Glorious Actions

A God who is fully glorious will also be glorious in all that he does.

Let's consider Psalm 8 together:

"LORD, our Lord, how magnificent is your name throughout the earth! You have covered the heavens with your majesty. From the mouths of infants and nursing babies, you have established a stronghold on account of your adversaries in order to silence the enemy and the avenger.

When I observe your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you set in place, what is a human being that you remember him, a son of man that you look after him?

You made him little less than God and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all the sheep and oxen, as well as the animals in the wild, the birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea that pass through the currents of the seas.

LORD, our Lord, how magnificent is your name throughout the earth!"

In this Psalm, we see that God is clearly glorious. But why?

As we studied earlier, God is glorious because God is the Creator. God deserves glory for being The Glorious Creator, for a glorious process of creating, and for the end result - God created a glorious world.

Even more, within Creation, God's creation of image bearers - people who bear the glorious image of God - is glorious!

This is a theme throughout the Scriptures. Consider the implications for human dignity that Jesus - God himself - became a human being! What greater honor could there be for humanity than that God would become one of us?

In the same way, God's redemptive work and the outcome of redemption are glorious.

For instance, when God redeemed the Israelites out of Egypt, he told Moses, "And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and he will pursue them, and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, and the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD."

How did God get glory over Pharaoh? Pharaoh thought he was God and that the God of the Israelites was puny, a failure, nothing at all. But when he attempted to demonstrate his supremacy over Yahweh, the verdict came in: God was the LORD.

And God's rescue was not only liberation from slavery and injustice, but it was an invitation to know the living God and to be with him.

For instance, God appeared not only to Moses, but to the Israelites. We read in Exodus 40, "Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle."

God's glory was with his people. Though the people could not directly encounter God's glory, they could see and know that God was real, that God was astoundingly great, and that God was with them.

So consider how this comes to fulfillment in Christ. In John 1 we read,

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth…For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known."

The glory that even Moses could not encounter took on flesh and dwelt among us!

The activity of the Incarnation reveals the presence and the work of a glorious God.

We see this break forth like fireworks in the transfiguration. Jesus' face shines like the sun, his clothes become as bright as light, and all Peter can think is: 'We need a tabernacle! We need a way to conceal this glory - it is too much!' He's thinking like Moses might think.

But then, he later reflects on this experience in 2 Peter,

"For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,' we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain."

And how does he conclude that letter? He writes,

"But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen."

What Peter could not understand at the transfiguration, he now understands.

By grace, we can know this Majestic God, be in his glorious presence, and so praise is the natural result: we give God glory now and we will give God glory forever.

In John 17, we see that our Triune God planned an even further revelation of his glory than his Incarnation. Jesus prays,

"I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed."

He goes on,

"The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me."

How can it be? That the same glory the Father gives the Son is the glory the Son gives to us? Yet we are given union with God through Christ, by his Spirit, according to his glorious grace.

As Philippians 2 teaches us, among other places, in Jesus' death and crucifixion, and his resurrection and ascension, he is glorified by God the Father to the name that is above every name.

Remarkably, one reason he endures that suffering is because he intends to give to us the glory he himself has always had in the life of the Trinity!

We know now God in a personal and intimate manner. We are in his glorious presence - and that makes us glorious. When we are forever and fully in his presence, we will be forever and fully glorious as well.

One day we will join the praise of God in heaven, as we read in Revelation 7,

"And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, 'Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.'"

Glory, glory, glory, glory, glory!

The whole Bible is saturated in the language of glory, majesty, honor, and praise because it is from a glorious God, it is about a glorious God, it celebrates God's glorious work, and God even declares that he shares his glory with us, which we know because we are already in his presence because of the glorious work of the Holy Spirit!

Our glorious God's work is glorious.