God Shines Forth (eBook)

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The Glory of God

Happy mission presupposes happy Christians.

There is a kind of mission that can be carried out by miserable Christians, and though it may be doctrinally correct and carefully organized, it will only reflect the emptiness in their own hearts. Christians who don’t enjoy God can’t and won’t wholeheartedly commend him to others. If we fear that God’s love for us is reluctant or that his approval rests on our performance, we won’t feel any real affection for him, our service will be grudging, and the world will likely see through us.

This was the experience of Martin Luther as a young monk who, though profoundly devoted and spiritually zealous, was nevertheless filled with dread at the thought of God. “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God,” he confessed, “and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God.”1 Two hundred years later, Jonathan Edwards, also an intensely religious young man, was racked with “concerns and exercises about [his] soul” and recoiled from the “horrible doctrine” of God’s sovereignty.2 These were deeply unhappy men trying to be Christians.

Luther and Edwards both underwent transformations in their views of God that lit up their lives, melted their hard hearts, and fueled years of sincerely joyful ministry. Both discovered—and then preached, taught, and wrote about—a God who is delightfully good. Carrying them through illness, loss, persecution, and poverty, their fresh understanding of God truly changed everything for them. At the heart of their happy Christianity was the realization that knowing God rightly must always begin with Jesus Christ.

Step into the Light

A whole array of spiritual paths and philosophical traditions claims to give us clarity on what God is and is not like, but Jesus declares himself the unique and totally sufficient gateway to God. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” he says. “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). In fact, the knowledge of God is hidden from “the wise and understanding” and must be “revealed” (Matt. 11:25–26). Even those we might expect to have the most intelligent, imaginative thoughts about God cannot know about him unless he shows himself. Jesus says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27).

The truth of God is naturally hidden from the world in the closed loop of relationship between the Father and the Son, and none of us can guess our way in. Only the Son, the one who knows the Father, can open this knowledge to us. In Jesus Christ alone, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3), do we see God as he truly is. Jesus puts this rather specific (even exclusive) approach down to his Father’s “gracious will” (Matt. 11:26) and clearly does not see it as a means to privilege an elite few over the masses, for his very next words are as inclusive an invitation as we could imagine: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). Anyone can come to know the living God and find rest in him, but it is uniquely to Jesus they must come.

All this is encapsulated when Paul calls Jesus “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). He is the one who stepped into the world he had created, showing us the God we could not see by ourselves. John also carries this theme with his title for the Son, “the Word” who was “in the beginning” with his Father (John 1:1). Just as our words reveal and expose who and what we are (Luke 6:45), God’s Word—his eternal Son—perfectly expresses and reveals him. This Word is also “the true light, which gives light to everyone” (John 1:9). Here we meet a very common scriptural theme: that of the Son enlightening us. John here is clearly drawing on the light “in the beginning” of Genesis 1:3. Paul does the same in 2 Corinthians 4 when he speaks of “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (v. 4). Indeed, he writes that “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (v. 6).

Time and again, Scripture is clear that sinful humanity languishes in unknowing darkness, and, left to our imaginations, we dream up a miserable god, quite deserving of our dislike and mistrust. The unique and cheering work of Jesus is to be the light in the dark rooms of our hearts and minds, showing us the Father. As John Calvin put it, “We are blind as to the light of God, until in Christ it beams on us.”3

Source and Beam

To get a right and true understanding of God (and to correct any faults and distortions we may continue to pick up) we must look to the Son. But when Jesus reveals his Father to us, he is not just passing on information about God. Because Jesus is himself God—the eternal Son of the Father—he is God with us. Not an expert lecturer or detailed commentator we may learn from, but God in person, reaching out to us to be known by us.

The writer to the Hebrews describes Jesus as the “exact imprint” or perfect representation of God to us, and also “the radiance of the glory of God” (1:3). To speak of Jesus as the “radiance” of God’s glory is to say that Jesus is not a light directed at some other subject, like a flashlight pointed at your shoes in a tent at night. Radiance, like the sun and its beams, speaks of something—or someone—that, by nature, shines out and gives light. In other words, it is not that God is hiding in the dark and we must enlist Jesus to help us seek him out. Rather, God himself is the source of that light that comes to us in Christ. Put another way, the light that shines on us in Jesus is the light of the Father. The Father and the Son are one being, one God. The eternal life of God is the Father begetting his Son in the Holy Spirit. What we see in Jesus is not peripheral to the being of God. No, the Father, radiating his Son, shines like the sun in the sky and, by those beams, communicates himself to us. “God is light,” writes John, “and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5), and so his Son is “the light of the world” (John 8:12). The Puritan preacher Thomas Goodwin saw this and said, “The sun doth not only enrich the earth with all good things . . . but glads and refreshes all with shedding immediately its own wings of light and warmth, which is so pleasant to behold and enjoy. And thus doth God, and Christ the Sun of righteousness.”4

In the radiance of Jesus, we not only are learning something about God but are receiving God himself. To see God rightly, to whom else would we turn?

Jesus, the Glory of God

This brings us to the language of “glory” that we have only danced around so far as we considered the light of God’s self-revelation in Jesus. It is there in John 1 as John writes, “We have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (v. 14); it is there in 2 Corinthians 4, where Christians are given “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (v. 6). B. B. Warfield wrote that more than a simple association is being made between Jesus and glory. Yes, Jesus came from glory (John 17:5), returned to his glory (1 Tim. 3:16), and will come again in glory (Titus 2:13), but “we come nearer to what is implied when we read of Jesus being ‘the Lord of glory’ (1 Cor 2:8), that is He to whom glory belongs as His characterizing quality; or when He is described to us as ‘the effulgence of the glory of God’ (Heb 1:3).”5 Jesus is not only glorious in a descriptive way; he is God’s Glory in a definitive way. As we have seen, for the writer to the Hebrews, Jesus is the Glory of God: the very outshining radiance of his being.

The Greek word for “glory” here, δόξα (doxa), was classically used to mean an accepted belief or opinion about someone or that person’s reputation. It comes from the verb “appear” or “seem.” In the New Testament, though, the word was filled with a slightly different sense. It picked up all the resonances of the Old Testament Hebrew word for glory, כָּבוֹד‎ (kavod). This word literally means “weight” or “copiousness”—the sheer, unmissable presence of something, especially in bright, shining splendor. So the shepherds outside Bethlehem watched over their flocks...