Saturday, May 13, 2023

 

Saturday, May 13, 2023


Psalms 101; 102:1-11

Exodus 34:11-26

John 13:21-35


Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in Him.


One of the nicknames given to the gospel of John is “the gospel of glory”. When Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana, it was when He first revealed His glory. Raising Lazarus from the dead was not simply Jesus making Himself feel better by bringing back His friend, but so that those who believed would see the glory of God.


When God’s glory was displayed to Moses and the Israelites, it was in the pillars of smoke by day and fire by night. God’s glory descended upon Mount Sinai; there it was thunder and lightning, fire and smoke.


The word itself is, in the Hebrew, related to a sense of weighty heaviness; God’s magnificence is a girthy magnificence. God is very magnificent, and describing God as having glory is our way of emptying our vocabulary in an attempt to get somewhere in describing that.


One of the things that makes Jesus so special is how He clarifies our understanding of God’s glory. If we tried to use our feeble human minds to translate the glory of a mountain on fire and flashing with lightning into a human being – which is what Jesus is, as God incarnate – would we have imagined someone who washes the feet of His disciples? Would the glorious God who raised an ocean for the Hebrews and then crashed it down on the heads of the Egyptians specifically instruct His betrayer to go and get the police to arrest Him?


Would the God who made everything and holds everything together by the word of His power come and die on a cross, just to save those whom He loves? What is this glory of God that we see in Jesus? Will an eternal lifetime spent in the direct presence of God ever explain completely for us just how beautiful God’s glory really is?





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