Responding to God’s Glory with Glory
Recently, I preached a sermon on Revelation 4:11. What initially intrigued me in this text was the fact that at the very end of the Bible, God is still being worshiped because He is the Creator. As I progressed in my study, however, I was stunned by the all-consuming worship and exaltation of the Lord pictured in Revelation 4. Because of this, I did a word study of some of the key words in the verse, including the word ”glory”. This idea of responding to God’s glory with praise and exaltation has occupied my mind the past few weeks, and I decided it was time I started working through my thoughts by writing them out.
In this post, I want to think through the sense in which the Bible describes God as glorious and the sense in which glorifying God is our proper response to that reality. I want to think through responding to God’s glory with glory: understanding who God is inherently and then how that drives your response to Him. Right off the bat, I am indebted to Jonathan Edward’s The End for Which God Created the World for engaging my mind on this topic and for influencing what I write in this post.
A brief word study
The word “glory” or “glorify” is used so frequently in good Christian conversation and preaching that I sometimes find it difficult to remember what exactly “glory” means. In the Old Testament, the word most often translated “glory” is the Hebrew word “kabod“. The word’s literal meaning is “weight” but clearly in Scripture this is a metaphor for the significance of something or someone. If something is “heavy” it is inherently more important and significant than something that is “light”. Other ways of understanding this idea of “weight” include splendor, reputation, and honor.
When you come to the New Testament, the word translated glory is “doxa“. You likely recognize this word from the English word “doxology.” This word was used outside Scripture to refer to someone’s reputation i.e. an opinion or estimate of someone. The greater a person or object is, the greater it’s “doxa” or it’s reputation. In Revelation 4:11, this word appears next to a word “time” which is translated “honor”. This word means “a value” or esteeming something. So, in both the Old and New Testaments, it seems that “glory” refers to the significance, the reputation, the value of something.
“Glory” is who God is
What does it mean when the Bible talks about “the glory of God?” Theologians answer this by distinguishing between God’s inherent glory and His ascribed glory. God’s inherent glory refers to the reality that God is, in and of Himself, the greatest, most valuable, and most significant of beings. Exodus 34 famously connects God’s glory to His attributes or who He is:
Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
Exodus 33:18-19 ESV, emphasis added
The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. 6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands,[b] forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” 8 And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.
Exodus 34:5-8 ESV, emphasis added
You see from the above passage that God reveals His glory, His value, His reputation to Moses by declaring who He is and what He does. This is God’s inherent glory. God, by the very nature of who He is and what He does, is the most valuable and significant. Notice also that God connects His glory to His name as well as His goodness. This passage is worthy of a much more extensive exposition, but for our purposes today, it is enough to see that God is inherently infinitely valuable because of who He is.
“Glory” is our response to who God is
“Glory” is not only used to refer to who God is inherently. Glory is also used to refer to humanity’s response to God’s inherent glory. Theologians refer to this as God’s ascribed glory. This is what you refer to when you talk about “glorifying God”. If you notice, Moses illustrates what it means to respond to God’s glory in the passage above: immediately after God reveals His inherent glory of Moses, Moses makes haste to worship in response. This pattern of “revelation then worship” is repeated throughout Scripture when humans are confronted with a revelation of God’s inherent glory.
So what is ascribed glory then? I think in the most basic sense, it is agreeing with God’s evaluation of Himself. God declares through Scripture and creation that He and He alone is the most awesome, great, valuable, and significant being. He is ultimate, the “alpha and the omega”. Therefore, the most basic response a human can give when confronted with this reality is to simply say “amen”! It is so. What God has revealed about Himself is true. “Ascribing glory” means you agree with God’s revelation of Himself by faith and attribute to God all the attributes and worth that He declares are true of Him.
The idea here is when you truly grasp God’s worth, gravity, and reputation, you respond in some way. Worship. Exaltation. Singing. Rejoicing. Obedience. The list goes on and on. Each of these actions “ascribe” glory to God when they are motivated by an understanding of and a desire to display God’s glory. There is much that could be said here, but for the remainder of this post, let’s consider how responding to God’s glory with your mind, emotion, and will occurs in your daily life.
Responding rationally to God’s glory
How can you display the worth and gravity and reputation of God in your mind, heart, and will? How can you respond to God’s infinite value, supreme reputation, and greatest significance properly? Starting with your mind, responding to God’s glory means first and foremost holding this high view of God in your mind.
Your mind is constantly assaulted by a culture that elevates humanity and their autonomy while demeaning the reality of God and His glory.
If you want to display God’s worth, value, and importance, you are going to have to guard your mind from internal thoughts and external voices that would de-value God. Internally, pride, sin, and your own flesh will push you to either think less of God or think of God less. By thinking less of God, I mean you will be tempted to lose a mental grip on the sobering reality of God’s inherent glory. And thinking of God less means becoming so distracted or disinterested in the Lord that you never stop to contemplate God’s value.
External assaults to your mental focus on God’s worth come in a myriad of forms. But they all typically have the common factors of elevating mankind by substituting subtle or overt lies about God. The key for fighting both internal and external temptations to belittle God is given in Romans 12:2 “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
A mind renewed by God’s word and prayer is a mind ready to remember God’s value.
So positively, how can you value and honor God with your mind?
- Daily go to His word to mentally understand who God is revealed to be. Memorize verses like Isaiah 40:21-23 which extol God’s greatness.
- Meditate throughout the day on God’s inherent glory. A mind that does not think of God’s greatness is not actively glorifying God. In the clutter of your own thoughts and the voices around you, dedicate mental energy to contemplation of God’s glory.
- “Take captive every thought” that comes from within or without that would elevate self and dethrone God or Christ in your mind.
If you would glorify God with your mind, you must be active and vigilant. If you wake up assuming you will naturally glorify God with your mind, you will no doubt fail. You must work to get your mind fixed on God and to keep it fixed on God.
A mind fixed on God and a mind that prefers contemplating God over worldly things displays the value, the greatness, and the importance of the Lord.
Responding affectionately to God’s glory
How do you love the Lord with all your heart? How can your emotions, feelings, and affections show that God is supremely valuable? Jonathan Edwards and John Piper have both expounded this point extensively, but I’ll add my own reflections to the mix. Emotions seem to me to be both responsive in nature as well as volatile. By responsive I mean that almost every emotion you have is attached to an object. That object can be an event, a person, a circumstance etc. Emotions are also volatile in the sense that they seem to shift at a very rapid pace depending on what object you come in contact with or sometimes they seemingly shift on their own without an object.
As Piper and Edwards have written, the proper emotional response to God is joy. Delight. Satisfaction. When you truly grasp the gravity, goodness, and greatness of God, your heart should overflow with delight. Why is this often not your experience practically? I think it is because you and I let other objects besides God grip our hearts and thereby shift our emotional response delighting in God to something lesser. The fight of glorifying God with your emotions is a fight to keep your heart continually delighting in who God is. This is easily said, but hard to do practically.
Responding to God’s glory with affectionate authentic joy requires anchoring your emotional faculties to who God reveals himself to be.
The goal is not to conjure up some sort of fake, excessive, emotional response. Emotions, because they are volatile, come and go rather rapidly. What you can control, however, if the consistency and fervor with which you pursue delight in the Lord. A good analogy would be feeling affection and delight for your spouse. Your emotional response to your spouse is not always proportional to their value. But as you spend time with them, think over their attributes in your mind, talk with them, prioritize them, oftentimes a proper affection follows. The hope is that over time, your emotions become less volatile with regards to your spouse and you enjoy more consistent times of extended delight. By consistently returning again and again to the desired object or your affections, you will likely experience more frequent moments of love and delight and joy in that object.
A heart overflowing with love and delight and joy in who God is shows God’s inherent greatness, worth, and importance.
Responding volitionally to God’s glory
How can you display God’s infinite value with your will? Actions? Lifestyle? This is a big question and a whole post could be written on answering this question in each area of life. But I think at a fundamental level, displaying God’s worth with your actions means obedience. In particular, obedience to the moral commands laid out in God’s word. The world would have you determine your own fate, decide what you want to do, ”do what is right in your own eyes.” When you remove an eternal sovereign God from the picture, you are left to determine and serve yourself.
Therefore, the simplest and most fundamental way to display the worth and weight of God is to deny yourself and live for Him. To let God determine who you are and what you are to do with your life. Was there ever a time that self-denial and prioritizing God were more counter-cultural? By choosing to obey God rather than choosing to obey your own desires, you are effectively saying to the sinful world around you ”I am not ultimate. You are not ultimate. There is a God who is ultimate. And He determines what life is, what life isn’t, and what we, as create creatures, should do.”
Radical, ordinary, everyday obedience is a testimony to God’s glory.
It is a testimony that God is so exceedingly glorious and valuable that He is superior to your own desires and pleasing Him is the greatest good you can do. Now, just because glorifying God with your will is simple at a fundamental level does not mean it is easy. Choosing God over self is a daily battle to ”deny yourself, take up your cross” and follow Christ. But in calling us to lose our life for the sake of the Gospel, Jesus is calling us to show to the world that there is someone greater than anything and is worth us losing our life for.
Obedience and self-sacrifice are both acts of the will by which you can display God’s glory to the world around you.
Conclusion: Responding to God’s glory is the privilege of the Christian
Responding to God’s glory with a life of worship is the great privilege of the Christian. Unbelievers live their lives in this world blind and trapped in the black hole of self-glorification. While the culture pretends this is an enlightened and viable way to live, the Christian knows better. Self-glorification is nothing more than trying to quench your thirst with a broken cup when a fountain of living water is in front of you (see Jeremiah 2:13).
In that sense, the Christian’s chief end to ”glorify God and enjoy Him forever” is not a burdensome duty, anymore than the invitation to drink from a fountain of life is a burdensome duty. It is the highest privilege and blessing you can be given. It is a calling to taste and see that the Lord is good, to come and buy food without price, and to experience the eternal life of knowing the Lord. You cannot be too committed to pursing a deeper knowledge of God’s infinite value. Nor can you be too committed to displaying with your mind, will, and life that knowledge you have of God’s infinite value. If you are a Christian, revel in the knowledge that you get to live a life of ”praising the one who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.”
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