The Glory Of The Lord Shone Round About Them

The cassia tree that overhangs our front door has just begun blooming. A recent visitor saw the blossoms in the sunlight and said, “That’s glorious”!

That casual remark got me to thinking about the word glory.

Naturally the first things I thought of were Christmas angels and shepherds:

“And the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid”.

Why would they be afraid?

When my girls were little they played the part of angels in many a Christmas pageant — bare feet, white gowns, cardboard wings, tinsel halos — I carried many a limp sleepy angel home draped over my shoulders after a Christmas Eve midnight service.

Why would shepherds be afraid — sore afraid — at seeing an angel?

Yet the first thing the angel said was, “Fear not!”

It went on to say, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy”.

Maybe the scene is just too familiar from too many Christmas pageants, but good tidings and great joy certainly seem like nothing to be afraid of.

And yet, glimpsing glory generated fear.

I’ve heard the word all my life but I’m not sure exactly what glory means, so I checked my dictionary and here’s what I found.

Glory— marked by great beauty and splendor; illustrious, magnificent, delightful, wonderful, splendid. worshipful, brilliant, resplendence, rejoicing proudly.

I begin to see reasons for fear of the Lord — religious artist represent glory by applying gold leaf halos or radiating light.

I think of a deer caught in the brilliant brightness of headlights coming around a sudden curve, the animal too petrified by fear to move out of the path of the speeding truck. I think of a criminal climbing over the prison wall caught in the glare of the tower. searchlight freezing at the expected bullets to follow.

Sudden light is scary.

No wonder that almost every time men, even holy men, encounter God in the Scripture, it terrifies them.

Peter screamed, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man”.

Isaiah trembled saying, “Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips”!

At the Burning Bush, Moses “Hid his face; for he was afraid”.

Hebrews declares, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Loving God”.

The brilliant light of incredible splendor and beauty and wonder overwhelms us. The sheer majesty of God strikes us with awe. His vast hugeness renders us insignificant as we realize that He could crush worlds like bugs and hardly notice.

Seldom in my life have I encountered such realizations of God — once when I was a child, once when I saw a red fox on a trail in the forest, once when I saw a girl in a yellow dress silhouetted in a sunny doorway at the Library of Congress, once while dissecting a pig in a biology lab, once in a Christmas Eve church service, once last summer laying on an air mattress in our pool watching stars at night. Occasionally these moments have come in relation to my studying Scripture with a pencil in my hand and a pipe in my teeth.

I’m not at all sure we can deliberately trigger such moments of awareness of God. For me, they have come unbidden and unexpected; however, the Scripture does assure us, “While ye are seeking Me, I will be found” and “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you”. However, the Wind bloweth where it listeth, and we hear the sound of it and see leaves move, but we can not tell where Wind came from nor where it is going.

Now while earthshaking to me, my own spiritual experiences would hardly jiggle the needle on anybody else’s Richter Scale, but each one left me with an acute sense of unworthiness, an intense sense of wonder, and a near overwhelming sense of gratitude.

I become conscious of being loved through no merit or credit of my own.

These moments remain precious in my memory.

I am neither mystic nor visionary. I see no visions and hear no echoing voice from the bottom of a barrel. My own thought encounters with God are just that — thoughts.

But they are thoughts of His beauty and love.

How is it that having a somewhat high regard for God, I can be so flippant when speaking or writing about religious matters? I sometimes speak without signs of respect and use visual images that make things clearer to me but upset other people.

And I often laugh when I pray.

Is this any way to associate with the High And Lofty One Who Inhabits Eternity.

Yes.

I think it is.

“I call you not servants,” Jesus said. “But, I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you…”.

Friends laugh and joke and talk and tease and feel comfortable together.

Jesus offers everybody a relationship with God. For each person it is different. Some people find Him through music. Some in a crowd of people clapping and lifting hands. Others find Him through tragedy. Others through prosperity. He tailors the relationship to the unique person; He is, after all, infinite.

Once when he was a tiny boy memorizing Bible verses, I asked my oldest son what the word infinite means.

Freddy pondered for a moment and said, “That means God has all the jelly you’ve got bread for”.

This infinite, majestic, glorious, beautiful, happy God made friendship available to us at a terrible price.

In my blog post yesterday I used the image of Jesus on the cross — the Almighty God, King of the universe, Who holds all creation small as a peanut in His hand — Jesus nailed down hand and foot, pinned down and splayed out like a frog on a dissection tray. A living, bleeding man writhing in deliberate agony because He loves us.

With death came postmortem lividity as His face turned ashen and His feet purple as blood settled to the lowest points.

And, even at this low point, Jesus, God Almighty come in the flesh, held together the universe by the word of His power. While He hung there naked between Heaven and Earth, He gave breath to the mockers and strength to the guys who hammered in the nails.

Gore and glory.

Crucified. Dead. Buried.

The Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Prince of Peace, Creator and Sustainer of all living things bounced back. The Lord of Life returned to life, Scared with nail prints and spear thrust, yet vibrantly alive and glowing.

“I have not called you servants, but friends”.

Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends.

Well, I’ve rambled a long way from the glorious flowers of our cassia tree. My thinking has hardly touched on the meanings of glory.

I want to think about this a lot more.

But this is as far as I’ve gotten today.

It’s something for me to cherish.

Something to relish.

————

Stepping Away For A While

For the next few weeks several things call for my attention:

Although we still have no firm plans, Ginny and I will be celebrating our 39^th anniversary.

All Summer I have neglected house and yard and I really need to do some time consuming work on home repairs.

In fooling around with other things I have fallen far behind in writing my history of the Jacksonville Fire Department; I want to bear down and finish that book before Christmas.

Ginny and I need to look at some minor physical things ahead of us too.

Therefore, I plan to stop blogging for a while to pay attention to these other matters; I hope, God willing, to resume blog posting again about the 19^th or 20^th of November.

For I have delivered unto you first of all that which I also received,
How that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures;
And that He was buried,
And that He rose again the third day
According to the Scriptures…
— I Corinthians 15:3