Glory is an immensely important subject in the Bible. Everything that is made and all that God does is a declaration of his glory. All that God is and does is to establish his glory as incomparable and as unconquerable throughout the entire universe. God defends his glory in the ultimate. Hell exists to protect the glory of God from incursions and future assaults. Heaven exists to celebrate it. There are more than 400 verses in the Bible that contain the word glory in its many linguistic variations. The only subject that could be more important for our study would be the person of God himself. But the study of glory should always return to God as Lord of Glory (see 1 Corinthians 2:8 and James 2:1).

In one of the church’s most important Councils, the godly leaders of the 17^th century held God’s glory in highest esteem and as the end and purpose of all man’s endeavors. The Westminster Shorter Catechism begins, “Man’s chief end [his overarching and ultimate purpose in all of life] is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”[1] This statement is foundational to all of Biblical teaching and it forms the center of the Reformed faith. No statement outside the Bible has so clearly focused on the glory of God and its virtue and centrality over all of the Christian faith and in the lives of God and all who love him. This statement summarizes all we do and all we aspire to be, to offer God the glory he deserves as God.

The glory of God is central to the life and worship, the ministry and purpose of the church. One might suppose that there is a broad agreement about what it means for a believer to give glory to God and to live in God-honoring. But there is today broad confusion about the nature of glory and the purpose of worship. If we study the glory of God, we learn that our efforts at bringing God glory (for that is what we said we were doing), if done in our own power and through sinful means, have utterly failed. In our new awareness, we know that God desires us to honor him and ascribe glory to his name, but we are not clear about how that is to be done.

We are used to using the language of glory in our worship and liturgies. We are comfortable singing, “Glory to God in the Highest,” “To God be the Glory,” and a thousand varieties of that great theme of glory. But still the church seems to struggle to know what “exactly” does it mean to give God glory, and what does glory mean to us in our worship and in our lives generally?  

The contemporary church can label anything as glorious. The church has acted as though it had power imbued glory where it wishes. But the picture from Scripture is that this is the right of God, and God alone. There has arisen great confusion within the church as to what should be considered glorious (or holy, or even “good”). Almost any action by the church can be conceived, justified, or excused by saying it has some connection with worship or the glory of God. Any process that is remotely related to the Christian faith can be ascribed as something that is somehow, now, by some practice or caveat, declared by the church to be glorious. From the dedication of a sanctuary after its completion to a prayer offered for an abortion-provider, glory is ascribed or seen to reside in almost anything and everything.[2]

When glory is everything, it becomes nothing. It must be defined in connection with the divine Person, or it will slip into meaninglessness and vacuity. In extreme forms it could even descend into a motif for what could otherwise be understood in any other context only as an atrocity. So the church may do what is atrocious and call it praise. It may do something that is forbidden by God and describe it as glorious. When the church is unclear about the glory of God, the world gets confused exponentially about the nature and person of God. When the church loses the glory of God, it becomes sadly like the world. The church should be a bit like Heaven in worship and glory and the knowledge of God. It shouldn’t be in any sense like the glory of the world.

The church contributes most to this confusion when we ascribe glory to anything done in the name of God or within the worship experience. We can confuse glorious categories when we are not careful to understand how the words or actions involved directly touch the glory that rests in and is solely derived from, God alone. We should be skeptical of ascribing glory to everything and anything the church does, or to all that Christians are engaged in. What the church does and what Christians do may not have anything to do with the glory of God whatsoever. Somehow it is assumed that anything done in faith is glorious. It may not be. Or we may understand anything that is, in some remote way, a least tangentially related to the glory of God because the language of glory has been hijacked and some human being led the charge to do what was described as adding to the glory of God.  But it may not have anything to do with God. It may be more about human beings than God.  

Glory is so imprecisely defined in our day that “glory” can be ascribed to God by anyone who does or says whatever they can imagine to say about God, and there is applause for the effort. “Glorious” is simply added to the aphorism and all is well: “glorious worship,” “glorious sanctuary,” “glorious offering,” or “glorious person,” all seem to work well and they are well-received in the modern church. But they are virtually empty of any content that is connected with the actual glory of God, and much more important, and this is a point of strong admonition and warning to us all who engage in worship, they appear to be the exact opposite of glory in their exercise.

If the purpose of some “glorious” act is to congratulate a human being for their gift, their service, their example, this is not true glory at all. This is the praise of men. By being so frightfully unclear about the nature and function of the glory which alone is God’s, the church is acting as though God were accepting of any praise we might offer to him, or with any action concocted from the imaginations of the sincere. But God is not accepting of all worship simply because we erroneously stamped it “worship” or “holy” or “glory.”

Churches create their own worship of God and they construct their own means of praise to the Almighty. But they fail terribly in these endeavors because they seek a glory that they create to offer to God. They have separated glory from the God who owns it all, and by trying to create a glory they can offer to him, they create a false glory that fails either at being glorious or the truth about God. This false glory is disconnected, separated from the actual works and nature of God. It is a fiction that people create in order to do what they believe to be a glorious act, when it is man-centered severely limited by the perspectives and values of men. Man’s glory uses the vocabulary of divine worship, but it comes short in every measure. Only God himself can be the One who determines what is or isn’t glorious. We should take great care in creating expressions of worship and praise that are insufficient, that are incomplete, or that are contrary to what God has done and who he is. When God is at the center the content of worship is God himself, what he has done, and said, and supremely, who he is.

The church would be the primary human voice to the glory of God. We have the account of the glory of God, we can read in the Scriptures his might deeds his, spoken words, and his prophetic utterances. We can see with our own eyes the beauty, scope, complexity, balance, and wonder of all that is created. Creation is so large and so complex that it defeats the human intellect to fully comprehend. We will never know grasp all God has made, never fully understand all the complexity of it. The size of the universe is comprehensible on one level – we can see it and study it, and draw conclusions from it, — but it is always just beyond our grasp. We understand some of it, and in some cases most of it, but there is always something in even the most mundane science that is beyond our capacity to understand. 

The church errs in trying to make the glory of God more accessible and familiar. The glory of God is utterly alien to human life. It is not something we possess. Glory is God’s possession. He owns it all.

Rather than admit our failure to understand and fully appreciate the glory of God, we embrace our own glory as representative of his glory. By this fundamental mistake we diminish the glory of God and dishonor the God who is glorious. This diminished glory, this  “glory” from the church is constructing a new language of worship that superficially invites worship and extol glory (in very miscalculated and untested ways), but when they are submitted to examination, these human expressions that aim at glory borrow the language of praise but they are found, upon examination, to have little to do with either God or glory. Saying something is glorious doesn’t make it so. Robbing the language of praise and filling them with another set of meanings, can never honor the God who is glorious. For worship to be true and God-exalting, it must be connected to the very nature of God or it fails in spite of the good intentions.

 Contemporary worship often fails to offer substantial, understandable language about the glory of God to guide worshipers into the presence of God and to offer him praise that is worthy of God.  When Christians struggle in these matters all they offer in worship and praise to God is incomplete or they give something that is contradictory to the clear demands God requires of all who worship him.  Worshipers are often led into experiences that do not achieve the excellences that the worship of God demands of those who come to God in faith. We must remember that God is demanding of the manner by which he is worshiped and he had dealt severely with those that failed in the attempt. God severely punished those who worshiped him out of their imaginations (Exodus 20:4-6).

Worship is not only to be rescued from the imaginations of men, but it must be done in such as way that brings glory to God. Burroughs[3] calls the worshiper to remember the nature of God is defended by God himself. If we will not sanctify the Name of God, God will be the one who judges those who wrongly worship. He is protective of his holiness and of his glory, and though he may suffer much at the hand of the well-intentioned, he can be provoked by inferior motives, confused focus in the worship, and denigrations of the holiness of God and the glory of God. It is true that every generation must face the realities of human beings in the presence of God, and each epoch addresses the nature of worship according to the conventions of the time. But not all approaches to God are equally valid nor should we think that any attempt at worship is acceptable to God. Every era faces the question that birthed the Reformation of the 16^th century, and began a recovery of the doctrines of grace and the longing for exalted worship. When Luther understood “how can sinful man be reconciled to a holy God” it was not just for personal salvation but also for the worship of God.

Worship must be rescued from those who think that inventiveness and innovation in the service is as important as the exploration of God’s nature and work, his Person and character, guided by the revelation of God’s Word. We know that Biblical obedience and faithful application of the Law of Faith brings God the glory due his Name. How can we exchange the glory of God for the talent of people? We may be assured that simple creativity and inventiveness, in the name of worship, may easily err in doctrine, they may confuse the immature, and they will parade the church before the world as just another display of human talent or invention, rather than distinguish the church as the place, really it is the people, who display the greatness and glory of God to the greatest extent possible in this life.

But because these man-generated acts of worship and these insufficient expressions of praise and glory have so little to do with the virtues of God or his mighty works, they fail to honor God as God and they bring more condemnation to us in the attempt. They also leave the honest worshipper feeling as though they had failed in the exercise. They had. It is exhausting to attempt to reach high enough by means of our broken hearts and our inadequate, sin-striped thoughts of God to bring him the praise and worship worthy of his Name. We always fall short in these matters of holiness and consecrated offerings of praise to God. We find great difficulty in ascribing glory to God and in our actions and our words struggle to correlate that praise to God to the truth about God, so that they actually do please and praise him as he demands and desires us to do. The aspiration and the reality always disconnect in fallen people.

To worship God aright is to capture the meaning and import of the things that God has done in display of his awesome nature and character and it is to extol and glorify God for who he is in himself. There is in the Christian who knows the God of eternity, the redeemed desire to reach higher and to achieve in worship what would be impossible in ourselves. Worship is the song of the redeemed not the display of the sinful nature in entertainment or performance, where worship is masquerading as an offering of glory to God, when it devolves into the display of the glory of men and women. Many horrid actions and offerings have been given in the Name of God and to his dishonor. Right worship is supremely an act of faith in God and obedience to his Word. Praise can only flow from faith. Faith is in God, not in man.

We know better (we certainly ought to know much better) and we ought to be embarrassed and completely repentant for much that goes down in the name of the worship of God. Vapid verse and simplistic melodies have replaced the older, and arcane, inchoate rhymes and inaccessible music of the past. The best hymns are just as neglected as the horrid ones are. In our stumbling procession of enthusiastic praise-givers hoping to honor God in the processional, we miserably fail in the exercise of actually offering praise to God that is acceptable and perfect (see Romans 12:1). Bad songs today are no better than bad songs of 100 years ago. Louder music is not more praise-worship than poorly played music was on an out-of-tune organ played by someone with marginal skills. Worship must never have been given away, abandoned, to the choir or the praise band. It is God’s people who have been called to worship. It should be neither a dirge nor a rave. But then as now, many seeking to worship God characterized the act of praise as giving glory to God. But it clearly was not, no matter how well-intentioned. Glory to God does not occur through good, but ill-informed intentions in any generation. There is content. Worship is work. Glory to God is full of content and rich with specific content about the nature of God and his purposes for humanity. Scripture is to be searched, read, believed, then celebrated. There are promises to be claimed. Sins brought into the light and honestly confessed. Songs of praise extolling the person of Christ and his redeeming work, sung with all our ability and with the joy of the redeemed. But all must be seriously overseen with an open Bible, not with a Google search of the hottest church and the most amazing worship video, or the loudest praise band. Such expressions of glory to God fail and are seen by those who are citizens of this world as profoundly grotesquely, unforgivably vapid or, worse, simply absurd.

If they had searched the Scriptures, they would have discovered that all they had created in the name of glory rose from within themselves—sung in the name of worship and honestly intended for God’s glorification, but, upon examination and in those flashes of honesty that in the presence of God, they realize to their great shame that it had nothing whatsoever to do with God either in the content of it or in its result. It was about man.

The sin nature within us all cannot aspire to the heights of worship. No matter how deserving God may be of all praise and worship, it falls above our ability to offer him “the glory due his Name.” There are categorical difference between people and God that make our approach, even out talking meaningfully about God, problematic. How can we describe God in human language, without committing sacrilege? Every word is insufficient. Every offering of praise or description of God is incomplete, omitting of some crucial aspect of the Divine Person, or simply incapable (by definition) of expressing the ineffable.

How can we approach God even to worship him when he is unapproachably glorious? Remember the words, “… who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen” (1 Timothy 6:16 ESV)? How do we offer honor to him or grasp eternal dominion? There is in the act worship the accomplishment of the impossible. We are finite, sinful, limited in our knowledge and understanding. We are imperfect humans and so our approach to God in order to offer him praise will suffer the failure of categories. We are not God.

The unapproachable holiness of God, the ineffability of God’s nature and works, the stunning out-shining of his eternal and resplendent glory, all hinder, limit, and create failure in our approach to the Throne of Heaven and to the place where the God of glory dwells in majesty. We run out of the right words, the proper words, the full and glory-filled words in our attempts at praising the Holy One. We stutter in our failure to express even what we know it true of God. Even taking the concepts from Scripture or attempting to parrot them back to God as a school-age child would recite the alphabet or the multiplication tables — this is how we feel before the God who cannot be fully honored because his honor is beyond and above everything we have known or experienced and he is so radically different from us as human beings that we possess no facility, in ourselves, for the adequate praise of God.

It may be the categorical reach that worship requires is what necessitates the failure of us all in the attempt. So we offer something simple, something we have concocted out of our imaginations and then amateurishly give it to God because it is all they have to bring him. So we feel the compulsion to worship God and that drive rests deep within us, it is akin to our hunger to know God and the hope to see God. But by fashioning worship ourselves, we must bring with our best gift to God a word of confession and apology that, though it was perhaps our best, still it was not adequate. Those who built the great cathedrals must have been heart-sick when their flying buttresses began to buckle and the stones from the ceilings fell upon the worshipers. Their best, their grandest architectural offering of praise to God, was flawed because it was people who built it, the splendor of it, in the end, was, and must have been, only human splendor, not God’s. All who worship God with a perspective rooted in the truth about the nature and perfections of God always feel the truth of this sort of failure in our human attempts to give he the worship due his name. We can’t do it.    

In the modern age, the God of the least common denominator has created a more accessible and more generic form of worship. All sorts of substitutes and short-cuts found their way into the fabric praise and the language of holiness. Purity is brushed aside as a quality of worship because purity is very difficult to attain. So the drummer in the band is sleeping with his girlfriend. The pastor has an affair that is overlooked. The attenders never contemplate God in the smallest degree, but they come, they would say, for some sort of worship service. Holiness is considered too exclusionary as a requirement for worshipers. Faithfulness and health, maturity of Christian character and prayerfulness, are denied by their dismissal and seen to be completely unimportant or irrelevant for those who approach God. Because God is seen as so much like people, he is treated with the same contempt. It is the experience of worship insomuch as it affects the people who come, not the approach to God that is seen as critically important.

 We realize that there has been a tremendous shift in purpose and end of the worship service. What used to be a service for the worship of God has become, over great objections, an event for the entertainment of people in the name of God. It has become more and more (not universally) an opportunity to display man’s ability, giftings than to honor God. It is interesting to see how the shift has gradually worked itself into the established pattern of worship in churches. First there was a breaking from the traditional organ and hymn model. Then electronics became cheap and recording of the sermon (for broadcast, or for copying and circulation among shut-ins) became commonplace. But after the introduction of electronic recording, the sermon was changed into something it was not before. The sermon became more of a record of the event than an act of corporate worship. The exposition of the word and the interaction of pastor with people was replaced by the event of recording the message for circulation or broadcast. The sermon was memorialized forever. Messages today are commonly available on the internet at virtually no cost to the church, and perhaps little value to the hearer, except to remember what was lost by recording the event. Whatever the pastor said was there, forever. That directly infects the sermon. The pastor is thinking about the many who will hear the message apart from the context of the longer series. They may hear any message they choose, like picking one show in a TV series, and then fast-forwarding toward the part that is interesting, rather than hearing the complete series, or the whole of the sermon arc.  So the emphasis on delivery and on the appropriate style for the medium becomes increasingly impactful on the message. Messages are dumbed down because of the desire to reach the broadest number. The recorder is in view when the messages are preached. The earnestness of the preacher, to those particular people, with that special message from God is lost.

So the pastor who used to give messages preached from his life of study, and for love of those people who are there assembled, is now relegated to being a TV star or the radio announcer. How different are the skill-sets of those different roles. While the vocabulary that describes God from his Word, even going so far as to quote his Word in the worship experience, but true worship is stolen. Turning the sanctuary into a club or an auditorium gains nothing and loses so much. Coming to a place set aside for the worship of God is a worthy end. Coming to a place to hear the Word of God spoken aloud. We come together so we could hear better, without distractions and competition from the world. We come to get help for the soul that is seeking God. Imagine a place filled with hundreds of people who were in a place, primarily there to engage in seeking God. Their chief desire was to worship him alone (see Deuteronomy 4:29; 1 Chronicles 16:29; Psalms 9:10; 29:2; Isaiah 55:6; Matthew 4:10 repeated in Luke 4:8).

The soul of the redeemed seeks to worship God. It must worship him. We desire height and depth, richness and excellence, beauty and glory in the worship of God. Less than that is not fitting for the King of kings. Such exercises are disappointing in that they exhaust the believing heart that craves, and is desperate for more glory. The believing heart is convinced that glory is not about man whatsoever, nor about man inventing things to bring to God. Glory is about God.

Divine glory is expressed in nature, providence, and redemption. Glory expresses the divine character and work. The word has a range of meaning from the declaration of God’s reputation in his actions, extending through his miracles and the works of creation, and most especially through redemption. God’s glory will lead us through a study of God’s self-disclosure, his character, his power, his wisdom, his redeeming choices, and in its grandest expressions, reaching to the extremes of his nature that can be known—even to the separation of his holiness expressed in his infinite wrath against sin and his holiness defended by the redemption of Christ on the Cross. The supreme act of God’s glory was the work of his Son redeeming us by his blood.

The study of glory is a subject for a lifetime. The more we know of glory, the greater, deeper, and higher our subject becomes. Mastery of this subject is impossible because it is the study of the nature of God.  Therefore, this great subject is profoundly humbling to the believing soul. Who can stand grasping his pride after attending this subject with anything approaching an adequate exposition? Eternity will be spent praising and exploring God’s glory without limit or constraint. But on this side of eternity there isn’t enough time and there aren’t yet enough exalted words to give adequate weight and value to this subject. Eternity is required.

Giving God glory is the “chief end of man.” It is the most important, most enduring thing a person can do. Christians ought to know that we should give God glory. They are confused about how to proceed. They are unsure about the content and actions associated with that glory. To “glorify” sounds to our ears like an act of worship, creating actions and saying words that we hold, and do sincerely believe will give glory to God. By those actions, therefore, we believe he will be pleased.

The truth is, we know little about glorifying God, and, therefore, know little about the “chief end of man.” Substituting the words and works of men for the very focused and splendid words and works of God is not glory. Glory should be approached with superlative care and with the measure of God’s Word, and with trembling and fear, offered to God in praise of the glory of his grace.

Glory is universally esteemed in Christian creeds. We write God’s glory on the dedication plaques affixed to our buildings. We often implore our people to “give glory to God” in our worship services, and glory is commonly a subject mentioned in our prayers to God both publicly and privately.

God already possesses the sum and total of all the glory that exists in the universe. There is no other source of glory. There is no other person or thing that possesses glory. Bringing God glory is very precise; a focused set of actions, and a narrow set of words.

Glory must begin with who God is and in what he has done. It cannot and must not originate in some response of man to what they see in God, or how they report the glory of God. Glory is not reflecting to God some quality within his nature and filtering it through the human mind and heart. Glory must be an exaltation of what actually exists in the person and work of God. Glorifying God has nothing to do with what people bring him in praise. Glory is what resides in God alone.

But Cathedrals have been constructed “to the glory of God,” boats have been christened for God’s glory, colleges and seminaries dedicated as testimonials to the glory of God, ministers ordained for the glory of God, and churches have even been mortgaged to the maximum to the glory of God. Yet none of these actions has anything to do with God’s essential glory, his nature, his work, or his words. Those efforts may be sincerely motivated and earnestly performed at great cost and sacrifice, but they have not truly given God the glory due his name. It is the proposition of this book that these actions could well have more to do with the glory of man than of God. Saying, “To God be the Glory,” does not, by simply repeating the words, actually bring God glory. Glory is not brought to him by repeating religious words. He owns all of glory before you uttered a squeak or lay down a pebble in the name of the glory of God.

To give God glory is only possible when God invites us to experience himself. We cannot create new “glory” for God. All of it comes from him and is owned exclusively by him. There is no glory we possess that God needs. The idea that we may have glory to give to God is absurd. There is no true glory that exists apart from God. He has possessed from eternity past, holds now in this moment, and will always have, all of it in himself. He does not need glory from men. But he longs to share his glory, to display his glory, and to declare his glory to every creature. It is that desire in God where glory touches our lives.

The great gift of God is to invite us to know him as the glorious God. He reveals his great works to make his name great, to teach us to understand with our own minds who God is in himself, and to become acquainted with the divine person on an intimate and personal level, and so to experience firsthand and in our own hearts, his grace and love so lavishly given to us by Christ. In this way God has put his glory at the center of everything.

The human heart has been made by God to know and to enjoy —“enjoy” God! The enjoyment of God is at the heart of bringing him glory. Glory could be understood as the study of the person of God and all his works, to know him and to delight in who he is and in what he has done. The capacity to know and to enjoy God has been destroyed or horribly damaged by our rebellion and our insufferable selfishness, and by this failure we have become disconnected from the God of glory.

Christ’s redemption does many things for his elect, but perhaps the greatest gift we receive is that we are drawn to experience and then to be changed by the glory of God. God’s redemptive purposes not only restore us to fellowship with God, but it promises that we will see and experience the glory of God in personal and tangible ways after we die.

Having seen this bright glory of God’s essential person even at a great distance, in pages of Scripture, and in the face of Jesus Christ, is a right and privilege that has been won for us by the most glorious expression of God ever displayed:  The Cross of Jesus Christ. We are redeemed by the glorious God, acting in the most glorious way that we might share in a glorious future with him forever.

As redeemed people, we want to render back to God the glory, shined upon our lives with such unmistakable brightness, and so to bring him his own glory, to praise him for what he has done—not for what we have built, given, or done. We raise our mistuned voices while falling down upon our trembling knees, our new hearts beating with joy, new life, and hope, and there to repeat to God what we have learned to be true about him. In that act, we give him glory.

Longing for glory

Our lives were created to know God’s glory and the nature and choices produced in them were intended to reflect the glory of God. There is an ultimate and consummative value in glory that had arrested the heart and vision of some of the greatest people who have ever lived, causing them to not merely reflect upon glory as one might study an exalted subject, but to sacrifice all for glory, to give all they had for it, and, in some cases, to lay their lives down willingly and joyfully in its defense.

Upon our death the rest of our redemption, holiness, and adoption as God’s sons and daughters will be sealed. Then our minds and hearts, remade by his power and wisdom as pure vessels of glory, will finally fully know and reflect what we can now see only dimly through a dark glass.

The destination to which glory brings us is where God dwells, to live with him, where glory illumines the streets, where God can be seen face to face, and where his people have been rid of their sin. So there the glory of God may finally be received in its fullness. Heaven will be unimaginably wonderful because the glory of God that we had longed for, begged to see, and here in this life and through these sin-stained years—dared to taste and touch in prophet’s ecstasies, Psalmist’s longings, miracles, history’s providences, Gospels, Letters, or apocalyptic dazzlings, by incarnation and redemption, resurrection and Spirit’s flame—we will experience directly and intimately.

We now hold these treasures with severely crippled hands and view them with utterly dimmed eyes. We can now only ponder their riches with finite and darkened minds. But we will, in the future, see in Heaven that very glory in fullness, illuminating everything—that glory will be lived and known, touched and felt, breathed in and out, filling every life, every word, every longing, every love, overflowing with God’s very life. There God will fulfill every hope and satisfy every wonderful longing for him. C. S. Lewis writes:

For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

… they will be known by Him. (1 Corinthians 8:3)[4]