GOD'S GLORY
A few years ago I watched
a program on Day of Discovery. It was about a twenty year old girl
named Lygon Stevens who was a mountain climber and had died in an
avalanche while climbing with her brother. Lygon did not sound like
your typical twenty year old. We get a glimpse into her walk with
the Lord through her journal that her brother salvaged during the
accident. She seemed to have found all the things that young girls
are looking for in her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But after her
death, her family was left to deal with their huge heart rending
loss. Their suffering was horrific. More of the story can be found
on the website http://www.timetoliveisnow.org/.
The takeaway in this
story for me is an illustration that came from Lygon's mother. She
had been asked to speak somewhere and had gone to a place of solitude
to gather her thoughts. It was still very hard to carry this whole
thing around with her...the loss of her daughter, but the story of a
love affair that Lygon had had with her Savior. She had fallen
asleep briefly, and when she woke up, there were five elk with huge
racks of antlers. She noticed how cumbersome and weighty the antlers
seemed to be. She heard God telling her that this was a picture of
us carrying around His glory. It's not always easy. In fact,
rarely is. But His glory is what it's all about.
Sometimes in life we must
suffer. We don't and can't understand why. Many people think Job is
a book about why people suffer. But that question is not answered
in Job. We can't always know why. We just know Who. Our sufferings
may seem senseless or a waste of time, but there's an element we
usually miss – His glory.
The Hebrew word for glory
is kabowd, pronounced
kä·vōde'. Blue Letter Bible Outline of Biblical Usage gives this definition:
1) glory, honor, glorious, abundance
a) abundance, richesb) honor, splendor, glory
c) honor, dignity
d) honor, reputation
e) honor, reverence, glory
f) glory
We don't get to choose if
we suffer or not. We do have a choice in how we respond to
suffering. We can run from it, rebel against it and refuse to let
Him use it, or we can move toward the suffering in surrender to Him
in trust that He has a plan, not just for me, but a greater plan to
display His glory. Those antlers were like a badge of honor to the
elk. And they were very abundant. They gave the elk splendor and
dignity, but they were heavy.
God's glory is heavy,
weighty.
Kabowd is
from the root word kabad, pronounced
kä·vad'. Blue Letter Bible Outline of Biblical Usage gives this definition:
1)
to be heavy, be weighty, be grievous, be hard, be rich, be honorable,
be glorious, be burdensome, be honored
a) (Qal)1) to be heavy
2) to be heavy, be insensible, be dull
3) to be honored
b) (Niphal)
1) to be made heavy, be honored, enjoy honor, be made abundant
2) to get oneself glory or honor, gain glory
c) (Piel)
1) to make heavy, make dull, make insensible
2) to make honorable, honor, glorify
d) (Pual) to be made honorable, be honored
e) (Hiphil)
1) to make heavy
2) to make heavy, make dull, make unresponsive
3) to cause to be honored
f) (Hithpael)
1) to make oneself heavy, make oneself dense, make oneself numerous
2) to honour oneself
The
word is translated as fierce in NKJV in Judges
20:34: 'And ten thousand select men from all Israel came against
Gibeah, and the battle was fierce. But [the Benjamites] did not know
that disaster [was] upon them.'
The NIV translates the word as heavy in that same passage: 'Then ten thousand of Israel’s able young men made a frontal attack
on Gibeah. The fighting was so heavy that the Benjamites did not
realize how near disaster was.' (Emphasis mine).
More
examples are Job 6: 1-2: 'Then Job answered and said: "Oh, that
my grief were fully weighed, and my calamity laid with it on the
scales! For then it would be heavier than the sand of the
sea--Therefore my words have been rash."'
Job
14: 21: 'His sons come to honor, and he does not know [it]; They are
brought low, and he does not perceive [it].'
We
can gain much insight into God's glory by studying these two words
kabowd and its root
kabad.
We
see that kabowd conveys
honor, abundance, splendor, riches, dignity, reputation and
reverence.
Jesus
said that He had come that we might have life and have it more
abundantly. We have come to think of that verse as meaning the
American dream. But it has nothing to do with materialism. It ties
in with God's glory. When our life is Jesus, He displays His glory
in us. He does this in a number of ways, one of which He frequently
uses is suffering.
When
life is good it sometimes causes us to give up some “God is Good”s.
And rightly so. But God is just as good in our bad times and
sufferings. His goodness isn't and can't be defined by us. His
goodness is His essence – His character. He is good always, even
when things in our lives aren't. Our circumstances change, but God's
goodness never changes. We should praise Him for Who He is when
things or good or bad, but never measure His goodness by our
definition.
Because
He is good, He allows hardships and sufferings to conform us into His
image. Suffering is the tool to bring us to the end of ourselves so
that His glory can be seen in us. I once heard a woman who owned a
vineyard in the Burgundy region of France talk about how the soil of
that region was the most inhospitable. This forced the grapevine
roots to struggle and to have to grow deep to get the nourishment
that they needed. But that struggle and depth were what gave the
fruit the sweetness and the depth of flavor that they have. Likewise,
suffering brings the fruit of an abundance of His grace and glory, an
honor of His glory, and a weightiness of His glory, like the elk.
One
of the most familiar verses in the Bible is Romans 8:28: And we know
that all things work together for the good to those who love God to
those who are called according to (His) purpose. The Greek word for
love here is agapaō. Blue Letter Bible Outline of Biblical Usage gives this definition:
1)
of persons
a) to welcome, to entertain, to be fond of, to love dearly2) of things
a) to be well pleased, to be contented at or with a thing.
But this verse is followed by the next, verse 29: For whom He foreknew, He also predestined (to be) conformed to the image of His Son, that he might be the first born among many brethren. Once again, we here in America tend to have the mindset that when we experience trials and tribulations, that God will turn it into a silver lining and restore everything like He did Job. And He may. But what He is more interested in doing through our trials and sufferings is chip away at all the unnecessary, to shake everything away except that which cannot be shaken. He molds and conforms us into the image of His Son. His purposes and ours are more times than not, not the same. God is most concerned with His glory. When we respond properly to suffering, i.e. surrendering our will to His, He begins to bring forth in us characteristics of His Son, like grace, forgiving attitude, love. They become abundant the more we cooperate. But there's also weightiness. It's not easy to be transformed. It goes against everything in our fleshly makeup. It's a little laboring. Like the elk, it's heavy on us – God's glory. But what a glorious display when we lay down our life and yield it to Him. The Stevens family had to come to terms with the fact that God designed Lygon's life to be His perfect life for her of just twenty years. He used her life for His glory. And though this would result in their tremendous suffering, they would be allowed to display His glory as they participated in His story of Lygon's life. His glory is abundant, honoring and weighty. Oh, what glory! When we can finally change our focus from what we want and how we think things should be to His glory, that's the place where the weightiness is first felt. But load bearing increases strength. Once we get a taste of His glory, He begins to change our desires.
There
is another aspect to this word kavod
found in the Gesenius' Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon which is to bear up under anything, to endure adversity; the idea of
bearing up under battle. As anyone who has experienced a prolonged
time of trial or testing knows, it is so hard to endure. The true
Christian life is hard to endure. We no sooner get through one
battle and another is there at the door. Here again, our perspective
– our focus should be God's glory.
More
times than not, God will delay His actions in order to teach us and
in order to more fully display His glory. One example of this is in
the story of Lazarus found in John 11. Lazarus was sick, so his
sisters Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus. Obviously they knew and
believed in Jesus and knew He was their hope for their brother, so
they sent word to Him that Lazarus was sick. How interesting the
next verse is: So, when He heard that he was sick, He stayed two
more days in the place where He was.
As
the story progresses we can hear the frustration in both Martha and
Mary that Jesus hadn't shown up soon enough to save Lazarus with,
"Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”
In their perspective of how their world should be, Jesus would have
shown up when they called, healed their brother, they would have
given thanks and praise for the healing and gone on with their lives.
But Jesus had a much greater plan. What a much more magnificent
display of His glory to raise a man from the grave who had been there
four days than to just heal a sick man. But in order to share in
that glory, Mary and Martha and all those involved had to endure the
delay that Jesus deliberated. It was heart rending. Their brother
was dead! But they did endure. The endurance was a very necessary
part of the coming display of God's glory.
Psalm
37 is a beautiful exhortation to us to trust in the Lord and wait on
Him during the delays. We should never take a delay as the end of
the story, but as a time when He is conforming us and using it as an
opportunity to display His glory in the utmost way. I should and
need to decide to let God decide what's best for me.
We
have so many exhortations and promises regarding endurance. The
Apostle Paul was constantly exhorting the believers to endure, to
persevere. His aim was to finish well. He wasn't concerned about
his salvation. He was concerned about enduring to the end and
remaining a faithful servant, because he knew it wasn't easy. He
knew we would be tempted to give up or give in. Let's keep our eyes
on the goal of displaying His glory.
Hebrews
10: 35: 'For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done
the will of God, you may receive the promise: For yet a little while,
[And] He who is coming will come and will not tarry. Now the just
shall live by faith; But if [anyone] draws back, My soul has no
pleasure in him.'
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