
just as
1 Corinthians 13:12 says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly,
but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I
also have been fully known.”
In the human/earthly sense, glory is a
beauty or vibrancy that rests upon the material of the earth (
Psalm 37:20,
Psalm 49:17), and in that sense, it fades. But the reason it
fades is that material things do not last. They die and wither, but the glory
that is in them belongs to God, and returns to Him when death or decay takes the
material. Think of the rich man mentioned earlier. The verse says, “The rich man
is to glory in his humiliation, because like flowering grass he will pass away.”
What does this mean? The verse is admonishing the rich man to realize that his
wealth and power and beauty come from God, and to be humbled by the realization
that it is God who makes him what he is, and gives him all he has. And the
knowledge that he will pass away like the grass is what will bring him to the
realization that God is the one from whom glory comes. God’s glory is the
source, the wellspring from which all smaller glories run.
Since God is
the one from whom glory comes, He will not let stand the assertion that glory
comes from man or from the idols of man or from nature. In
Isaiah 42:8, we see an example of God’s jealousy over His
glory. This jealousy for His own glory is what Paul is talking about in
Romans 1:21-25 when he speaks of the ways people worship the
creature rather than the Creator. In other words, they looked at the object
through which God’s glory was coming, and, instead of giving God the credit for
it, they worshiped that animal or tree or man as if the beauty it possessed
originated from within itself. This is the very heart of idolatry and is a very
common occurrence. Everyone who has ever lived has committed this error at one
time or another. We have all “exchanged” the glory of God in favor of the “glory
of man.”
This is the mistake many people continue to make: trusting in
earthly things, earthly relationships, their own powers or talents or beauty, or
the goodness they see in others. But when these things fade and fail as they
will inevitably do (being only temporary carriers of the greater glory), these
people despair. What we all need to realize is that God’s glory is constant, and
as we journey through life we will see it manifest here and there, in this
person or that forest, or in a story of love or heroism, fiction or non-fiction,
or our own personal lives. But it all goes back to God in the end. And the only
way to God is through His Son, Jesus Christ. We will find the very source of all
beauty in Him, in heaven, if we are in Christ. Nothing will be lost to us. All
those things that faded in life we will find again in Him.
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