“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 (John 1:14).
I wish I knew more about glory – or maybe it’s that I want to see what it must have been like to have been there at his birth and to see His glory. I wish I had seen Moses behind the rock, or the pillar of fire or cloud, or the ark of the covenant. And then to have seen that glory fully concentrated in Christ’s body, his very being. Very God of Very God.
I’m reminded of something Annie Dillard wrote – “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” (Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk)
“The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured.”
1 Samuel 4:22
I don’t have to tell you that we live in a world utterly stripped of glory. We don’t even have words for it. Can you imagine the national grief captured by Phinehas’ wife after hearing the ark of the covenant had been captured? (and her husband and son dead). “…she said, ‘The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured.’” (1Sa 4:22 ESV) Glory, as we see it in the Old Testament is always manifested from a distance, for it is the unabated, unfiltered presence of God. Under the old dispensation, just like Moses, we would not have been able to come near it and live. This was Moses’ experience:
18 Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” 19 And he [God] 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. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” 21 And the LORD said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.” (Exo. 33:18-23)
And yet, shepherds and prophets from the east, and Joseph, and even Mary, especially Mary, gazed at the face of this new-born babe and lived. What would it have been like to kneel there, by the cradle, laying down all power, all wealth, all of all, to worship him and to know his glory?
The apostle John captures this poetically in the first chapter of his gospel. ” 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 (John 1:14). This is the incarnation – This is God made man. – C.S. Lewis called this the central miracle of all miracles. But how can we even talk about the fact that while Christ took on flesh, he remained God. It was never a blending of the two, and not an uneasy union of the two. This is how one Pilgrim preacher wrote of it:
“What a wonder that two natures infinitely distant should be more intimately united than anything in the world…That the same person should have both a glory and a grief; an infinite joy in the Deity, and an inexpressible sorrow in the humanity! That a God upon a throne should be an infant in a cradle; the thundering Creator be a weeping babe and a suffering man; the incarnation astonishes men upon earth, and angels in heaven.” (Stephen Charnook).
When we bless God for giving us the best parking space but neglect doing the hard, obedient things He has called us to, where is His glory?
The denial of the incarnation was one way the early church could identify a false prophet. In 1 John 4 John says to test the spirits by this one criterion: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God…” (1 John 4:2 ESV).
Paul echoes this thought in 1 Tim. 3:16 – “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.”
The shepherds were given a foretaste of that glory – “and in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear” (Luke 2:8-10).
What have we done with that glory? By that I don’t mean that we can ever do anything to diminish the glory that is Christ’s. What I mean is have we banished it? Have we forgotten it? Have we become inured to even the idea of glory? When we reduce our God to be an extension of our desires and not the God we are called to by Holy Scripture to worship, what have we done? When we bless God for giving us the best parking space but neglect doing the hard, obedient things he has called us to, where is his glory?
I think we would all say, after pausing and reflecting on this – that we want the reflection of Christ to be on our faces. We want to turn our faces to Him, unveiled, transparent, (our sins, our secrets settled by the glory of the Cross) so that we can behold the glory of the Lord. And oh, don’t you want to be transformed into the image of Christ – from one degree of glory to another? (2 Cor. 3:18) Let this be the cry of our hearts, and may “light shine out of darkness, the light which has shown in our hearts… to give the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6) Amen.