Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: glory

  • Despised – Lamentations 1:8

    Despised – Lamentations 1:8

    8 Jerusalem sinned grievously,
    so she has become a mockery;
    all who honored her despise her,
    for they have seen her nakedness;
    she herself groans,
    and turns her face away.

    The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), La 1:8.

    One of the problems of having a high opinion of oneself is that people may eventually find out that you’re human after all, that you have failings and limitations like anyone else. It’s good to figure this out as early as possible and avoid overrating yourself.

    Jerusalem was confident in God’s favor, even though the prophets had told them repeatedly that they were offending their God, and that trouble was coming. There came the time when those who had given Jerusalem and Judea honor came to despise her.

    All of us have this very potential. We come to consider ourselves superior, better than others. Then something happens and we find that honor has turned to contempt. Those who thought well of us now look at us as an example of failure.

    “All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory,” says Paul (Romans 3:23). This gives special meaning to the idea of glory for a Christian. The goal, the standard is God’s glory. “Eye has not seen, neither has the ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared …” (1 Corinthians 2:9). In the face of sayings like this we seek our own honor, our own glory, and may even get the praise of others for some time. But against what God has planned, our attainments are always small. The person who jumps three feet into the air in trying to jump over the moon is not superior to the one who jumps two feet. Both failed.

    When I moved from my undergraduate school to the University to go to graduate school I had an opportunity to learn this lesson. It’s a really minor event that has stuck with me ever since. My brother and I attended church at the visitors’ center at Old Faithful. Everyone there was a visitor to the park, so we all introduced ourselves and said where we had come from and where we were going. I was headed to graduate school after receiving my BA in Biblical Languages. I was headed to the Graduate school, co-located with our denomination’s seminary, to study further. After the service someone brought a text to me to ask about the “original Hebrew.” I don’t recall the specific verse, but it was a piece of poetry from Job. I talked to him about it for about five minutes. After we left, my brother and I were walking around Old Faithful and it suddenly hit me. I said to my brother, “Do you know that I talked to that guy for five minutes, and I never answered his question? In fact, I have no idea what the answer is!”

    I wondered whether he realized how empty my “answer” was, or whether my many words around it satisfied him. But I knew the glory was empty.

    I wish I could say I learned my lesson and expressed my level of knowledge with more humility from then on. But that would be a lie. Nonetheless, I have valued that lesson.

    It only takes time for praise and glory to turn to failure and shame. But there is always a remedy. That is for later. First, in this book, we learn to lament honestly, to recognize where we are, so that we can turn from there to the real glory.

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Psalm 119:156 – Great Mercy

    Psalm 119:156 – Great Mercy

    Your mercy is great, LORD!
    Grant me life according to your judgments.

    “Mercy is great” could be translated “mercies are many.” I think it comes down to much the same thing.

    Notice the parallel here between God’s mercy and God’s judgments. The Hebrew word order places the words “mercies” and “judgments” at the start of their respective lines.

    How do these two elements interact?

    That is much of what this whole Psalm is about. The Psalmist is clearly thankful for God’s law. He’s not just thankful that it’s out there somewhere, telling him what God is like, or that it’s putting a standard before us that we can’t meet. He’s thankful for it in action, in our day to day lives, and in our relationship to God.

    Now I believe that God’s law presents to us a standard that we cannot meet. But God’s law also presents to us a God who can and will take us to that standard. The goal is not simply the accomplishment of some list of duties, or the avoidance of some list of sins. Rather, the goal is to be the person, “a little lower than God” (Psalm 8:6).

    God, being merciful, saves us from ourselves, and grants us life according to his judgments, namely something beyond what we can imagine. Sin is destructive. Mercy is not an emotional condoning of sin, but rather, a rescue from it, and a path to a better way.

    All of this comes up as an act of God.

    Now let me wander from the text. In Psalm 119 we have both the individual working and God working and giving. I want to again depart from my usual pattern and quote from John Wesley on this:

    XLVIII. If, then, you say, ” We ascribe to God alone , the whole glory of our salvation, ” I answer, So do we too. If you add, ” Nay, but we affirm, that God alone does the whole work, without man’s working at all; ” in one sense, we allow this also. We allow it is the work of God alone, to justify, to sanctify, and to glorify, which three comprehend the whole of salvation. Yet we cannot allow, that man can only resist, and not in any wise work together with God: or, that God is so the whole worker of our salvation, as to exclude man’s working at all. This I dare not say; for I cannot prove it by Scripture: nay , it is flatly contrary thereto: for the Scripture is express, that (having received power from God) we are to “work out our own salvation:” and that (after the work of God is begun in our souls) we are “workers together with him.”

    The Works of John Wesley, vol. 14, p. 347, “Predestination Calmly Considered”

    To go back a bit and cover one point here, we might ask if we are coworkers with God do we not get some of the glory. Wesley commented on this a bit before this quote:

    If so, your assertion is, “If man do at all work together with God, in working out his own salvation, then God does not do the whole work, without man’s working together with him.” Most true; most sure: but cannot you see how God nevertheless may have all the glory? Why the very power to “work together with him,” was from God. Therefore, to him is all the glory.

    Ibid, 346-347

    Mercy is often, if not always shown by bringing the rebel into line with God’s will, God’s judgment. And thus, in many ways, mercy can be judgment and judgment mercy.

    In what ways will you experience God’s mercy today?

  • Psalm 119:47 – Taking Delight

    Psalm 119:47 – Taking Delight

    And I will take delight in your commands,
    which I love.

    Everyone who loves being commanded, raise your hands.

    Well, I can’t see the hands over the internet, but I’m guessing there aren’t many. There are only a few people who really enjoy dealing with regulations. We may consider them necessary, but we don’t generally get delighted about them.

    I’ve talked about many reasons that the law, as understood in Psalm 119, should be seen as much more than regulations. Yes, it includes regulations, but all of that is part of the self-revelation of God to a people (Israel) that he chose. There is a certain wonder in just the fact that God made such a choice. For those of us who are not descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, there is the fact that when God called Abram, he called him to be blessed and to be a blessing.

    Today, however, I’d like to suggest reading another Psalm as a tie-in for this verse and the next one. Psalm 19 also includes praise of the law in terms not so often used today. It also makes another connection, one which I consider very important, and one in which I take delight.

    Psalm 19:1-6 talk about the way God’s creation declares God’s glory. Some scholars think Psalm 19 is a combination of two prior songs, and it may be that, but I think the combination was very intentional. Because starting with verse 7, we here about the law, with “law” used here in much the same way as in Psalm 119.

    The law of YHWH is perfect, reviving the soul. (Psalm 19:7)

    This is followed by many of the same terms for various aspects of law that are used in Psalm 119, bringing out that full picture of God’s self-revelation to God’s people in the broadest sense.

    The power of the lawgiver is tied to the power of the creator. The reason God can give laws is that God made everything, and knows how it works, works best.

    This function of law relates closely to God’s grace, God’s giving. In Genesis 1 & 2, God creates, and then gives instructions. I regard the story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as very much symbolic. God creates and then sets boundaries.

    We see this order of affairs again with the ten commandments in Exodus 20. God notes this in the prologue to these commandments. “I am YHWH your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The grace, the giving, comes first.

    Now we experience this in reverse much of the time. We have to realize there’s a problem before we seek the problem solver.

    But when we come back to the grace, we realize that it was there, is there, will always be there, first.

    The heavens and the Law declare God’s glory in chorus.

    Are you listening?

  • Psalm 119:32 – Enlargement

    Psalm 119:32 – Enlargement

    The way of your commands I will run,
    As you broaden my understanding.

    A young man once commented to me that he thought that perhaps we were trespassing on God’s sphere with scientific discoveries, that we were approaching knowledge that God had kept to himself alone. I asked him this: Do you believe that God is so fragile that he can be threatened by what little we can learn of the incredible amount there is to learn about this amazing universe. And what we know as the universe may not truly be the universe, or all that there is.

    There’s a much more likely reaction. There’s an episode in Life, the Universe, and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series. The Krikkiters have lived for ages on a planet enclosed in a dust cloud and thus have not known that there were any other stars or galaxies. For reasons explained in the book, they build a spaceship and travel past the edge of the dust cloud that encases their galaxy, and come upon the incredible site of the galaxies and starts that surround them. Seeing this, they immediately determine two things. First, it’s very beautiful. Second, it’s got to go!

    We often act very much like that. Push our horizon a bit too far out and we want to settle back into things that are already well known. “We ain’t never done it that way before” becomes “we ain’t never thought of anything like that before.”

    We like a small and easily imagined universe, and with that we want a carefully delimited god suitable to our imagined universe. When we see something bigger, we may think it’s beautiful, but it’s got to go.

    In turn, we read scripture in such a way as to fit it into our limited universe, and so as to imagine it produced by a similarly limited god. If someone goes beyond those boundaries we are quick to yell “heretic” and “corrupter.”

    And we read the Psalms in this way. I have heard material from Psalm 119 and other Psalms used simply to explain why we ought to be so thankful to God for making up some very good rules. Many of these rules could be deduced from just looking around our little corner of the universe.

    The keepers of the acceptable often complain that those who speak of the power of God’s grace, and do not see the value of a path of holiness that is just about doing certain stuff and not doing certain other stuff as being against God’s law. Antinomian is the word.

    I teach a principle in Bible study that I call the hammer and saw principle. “Don’t criticize your hammer because it won’t saw boards.” Don’t criticize the law, conceived as a set of rules, because it won’t make people holy or even good. That’s not what it’s there for.

    Psalm 119 turns into a boring and trite piece of propaganda when read as high praise of a list of rules. But when read as the high praise of the God who stands behind those rules and invites people to ever greater things, it sounds very different.

    I used “broaden” in our verse today as a translation. In other translations you’ll find many ways of translating this Hebrew word. But it comes to the word party with a sense of widening and making something bigger. Combining various senses of a word can be dangerous, but I think it’s also dangerous to ignore where a word came from. We can lose the broader sense that the word brings to us when we totally ignore its origins.

    “Make my mind bigger.” This is what will bring on running in the way depicted by God’s commands. It doesn’t bring on checklist managing. It doesn’t bring on a life restricted from greatness by a list of petty limitations. It’s a life made possible by the broadening power of the God of the commandments.

    The law can be a most horrifying and destructive force when it is allowed to replace the Lawgiver. It is God who broadens. It is God who acts first. And it is a God of enlargement that is involved in it all. A giving God, a gracious God, is One who opens doors onto broad vistas of life now and in the future.

    I believe the Psalmist sees this as he praises God as revealed in the instructions, the Word that God has given.

    As a Christian reader of the Psalms, I have come to this particular verse on Christmas Eve, writing something that will be published Christmas morning. For me, the incarnation is the central doctrine of my faith. It’s one I won’t let go of. But more importantly it’s one I want to understand more and more.

    The incarnation is not just an historical event. Yes, I see it as something that happened in history. There was a time and place at which God became present (was revealed) in a human infant. But that moment also represents the timeless fact that God has always been and will always be with us.

    Glory came into a stable. Something that could not be contained was represented in the small, the ordinary, the limited. We try to make this seem better in so many ways. We want it to seem more dignified. But there is nothing more undignified that pure Glory contained in a human body. Philippians 2:5-11 gives a bit of the sense of that.

    But in the same mode, what is human, what is small, what is limited, was called to something greater by the touch of infinity. The incarnation in that place had/has/will have impact and meaning at all times and in all places. It says fundamentally who God is. It says that Infinity chooses to connect with the finite, indeed that Infinity created the finite and calls it to greatness.

    When we note that we cannot keep the law, or be worthy of God’s glory as noted in scripture, it’s not merely that we’re going to screw up and do stupid and destructive things, though we will. It is that we can’t even conceive of the glory to which we are constantly called by the same Infinity that showed up in a manger and showed us that yes, it could happen.

    Creation, redemption, first and second coming all combine into the ultimate reality of the God whose nature is such that God appears in a stable.

    To what glory is God calling you from your stable?

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)