What is the glory of God?

But what is meant by His glory? The glory of God is the revelation of what He is. When we speak of glorifying Him we do not mean that we can add anything to Him or make Him more glorious than He is, but that having received the revelation of Himself by faith we respond to it and give Him that place in our thoughts and lives that the revelation claims. If we speak of the glory of a man, it is his achievements that we have in mind, but no man can achieve anything beyond what he is, and when we think of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ in manhood, we think of what He achieved in His life of sufferings, but His achievements are the revelation of what He is, the Spirit of God delights to bring His achievements before our souls, and in this way glorify Him, and as the Spirit glorifies Him to us we begin to count earthly glory all loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Him.

The glory of God displays what He is in His attributes and nature, and is seen pre-eminently in the Person of the Son, who is the "effulgence of His glory." In the coming kingdom of the Son of Man the divine glory will be displayed before an admiring universe in the Person of the Son, but not only in Him, also in those whom God has called to share what Christ has secured through His death upon the cross. There is also the divine glory of the Son that He had with the Father before the world was, and this will be displayed before those who share the Son's place in the bliss of the Father's House (John 17:5, 24).

First we are to enter into the glory of God; for us it is the Father's house, and we are made meet for it by the Father's grace and the blood of Jesus, and then we are to come out of it all radiant with the light that fills it, to shed that light upon the earth during the millennial reign of Christ. The church is to be the vessel of the glory of God. What is the glory of God? The glory of God, in the moral aspect of it, is the display of His own blessed nature; He has revealed Himself. How has He done that? He has done that in the Person of His beloved Son, and having done it the great fact has come into evidence that GOD IS LOVE. That is the glory of God. You would not know it by simply scanning the heavens. They declare His handiwork, His wisdom, His divinity, His power. Men did not learn this great fact at Sinai, for there in the presence of the thunderings and fire of that dread mount they were filled with terror. This great and blessed revelation was made by the beloved Son when He came into the world and passed through it to the cross of Calvary. The light that He brought into the world is to be contained in the holy city, and that light will radiate from it to the utmost bounds of creation, and all creation will rejoice in the fact that God is love. "Each heart its praise outpouring, To Him all praise above, Each voice in strains adoring, Re-echoes — 'GOD IS LOVE.'"

There will be another glory in that day, for Christ will come to be glorified in His saints, and to be admired in all them that have believed. Thus, as the apostle speaks in another place, "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory." (Col. 3:4.) It is of this indeed that the Lord Himself speaks in John 17, when He says, "And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me." (Vers. 22, 23.) On such a theme more could not be said, for we have had no experience of glory. And yet it will further us in our meditations if it be again stated that divine glory is the display of divine perfections, even as the Lord's glory, as the glorified Man, is the manifestation of His moral excellencies or perfections; and in the same way angelic glory will be the revelation of the moral beauty of angels, while that of the redeemed will consist in their conformity to the image of God's Son that He might be the Firstborn among many brethren.

The end and object of all is the glory of God. It is perfectly, divinely true, that "God hath ordained for His own glory whatsoever comes to pass." In order to guard this from all possibility of mistake, we have only to remember who is this God, and what the glory that He seeks. It is He who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, — of Him in whom divine love came seeking not her own, among us as "One that serveth." It is He who, sufficient to Himself, can receive no real accession of glory from His creatures, but from whom" Love," as He is "Light," — cometh down every good and every perfect gift, in whom is no variableness nor shadow of turning. Of His own alone can His creatures give to Him.

The glory of such an one is found in the display of His own goodness, righteousness, holiness, truth; in manifesting Himself as in Christ He has manifested Himself and will forever. The glory of this God is what of necessity all things must serve, — adversaries and evil as well as all else. He has ordained it; His power will insure it; and when all apparent clouds and obstructions are removed, then shall He rest — "rest in His love" forever, although eternity only will suffice for the apprehension of the revelation. "God shall be all in all" gives in six words the ineffable result.

The sovereignty of grace did appear. Their transgression and sin was God's opportunity (if such a word may be reverently said of God) to manifest His grace in a way not known before. Moses said, "I beseech thee, show me thy glory." But God said, "I will make all my goodness pass before thee." Not His glory, but His goodness! Yet His goodness is His highest glory, the glory He delights in. The glory of judgment is His strange work. (Ex. 33:18-19; Ex. 34:6-7.) Moses takes courage from the revelation of goodness, and pleads the stiff-neckedness of the people as a reason why Jehovah should go with them. It was according to the mind of God. This boldness of faith God waited for, and immediately He responds in grace to the extraordinary plea.

Glory is often used as expressive of the proper distinction of a person, or of a company: as the glory of the Father, Rom. 6:4; of the Word, John 1:14; of the children of God, Rom. 8:21; and even of inanimate bodies heavenly and earthly, 1 Cor. 15:40-41. Each has its own glory, and such glory is evidently not transferable; for if it could be transferred or communicated, it would lose its specially distinctive force. But glory may be in the nature of distinction conferred, as upon a creature by a superior, and even upon the Lord Himself, viewed as in the place of Man; as on the mount of transfiguration, and at the right hand of God. 2 Peter 1:17; 1 Peter 1:21. And this is distinction in which others may in measure be permitted to share. John 17:22.

Glory may properly attach to a person even under an exterior by which it is not expressed. This was evidently the case with Christ when on earth: the flesh which He assumed in becoming Man served to veil His glory. In the same way the glory of the children of God is not yet manifest, and until it is manifest the glory is the exultation of the heart. This idea is not infrequently found in the Psalms.

And further, this thought of glory hidden brings us to the glory of God, which, in its full expression, is the effulgence or display of Himself in the accomplishment of His counsels, in hope of which Christians rejoice. These counsels hid in God constitute, as one may say, His glory; and in their result they fully display His wisdom, love, and power. Meanwhile they have come to light through Christ being at the right hand of God, and the Holy Ghost given. We have now the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Glory may be said to be the manifestation of excellency. Gold is precious, even in the ore. But the glory of it is not discerned till it has passed through the crucible, and been separated from all the baser elements which were mingled with it. The sun is the fountain of light and heat to this whole system, even when clouds interpose, and obscure its brightness; but when the clouds have passed away, and it shines forth in all its majesty and strength, then we see its glory. And whatever may constitute, in millennial times, the manifested glories of Christ, they will all be found to be but the display of what he is now; and of what faith now knows him to be. It is only by faith that we can discern these glories now; but it will surely be found that each glory to be manifested then is but the display of some excellence residing in this blessed person, or in one or other of the offices he sustains. How the heart stops short, alas! of entering by faith into the contemplation of these wondrous and varied glories of Christ! Would that we knew them better, by the teaching of the Comforter, whose office it is to glorify Christ, by taking of his, and showing it unto us!

We come now to something different from simple creatorial majesty in Christ, different from the relations in which He stands with created things. For He is the shining forth of glory. All that can be called glory in God shines out in Him. Our Lord wears human form now, and His humanity has served to bring out in the most illuminating way, in the very midst, too, of human circumstances, all the attributes of God, which, when viewed together, compose glory. Light is the outshining of what is in the sun. But precious as the light is, and pleasant as it is to behold the sun, we might have great difficulty in describing light. So, what is glory? Above all, what are the elements in God's glory, its constituent parts, so to say? We take a prism, and we allow the light to fall upon it. Instantly that which is diffused so sweetly as light becomes broken up into its component parts, and we discover the beauty of the several rays which, when blended, form light. Even so, with reverent hearts may we study Christ in whom the varied rays of God's glory are severally discerned. His character and ways bring before us the exact delineation of God's holiness, righteousness, truth; they utter to us, in an intelligible way, His grace, goodness, longsuffering mercy; they set forth those divine perfections of obedience, dependence, humility, meekness, lowliness, which could be discerned only in circumstances of humiliation. Moreover, in the cross and death of Jesus, we find every ray converging; the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in Him. Never was all that God is so seen as in that wonderful moment. All the outgoings of His holy nature against sin were present in infinite degree; and yet every consideration of pity and compassion for the sinner was combined with them. Nor is this all. Raised from the dead, triumphant over death and sin and Satan's power, Jesus has become in heaven the complete expression, the effulgence, of all that God is. What would be to us otherwise unknowable or inexplicable is resolved, and in the face of Jesus — unveiled and glorious — we behold the glory of God. That face speaks to us; it is language that our ransomed hearts can understand. It makes our own will appear loathsome, it makes the world appear a poor selfish system without God, it attracts our affections and expands our minds, and stirs our energies for God and souls and heaven, as nothing else could. It makes the presence of God our home, and the glory of God our goal in the hope of which we boast.

If we turn to the Epistle to the Hebrews, we find it stated there that God has both spoken to us and created all things by His Son. But here the same Person is spoken of as the Word. And since it was the Word who created, every little thing that He made carried with it some expression of the glory of God. We look at the grandest part of the creation — the heavens, — and observe its order and beauty. Well, as the Psalmist said, "The heavens declare the glory of God." And so it is with the earth apart from the mischief that sin has wrought. Everything created expresses in some way the glory of God, because it was made by One who is Himself the expression of all that God is — "the Word."