Glory

“Why couldn’t I, why shouldn’t I …

Go out and be glorious, glorious? –

Do something truly epic – just let me through; just put me to the test,

’Cause I can be glorious, glorious.

I’ll never stop believing that, one day, I’ll be up there with the best.”

Bend it Like Beckham (2015)

The Greek word for ‘glory’ is δόξα (dóxa). It’s related to the verb δοκέω (dokéō), which covers a range of meanings including ‘expect’, ‘think’, and ‘seem’. It has to do with people’s opinions. And so δόξα, the noun ‘glory’, also, etymologically, has to do with people’s opinions. It carries the sense of ‘repute’.¹ Glory, in the ancient Hellenophone mindset, we deduce, is what you have when other people think highly of you.

 

Apparently this kind of flower is called morning glory. Seemed as appropriate as anything given that this post is about an abstract concept.

The main Hebrew word used for ‘glory’, on the other hand, is כָּבוֹד (kāvōd). It comes from the root כבד (kbd), which means ‘be heavy’.² And, as you’ll have noticed if you’ve ever been bowling and got confused about which colour of ball is which, how heavy something is has absolutely nothing to do with how heavy someone else thinks it is. Heaviness is an inherent quality of the thing itself. Glory, in the ancient Hebraiophone³ mindset, we deduce, is something you just have, regardless of what other people think of you.

To be fair, there are some other Hebrew verbal roots whose derived nouns are sometimes translated ‘glory’ that potentially do have more to do with the idea of appearance, like פאר (pʾr) ‘beautify, adorn’. But כָּבוֹד is overwhelming the most common – especially when it’s the glory of God we’re talking about.⁴ Now, כָּבוֹד gets translated as δόξα in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament, but you knew that, right?), because, you know, that’s the closest option the translators had, and I’m not trying to argue that it’s a bad translation or that the concept of כָּבוֹד is completely unrelated to these ideas of praise and name and reputation. On the contrary, the term’s occurrences in poetic paralleling tell us that it’s extremely closely connected to them, and that’s a bit of evidence just as important as its etymological derivation. Check out the following chunks I’ve scooped out of the later chapters of Isaiah (‘glory’ in each instance is translating כָּבוֹד):

“I am YHWH; that is my name, and I will not give my glory to another and my praise to idols.” – Isaiah 42:8

“I will say to the north, Give, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth, every person called by my name, and for my glory I created him, I formed him, also I made him.” – Isaiah 43:7

“For the sake of my name I defer my anger, and (for the sake of) my praise I restrain it for you, so as not to cut you off … For my sake, for my sake, I will do (it), for how shall it be profaned? and my glory to another I will not give.” – Isaiah 48:11

Name, praise, glory – all seem to be much of a muchness. So why did I bother mentioning all that stuff about heaviness as an inherent quality? Well, think about this: why won’t God give his glory to another? Just because he doesn’t want to? Just because he rather likes getting all the praise and worship and admiration, thank you very much, and wants to hoard it for himself, and as luck would have it he’s the Almighty and he can therefore demand whatever he likes of the rest of us on pain of things worse than death? Yeah, that doesn’t sound like my God to me either. In fact, the reason he won’t give his glory to another is because no other deserves it. God is just. He rewards each according to what she has done.⁵ He won’t give his glory to lifeless idols because they don’t deserve it; to do so would be a perversion of justice and righteousness.

So with God, in his kingdom, each person’s glory is exactly proportional to her righteousness. Exactly proportional. In fact, the two are so intricately connected that to be righteous is inherently and automatically to be glorious. In God’s kingdom, glory is not how highly other people think of you, whether rightly or wrongly; it’s how highly it’s fit and right to think of you. Consider the way that Jesus talks about his death in the gospel of John. “The hour has come,” he says in chapter 12, “so that the Son of Man might be glorified. Amen, amen, I say to you guys, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” A moment later: “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But on this account I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”⁶

Jesus is talking about his death here. He is describing his death in terms of him and his Father being glorified. His crucifixion itself, not just the resurrection and ascension and all the nice good happy stuff to follow – I mean, that jazz is obviously glory. But so, we see here, is his death. In fact, it’s all inextricably linked: remember Philippians, where the fact that Jesus humbled himself to death, even the death of the cross, is explicitly identified as the reason why God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name above every other name?⁷ That doesn’t just mean, well, fair enough, you went through the horrendous bit, so now you get to be glorious. The act of demonstrating righteousness and obedience and love, to the extent that he died the death he did, was in itself Jesus’ obtaining of his glory. In that moment, though despised by the world, in truth, he was glorious. Think about it: we’re going to spend eternity praising God for the cross. If it were anything other than the pinnacle of his glory, why would we keep bringing it up like that? Why would Jesus still bear his scars in the new creation?⁸

Glory is praise and name and reputation. But in God’s kingdom, you get praise and name and reputation through righteousness. That’s the difference between the glory that comes from man and the glory that comes from God.⁹ Human beings have some pretty dodgy standards for what’s worthy of glory, and on top of that, to human eyes, you can sometimes pass yourself off as meeting those standards when you actually don’t. With human beings, you can accrue praise and name and reputation without actually deserving it. You can defraud them of their good opinions; you can get your δόξα, whether you’re righteous or not. But with God, you just can’t. His standards are unimpeachable, his knowledge unquestionable, his judgements inscrutable: with him, you can only get the praise and name and reputation if you really do deserve it. You have to have the genuine weight of the thing and not just the appearance of it. With God, glory is כָּבוֹד – something you have regardless of what other people think, because his opinion is the right one, and nobody else’s matters.

 

To human eyes, was the idea here.

I think glory is best defined, therefore, as manifest excellence. It’s not just the reward for prior righteousness, but also the righteousness that makes you worthy of the reward in the first place. Now consider in this light those extracts of Isaiah I gave above. When God says he does something for his glory, he doesn’t mean, so that everyone will think I’m really great. He means, because I am really great, and am bound by my nature to demonstrate that greatness. When God seeks his own glory, he is not seeking it as if it were the glory that came from man – cheering crowds and shiny gifts and everybody’s good opinion. He is seeking real glory, manifest excellence, the actual doing of the righteous deeds that warrant the reward. God’s zeal for his own glory is found in his insistence on being and doing good.

To do good, to be righteous, is to acquire glory. There is, indeed, no other way to acquire glory. So what said doing good and being righteous actually involve? That’s an easy one: loving God and neighbour.¹⁰ And what does love actually involve? The first letter of John can help us out here: “by this we know love, that he [Jesus] laid down his life (lit. soul) on our behalf.” Then again: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son as the propitiation for our sins.”¹¹ To love, then, is to forfeit what you have for the sake of someone else. The best definition I can think of is this: love is the pursuit of the highest good of another regardless of the cost to the self. I suppose we might equally call it ‘service’.

So God is the most glorious because he is the most loving. And if we want to be glorious ourselves, the thing to do is to love in a manner as much like his as possible. And – this is the point I’m trying to stress here – it is in the very act of demonstrating love that we are glorious. It’s not that we do good and show love now in order that we might later stop doing it and instead enjoy the glory we’ve managed to pile up: eat your vegetables and then you can have pudding. Rather, in doing good and showing love now, we are already gaining the very same glory that we’re promised we’ll later have in full. When Jesus told his disciples that the least among them would be the greatest, he wasn’t saying, make yourself least now in order to be greatest later.¹² He was saying that, in the kingdom of God, to make oneself least is what being the greatest fundamentally looks like. In the kingdom of God, if you want to know who at the party is the biggest deal, you look round and see who’s behaving most like a servant to everybody else. That is the system, the economy, the societal structure, that we should be working to as the embassy of God’s kingdom here on earth. And it’s the one we’ll find, moreover, in the new creation. We won’t stop dedicating ourselves to the service of God and one another in the age to come, as if that were just a temporary pursuit for the present age of injustice and mortality, rather than the real business of existence itself. We will still be giving ourselves up for the sake of the good of others; the difference will be that there won’t be any false, human, worldly standards of glory hanging about confusing us to the effect that giving ourselves up for the sake of the good of others is something other than great and glorious. There won’t be any deceitful glory that comes from man, only the true and perfect glory that comes from God.

It’s the world that has things upside-down here. The world says that to serve others is a position of abasement; God says that to serve others is a position of greatness. Isn’t that just absolutely blooming fantastic? Love and service and making yourself least are not the things you grit your teeth and do because you know you’ll have your glory later; they are your glory. What we’re learning to do right now is to love loving, as it were – to appreciate the righteousness of service for the joyous and excellent and glorious thing that it is. Which is hard, precisely because the world has things so upside-down, but by his Spirit God grants us a renewing of our minds so that we might have the attitude of Christ Jesus, who gained his glory in the ultimate act of humility, the death of the cross.¹³ God, you see, already loves loving. He’s the arbiter here, the one who’s got his standards and appreciations and affections all in the right places. He loves goodness and righteousness and love. And that, O Dear and Beloved Reader, means that he actually loves loving us. Nothing surpasses God’s zeal for his glory; which is to say, his insistence on being and doing good; which is to say, his enthusiasm for showing love and blessing to those on whom he has set his favour. He is thrilled to deluge you in grace and mercy and guide you into greater knowledge of him and sanctify you after the image of his Son – these things which constitute your highest possible good – because it is the very nature of goodness that it doesn’t merely love but loves to love.

Why am I blathering on about this at such great length? Because for far too long, I didn’t realise it at all. Whatever I might have been piously claiming in public, I secretly begrudged God his glory, because I thought his glory was like the glory that comes from man, and that it was ultimately kind of egotistical of him to seek it. And also because now, having refuted that error, I forget. Every day, I forget the goodness of God. And knowing the goodness of God is the fundamental beginning of every aspect of the Christian life. If you don’t see his goodness, you’re never going to be able to learn to reflect it; the reason we shall one day be like him is because we shall see him as he is. So the key business of every day is to remind myself of God’s goodness, and to go on reminding myself until it sinks in. Everything else comes out of that.

God won’t give his glory to another. He himself will do the greatest good and show the greatest love. He already has, in sending Christ to die for us. Glory isn’t just the reward of righteousness; righteousness is glory in and of itself. So ponder the all-surpassing glory of him who is perfectly righteous and let it turn your worldly thinking about what greatness looks like upside-down. And then, only then, once you know that glory is a surrendering of yourself to the love and service of God and neighbour, then go out and be glorious.¹⁴

Footnotes

¹ Check out the relevant LSJ entry if you don’t believe me: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=doca&la=greek#lexicon.

² Here’s the BDB entry for the noun, http://www.ericlevy.com/Revel/BDB/BDB/11/kap-Index.html, but if you click back over the previous few pages you can see the various nuances of meaning of the associated verb.

³ I think I may have made this word up. But I also think it could do with existing, so hey, you’re welcome, world.

⁴ STEP Bible has a search function where you can search by a term used in English translation, which is useful for sorting out different original-language words that have been subsumed under one English rendering: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=ESV|version=OHB|meanings=glory&options=UVGVNH&display=INTERLEAVED&sort=false&pos=1. Also, did you know STEP Bible now has an app? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tyndale.stepbible&hl=en_US It’s still in development, but still – dreams do come true.

⁵ I mean, yes, with the exception of those covered by the blood of Jesus, obviously, but then also if you think about it, the whole business of the cross was actually kind of a convoluted way of making sure that everyone is judged according to what she’s done but also those God has chosen are saved. Because our judgement fell on Jesus and now we’re judged according to who we are in him. Can I hand you over to Shai Linne here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS5DlIPUzcA.

⁶ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+12&version=ESVUK. Check out also the beginning of chapter 17.

⁷ Whole chapter again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=phil+2&version=ESVUK.

⁸ I explored that idea more fully in ‘Marks of Honour’, under November 2016 in my blog archive.

⁹ Here, and subsequently, I allude to John 12:43. Scoot up a few footnotes for the whole-chapter link.

¹⁰ You’re looking at Matthew 22, Mark 12, and, for an interesting variation where someone else says so and Jesus approves, Luke 10: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10&version=ESVUK.

¹¹ Click across to chapter 4 for the second quotation: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+john+3&version=ESVUK.

¹² I mean, there are loads of places I could point you for that jazz; try Luke 22: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+22&version=ESVUK.

¹³ For renewal of the mind, you’re looking at Romans 12 and Ephesians 4; and for the rest, you should recognise Philippians 2 from earlier.

¹⁴ My opening quotation from Bend it Like Beckham the musical obviously refers to a rather different idea of what glory is. It’s a cracking song though. Here’s a rather nice cover by someone called Alison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nf2IqeRFdU.