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.

White Lies?

“Just play the game; just go and play the game.

It’s not as if you’ve never lied

To suit the needs of either side.”

Bend it Like Beckham (2015)¹

A little over two years ago, I wrote a post called ‘The Truth About Lying’ in which I argued that lying isn’t actually a sin. And then I expressed my intention to write a follow-up post accounting for other parts of scripture that seem to take rather a dim view of lying the following weekend. And then I tried to do that, but I wasn’t happy with what I wrote and ended up posting something else that week instead, and also the next week, and the next, and then before I knew it, my expressed intention had been left unfulfilled for all of, well, a little over two years.²

Well, they do say better late that never. So here goes.

 

An absolutely gorgeous artistic interpretation of Pinocchio by SimonT at newgrounds.com. A comment from the author: "In a pinocchio's story fairy who turned him into a living figurehead promised him that she will turn him into a human if he deserves it. Well it took him a little bit longer then he thought."

To recap the thrust of my previous post: lying – which I define as verbal assertion of something the speaker knows is untrue, not including other forms of deception or dissimulation – categorically cannot be a sin in and of itself, because of the cases of Shiphrah and Puah, and Rahab, in both of which, God actively commends and rewards someone purely on the basis of her having told a particular lie. The lie is not merely tolerated as some lesser of two evils, but openly celebrated as an act of God-fearing faith and obedience. Which means that, when, elsewhere, the scriptures seem to condemn lying – you shall not bear false witness against your neighbour; lying lips are an abomination to the LORD; do not lie to one another³ – they must, if we believe in their consistency, be condemning something other than simply verbal assertion of something the speaker knows is untrue in and of itself. The question is what.

Let’s try to answer that by looking at some more scriptural case-studies – this time ones where the person who tells the lie is berated and/or judged for having told it.

An obvious example that springs to mind is the story of Ananias and Sapphira.⁴ We’re told that in the very earliest days of the Church, lots of its members were selling property they owned and handing over the money to the apostles for distribution to the poorest among their brothers and sisters. Ananias and Sapphira sold a field and handed over part of the money for this purpose. Peter was less than impressed: “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.” Ananias fell dead; his wife came in and restated the lie that they had handed over the full price they received for the field; she died too. Why this stark jugdement? Because they kept back part of the proceeds? No, once the land was sold it was at their disposal. Rather, because they lied about it.

But what was the problem with them lying? Not mere verbal assertion of the known untruth, because that was fine, praiseworthy even, when Shiphrah and Puah and Rahab did it. But Ananias and Sapphira were lying because they wanted to get all the kudos for being generous, while still keeping a good chunk of their cash. They were lying to present themselves as more virtuous than they actually were. Their sin wasn’t lying so much as hypocrisy, and the covetousness for which hypocrisy is so reliably a cover – covetousness of wealth and reputation. This is the exact sort of thing Jesus used to have a go at religious leaders over.⁵

Here’s another one, from the book of Jeremiah. A chap called Hananiah (funnily enough, Ananias is the Greek form of the same name) prophesies that the Temple vessels and King Jehoiakim and all the exiles will return to Judah within two years. Some time later, Jeremiah tells him: “Listen, Hananiah, the LORD has not sent you, and you have made this people trust in a lie. Therefore thus says the LORD: Behold, I will remove you from the face of the earth. This year you shall die, because you have uttered rebellion against the LORD.” And sure enough, that year, he died. That’s how you tell a real prophet from a false one, kids: do his predictions come to pass, or not? In the following chapter, we get a few more individuals singled out to similar effect: “Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, concerning Ahab son of Kolaiah and Zedekiah son of Maaseiah, who are prophesying a lie to you in my name: Behold, I will deliver them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and he shall strike them down before your eyes. Because of them this curse shall be used by all the exiles from Judah in Babylon: The LORD make you like Zedekiah and Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in the fire – because they have done an outrageous thing in Israel, they have committed adultery with their neighbours’ wives, and they have spoken in my name lying words that I did not command them.” All right, so we’ve got adultery as well as lying there, but the lying is clearly a big part of the charge. Then again: “Thus says the LORD concerning Shemaiah of Nehelam: Because Shemaiah had prophesied to you when I did not send him, and has made you trust in a lie, therefore thus says the LORD: Behold, I will punish Shemaiah of Nehelam and his descendants. He shall not have anyone living among this people, and he shall not see the good that I will do to my people, declares the LORD, for he has spoken rebellion against the LORD.”⁶

 

Michelangelo’s depiction of Jeremiah from the Sistine chapel. Not looking too happy, surprisingly enough.

Three cases here, then, of the telling of lies being directly met with God’s judgement. But again, not merely the telling of lies in and of itself. To tell people lies about what God had spoken was to dishonour him, to give his saints false expectations and lead them astray, to usurp his place and declare revolt against him. Why were these people doing this? Well, because they didn’t like what God was actually saying, namely that the exile would last seventy years and the right thing to do was to build lives in Babylon while it lasted. That was what Jeremiah was saying, and in case you hadn’t noticed, he didn’t get a lot of appreciation for it. His message was unpopular. Hananiah contradicted him in public; Shemaiah actually went so far as to send letters to a priest called Zephaniah telling him that the LORD had made him High Priest instead of Jehoiada and he ought to get on and tell Jeremiah to shut up. You can bet that these guys, and others who claimed to speak for God and predicted a swift end to the exile, were a lot more favourably received than Jeremiah was. Their sin wasn’t lying so much as rebellion: making God out to be a liar, making his people trust in falsehoods whereby they would come to harm, persecuting his true prophet while trying to gain the glory of a prophet’s status for themselves. There’s plenty to deplore there without needing to make the actual act of false utterance part of it.

I think it’s fair to say that most of the time, people lie because they want something that the truth doesn’t entitle them to. They want wealth, or they want the approval of others, or they want to get one over someone they don’t like. These things are sins already: love of money, fear of man, hatred. What lying does is allows you to indulge those desires while maintaining a veneer of virtue. That is, at the end of the day, the point of the lying: nobody, after all, lies hoping to be found out.

But found out by whom? If the threat is that you’ll be found out by a just and righteous authority, then there is no good reason to lie. In that case, you must be lying because you want something that sits contrary to justice and righteousness. If, on the other hand, the threat is that you’ll be found out by an unjust and unrighteous authority – well, that’s a different kettle of fish. For instance, I once read a book that consisted of the memoirs of two Iranian Christian women who’d been incarcerated for their faith.⁷ When they were interrogated, they had no qualms whatsoever about lying when it came to revealing the identities of other Christians they knew. For the sake of keeping their brothers and sisters from harm, they flat-out denied that they knew any. And, well, that just makes sense as the right course of action, doesn’t it? What else would we have had them do?

Lying to an unjust authority in order to protect or help the people of God is not wrong; it’s commendable. That’s what Shiphrah and Puah did, what Rahab did, and what so many saints have done before all the unjust authorities that have risen and fallen in the millennia since. It’s not like the kind of lying I discussed above, where the aim is to obtain things for yourself that truth and justice don’t entitle you to; on the contrary, it’s often very selfless indeed. A person who loved money and reputation and revenge more than truth and justice would rather sell others out in order to save his own skin than lie to protect them. A person who loves truth and justice more than money or reputation or revenge, meanwhile, will lie for the sake of saving others.

So the fact that lying isn’t a sin is contingent on the existence, in the present age, of unjust authorities. To lie, by contrast, before God, the supremely just and supremely righteous and supremely truthful to boot, is always a sin. (Pro tip: he knows you’re lying anyway.) Why? Because if you’re trying to lie before him, you must be after something that his perfect truth and justice wouldn’t entitle you to. And that’s covetousness, and rebellion, and an impugnation of his goodness. Most lies are. This, I think, is how we account for the frequent exhortations against lying in scripture. Insofar as God is the authority we’re under, we shouldn’t be lying. Lying isn’t part of what a perfectly righteous world looks like, and the occasions when it’s the right thing to do are rare, much rarer, I feel entirely sure, than we’d like to persuade ourselves they are. Such occasions do, crucially, exist, but they’re a mere handful next to the ocean of lies which serve only to advance the lier’s own self-interest.

Still, we look forward to a time when not only will God himself, in all his truth and justice, be established as the only and total authority, with all injustice trampled beneath his feet, but we will be raised imperishable and made sinless, so that we’re no longer prey to any impulse that would make us wish to lie before him. Lying isn’t in and of itself a sin in the present age, but it’s nevertheless true that, in the age to come, as surely as there isn’t any sin, there won’t be any lying either.

Footnotes

¹ Yep, the 2002 film you know and love is now a stage musical, with one of my favourite soundtracks ever. The cast’s performance from 2015’s Children In Need show should give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BydEhIveYtY. I’m so gutted I didn’t get to see the show live before the end of its (very short) West End run.

² If you want to check out ‘The Truth About Lying’ before reading what is essentially its sequel, you’ll find it under March 2018 in my blog archive.

³ Exodus 20:16, Proverbs 12:22, and Colossians 3:9 respectively.

⁴ As told in Acts 5, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+5&version=ESVUK, though do scoot back to the last few verses of the previous chapter for context.

⁵ The classic place to go for that jazz would be Matthew 23: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23&version=ESVUK.

⁶ I’ll give you chapter 29, and you can click back one for the bit about Hananiah: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+29&version=ESVUK. Jeremiah is such an under-studied book. Well worth spending some time in.

⁷ It’s a good time to buy the odd thing from 10ofthose to help keep them going with all the Christian conferences and stuff cancelled, and this one was a pretty great read: https://www.10ofthose.com/uk/products/18042/captive-in-iran.