Have you ever considered the doctrine of glory? I will never forget one night when I was blown away by a musical composition. I don’t recall the composer or the conductor, but I was at a performance played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. My ticket put me in the first row and it was worth it. The music was powerful, foreboding, amazing, haunting, compelling and glorious, all at the same time.
There were moments when I wished this night would never end, and moments when I wanted to get up and run out of the concert hall. There were moments when the music caused my chest to rattle and moments when it lured me in with a whisper. There were moments when musical joy collided with musical fear in a beautiful disharmony of sound.
When the performance was over, I felt both sad and exhausted. I wanted more, and yet at the same time I felt like I had had enough. I didn’t know why this particular performance had affected me so deeply until I looked at the program and saw the name of the composition. It read: “God, the most formidable word ever spoken.”
The Doctrine of Glory
What I experienced that night was the attempt of a very gifted composer to capture God—in all his amazing and variegated glory—in a single piece of music. In one sense, it was a triumphant effort, and in another sense, a dismal and embarrassing failure.
For any human being to think that they could capture the glory of God in a single artistic statement is delusional at best and vain at worst. To squeeze what is infinite into what is finite is vastly more impossible than trying to cram the entire body of fully-developed elephant into a thimble. No matter how gifted you are or how hard you try, it just won’t happen! The composer, the conductor, and the orchestra had done marvelously well by human standards, but with their grandest effort, they only captured less than a drop of the never-ending ocean that is the glory of God.
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Glory is not a thing, like a shoe, a steak, a candle or a cottage. Those are particular physical items that could be so carefully described with words that you would immediately have an accurate picture in your mind of what is being talked about. One could draw a picture of a shoe or take a photograph of a cottage and you could see it and know what it was. But glory isn’t like that.
No single drawing, painting, photograph or verbal description could ever capture glory. Glory isn’t so much a thing as it is a description of a thing. Glory isn’t a part of God; it’s all that God is. Every aspect of who God is and every part of what God does is glorious. But even that’s not enough of a description. Not only is he glorious in every way, but his very glory is glorious!
What is the Doctrine of Glory?
With many other doctrines in Scripture, we typically run to a couple of default passages that describe the issue at hand, and we feel as if we’re able to walk away with some general understanding of that topic. But that strategy doesn’t work with the doctrine of glory, because God’s glory lives above and beyond any type of description or definition.
You can say for sure that God is glorious—your Bible declares that he is—but you cannot accurately and fully describe in words the glory that Scripture declares. Perhaps the only workable path into some understanding of the grandeur of the glory of God is to read the entire Bible from cover to cover over and over again, looking for divine glory. Why? Because the doctrine of glory isn’t defined in his Word; no, God’s glory is so grand that it splashes across every page of his book.
That being said, there are places where Scripture attempts to define the hugeness of the glory of God with the smallness of human language so we can get a glimpse of what it’s like. For example: The prophet Isaiah, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, stretches human language to its furthest point of elasticity in order to give us a little glimpse of God’s glory. He writes, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand?” (Isaiah 40:12).
