Sunday, July 24, 2016

Babel and the Glory of God

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

The Presbyterian church in which I was raised practiced what was for them a high church liturgy. I grew up with the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Doxology, and the Gloria Patri, quoted here in its old form. I still associate the word “glory” with the vacant spaces and smells of that old sanctuary, other-worldly and comforting at the same time. But as I’ve aged, I’ve found there is more to the word than a feeling. Let’s explore it for a bit.

We usually think of God’s glory as light, effulgence, radiance, that which is observable around that which is too bright to be seen directly. This is a redemptive concept, in that God condescends to reveal Himself in ways that we can perceive, while His very essence would overpower us. Certain groups of Christians, notably charismatics, center much of their worship around touching the glory of God and experiencing its healing and transforming power. This is a valid description of glory.

Of course, there is another, almost opposite, description. God is often portrayed in the Old Testament as dwelling in “clouds and thick darkness.” In the presence of sin and rebellion, God hides Himself and protects His absolute purity and holiness behind a veil. The cherubim that covered the mercy seat were not only his bright golden chariot, they were also His armed guards that shrouded Him in mists. This darkness in response to human depravity is also a valid form of His glory.

The Hebrew word for glory (kabadh) is instructive. Its root meaning is “to be heavy.” The feelings aroused by the word are similar to those felt by Isaiah in the presence of God: overwhelmed, smothered, not just humbled, but humiliated, at a loss, undone. We might call it oppressive. I prefer the term “ponderous.” It is insurmountable, fixed, immutable, an obstacle against which fallen man pounds his fists.

The New Testament also reveals this dual nature of the glory of God. The disciples saw the effulgent glory of the Son at His transfiguration and at the resurrection. But the disciples also encountered “clouds and thick darkness.” They were constantly confounded as their preconceptions and expectations crashed against the truth of Christ’s words and Person (“you have heard it said, but I say unto you…”). It wasn’t until the Holy Spirit opened their inner eyes through a new birth that they were able to “walk in the light as He is in the light.”

Culturally speaking, whether or not a people see the glory of God as light or darkness depends on their response to His revealed moral law and to the Christ who perfectly kept it on their behalf. A nation that openly flaunts its rebellion against God’s purposes will find Him resistant to theirs. I am one of those unlikable Christians who believes there is a relationship between the sins of the culture and the rise of violence within it. I will not bother to discuss those here. There is a deeper attitude from which they all spring.

That attitude is hubris, an arrogance that, after thousands of years, still afflicts humanity with an obsession with utopia. We can waste time debating whether our founding fathers were evangelicals or children of the Enlightenment, but whether they were influenced by the Reformation or by John Locke, they were anything but utopians. They envisioned government as a tool to protect us from one another so we could live free lives; hopefully, lives of service to God and to one another. In every way they tried to curtail unlimited authority, and never saw governmental (or ecclesiastical) authority as the chief means of achieving a utopian dream of human excellence.

I hear hubris at both ends of the political spectrum. One promises the brave new world of a universal village, seeking to answer Jack Nicholson’s clueless question, “Why can’t we all just get along?” The other is a new nationalism accompanied by a lot of chest thumping and grunts. Both make promises that can’t be kept. Both ignore the curse that hangs over man. I believe that God will honor a culture that above all lays down its arrogance, admits its limitations, and manifests some humility and the need for divine intervention.

God resists hubris because He will have no perfect kingdoms in competition with His own. He responds to it by surrounding it with His glory cloud of darkness. The result is the confusion of tongues. No man can understand his fellow. The stronger the arrogance, the more division and incoherence emerge. We are building a tower to heaven, and wonder why when we ask our neighbor to pass the hammer, he tosses us a brick. The cherubim are dispatching shadows.

Because God is always present, his glory is always with us. To the humble, it will be light and redemption; to the arrogant, clouds and darkness-- but the glory of God nonetheless.

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