The glory of God

Weight and radiance

The Old Testament word for glory, kavod (כָּבוֹד), comes from a root meaning ‘heavy’. God's glory is his weight, the worth and reality of who he is, his holiness, goodness and power shining together. The New Testament's doxa (δόξα) carries the same sense. When Moses asked, "Please show me Your glory" (Exodus 33:18), God answered, "I will cause all My goodness to pass before you" (Exodus 33:19). Many theologians therefore describe glory less as one of God's attributes than as the radiance of them all.

And they were calling out to one another: "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts; all the earth is full of His glory."

Isaiah 6:3

That glory filled the tabernacle in the cloud (Exodus 40:34), and "the heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1). God will not share it with idols: "I will not yield My glory to another or My praise to idols" (Isaiah 42:8). Human beings were made to reflect it, yet "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

Glory in the face of Christ

John bears witness: "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory" (John 1:14). Chrysostom comments that this was a glory "we should not have seen, had He not, by His alliance with humanity, become visible to us" Chrysostom. Paul says that God has given "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6). Those who look to Christ "are being transformed into His image with intensifying glory" by the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18), and at the last they will share "the glory that will be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18), which is their glorification.

Giving glory to God

To glorify God is not to add anything to him, but to recognise his glory and to acknowledge and display it with heart, lips and life. So Paul writes, "whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 10:31). The Westminster Shorter Catechism begins here:

Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.

Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 1

The Reformers confessed with the phrase ‘to God alone be glory’ that the whole glory of salvation belongs to God and not to us (the five solas). Long before, Irenaeus had written, "the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God" Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20.7. God's glory and our true happiness are not rivals.

The Orthodox churches, following Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, distinguish God's essence, which no creature can know, from his uncreated energies, in which we can share, and they see the light the disciples saw at the transfiguration as that uncreated glory. Catholic and Protestant theology have generally not used this distinction, but every tradition confesses that the redeemed will see God's glory and share in it. See the lesson Man's chief end.