We have now reached the time to bring Glory and Pain & Suffering together in the way Paul does in the Second Letter to the Corinthians. Many of you have written to me and asked how Glory can be a part of pain, suffering, and grief in a setting of sickness, dying and death. How can that be? Surely dying and death is not part of God’s will? Well the simple answer is, “No, it is not.” Death and dying entered the world with sin. The life God created in the beginning did not include suffering, pain, death nor dying. All of what I have chosen to look at in this Puzzling Paradox series is not a part of God’s will for us. It is a consequence of Adam and Eve wanting to experience the knowledge of good and evil. This action brought the entry of human sinfulness into God’s perfect world. Yet God had given mankind free will and would not reverse it and remove their freedom to choose. Instead He chooses to use it for His ultimate ends.
In order to deal with the deeper significance of glory and grief I need to spend some time expanding our awareness of the true nature of God’s glory. Oh there are some aspects of Glory which I reserve for the final level of Deeper Bible. But for the moment let’s explore the biblical notion of Glory. The Bible mentions glory and its cognates or derivatives over 400 times across the Old and New Testaments. It is a ubiquitous word which keeps popping up everywhere. But the Bible is also a connected whole and as such is revealing the deeper sense of biblical ideas in a progressive, revelatory kind of way. For a Jewish speaker of Hebrew, the word for glory is Kabod or kavod. The word has the sense of weight. The word [kabod] when it depicts Glory is associated with the idea of weight or weightiness. That is why often when we have a sense of the Presence of God in a unique, personal kind of way, we feel as though a great weight is pushing us down and squashing us into the carpet. That has happened to me on two occasions.
I was staggered when reading the book “Heartbreakingly Beautiful” written by Lyn and David Wake, with Bethany’s input to find they had included the reading on page 144 for Week 52 entitled “The Weight of Glory“. I wrote to these dear friends and talked with them about this reading they had included. Bethany referred to the weight of glory and to the fact that she was to experience “Another Kind of Mission” (Week 13, Page 46). Believe me, when I say, this young girl had a deeper sense of what God had in mind for her journey on another kind of mission. God asked her if she would go anywhere and do anything He asked of her. Bethany told God she wanted her life to give Him SO much glory. That is exactly what He did. For us to understand more of this journey Bethany, Jeremiah and Kate, along with so many others, have experienced, we need to understand more fully the nature of God’s glory. As Lyn Wake wrote in the reading for Week 52, “God has another kind of weight to place on the healed and restored Bethany – the eternal weight of glory which will far exceed her pain and will never be a burden but rather an eternal delight.” God enabled the Wake family to peek behind the curtain of glory, behind the thin veil which separates us from Him.
Allow me now to take you behind the scenes of that veil and peak a little more into the nature of God’s Glory. I borrowed some elements from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians in last week’s Nugget to take you on a journey into Plax and Octraca. If you followed my advice and read the whole letter, you will have noticed that Paul has a glory theme stretched through the letter. Well you can’t help but notice that he takes us back to the Exodus experience on the mountain top at Horeb or Sinai. I told you it is all connected. Just read through 2 Corinthians Chapter 3 and you will not miss the connection of veil, brokenness and glory to ever increasing levels. For every Jew and Christian alike, this passage takes us back to the pinnacle of Moses’ experience of God’s glory. That moment on the top of Mount Sinai when Moses asked to see God’s glory. Actually he asked three things of God.
- That I might see your face.
- That I might see your glory.
- That I might know your ways.
I have dealt with God’s ways already in two Nuggets in this series:
Making Sense of the Acts of God and the Ways of God aPP6
The Acts of God and the Ways of God Explored Further aPP7
Let’s investigate what God’s answer was to Moses on the matter of seeing God and seeing His Glory. I won’t insert the Old Testament part of the story into this Nugget because it will just make the Nugget longer. You can look it up in Exodus 33. Many of you will remember the story well. Every traditional Jewish boy and girl has learned this story off-by-heart. They know it well; do you? Moses asked to see God face and he was told he couldn’t see God’s face but God would allow him to see His back. Moses asked to see God’s glory and was told God would hide him in the cleft of the rock (the same place Elijah found himself) and would cover him over with his hand as He passed by. What a curious account! You can’t see God face but you can see His back? Really?
The word used to describe God’s back here can also be translated “afterness” “behindness” or “back side”. If God is light, what is the backside or afterness of light? I think the best word to use if I were translating this passage in the IVV (Ian Vail Version) is “afterglow“. Surely afterglow is the best way of describing the afterness or behindness of light. I think that captures the moment well. [I have described another way some rabbis look at this passage in terms of the backside of light, but I forget exactly where I included it on this website. I will have to find it and insert the link here at a later date.]
In the meantime let’s explore the idea of what went on when Moses met God on the top of Mount Sinai a little more. God told Moses that he couldn’t see God face to face, but He (God) would show him (Moses) His afterglow. That makes sense. Not only that but God can’t show Moses HIs full glory, so He hid him in the cleft of the rock and covered him over with His hand. That too makes sense. The intense light of the Glory of God would have blinded Moses forever. Now let’s track the story as it unfolds. For that we have to go over to 2 Corinthians Chapter 2. Well look at that! That’s quite a coincidence isn’t it? Fancy finding it there.
Are we beginning to praise ourselves again? Are we like others, who need to bring you letters of recommendation, or who ask you to write such letters on their behalf? Surely not! The only letter of recommendation we need is you yourselves. Your lives are a letter written in our hearts; everyone can read it and recognize our good work among you. Clearly, you are a letter from Christ showing the result of our ministry among you. This “letter” is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts. We are confident of all this because of our great trust in God through Christ. It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God.
He has enabled us to be ministers of his new covenant. This is a covenant not of written laws, but of the Spirit. The old written covenant ends in death; but under the new covenant, the Spirit gives life. The old way, with laws etched in stone, led to death, though it began with such glory that the people of Israel could not bear to look at Moses’ face. For his face shone with the glory of God, even though the brightness was already fading away. Shouldn’t we expect far greater glory under the new way, now that the Holy Spirit is giving life? If the old way, which brings condemnation, was glorious, how much more glorious is the new way, which makes us right with God!
In fact, that first glory was not glorious at all compared with the overwhelming glory of the new way. So if the old way, which has been replaced, was glorious, how much more glorious is the new, which remains forever! Since this new way gives us such confidence, we can be very bold. We are not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so the people of Israel would not see the glory, even though it was destined to fade away. But the people’s minds were hardened, and to this day whenever the old covenant is being read, the same veil covers their minds so they cannot understand the truth. And this veil can be removed only by believing in Christ. Yes, even today when they read Moses’ writings, their hearts are covered with that veil, and they do not understand. But whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord—who is the Spirit—makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.
2 Corinthians 3:1-18
Well, that is fascinating! God protects Moses from the full glare of His glory by showing him only the afterglow of the Glory. Not only that he covers him over with His hand as He passes by. Moses proceeds back down the mountain and finds the people of Israel in the midst of worshipping the golden calf. As he does, Paul tells us the brightness was already fading away. On seeing Moses, the people begged for mercy and asked that he cover his face with a veil because his face is shining too bright for them to look on his countenance. That friends is a biblical view of Glory. Even the covered-over-fading-afterglow-of-the-glory-of-God was enough to hurt their eyes. Now you have been given a glimpse behind the veil at the fullness of the Glory of God.
Next Nugget I will take you further behind the veil into the really good stuff and the connection as to why Glory can be seen in the pain, suffering and grief. Bethany, Jeremiah and Kate saw it. Next Nugget is the time for you to see it.