27.1 The Glory of God

Man is not God. God is not man. Nonetheless, God designed and created us for Himself, that He might dwell inside our togetherness and reveal Himself through our love for one another. Being like God is loving one another as His Church. Love among us is the revelation of the Father.

God is unknowable and unknown. In Himself, God cannot be known, for the moment there is any “outline” that might show “God” to us, that outline is no longer God. God’s path to being known is no easy thing, for God can be known only through a double symmorphy, God the Father sharing life with Christ Jesus first and then Christ with us.

Completion. In the next chapter, the last full chapter of this text, we hope to set forth a second attempt at a comprehensive definition of the human. Then, the next Symmorphy text is titled Symmorphy VII: Completion.

Wherefore also, Jesus is able to save into all salvation those approaching God through Him, always living into hitting the mark for them, for their sakes (Hebrews 7:25).

Completion is everything God means by “ALL Salvation,” both within (Covenant) and without (Kingdom). This text has been focused on Covenant, what a human is, sharing life with God. Symmorphy VII: Completion, then, is focused on Kingdom, what God and humans do together.

God’s Completion. In this chapter, we want to set out the definitions, as carefully as we can, of the largest meanings of God’s end purpose, God’s Completion, in terms of what we are as humans, God with us.

Now, the New Testament is very clear and very LOUD in setting forth the meaning of God’s Completion for us as humans, yet Christians “see” none of it. It would be correct to translate Ephesians 3:19 in this way also, “That all the fullness of God might be fulfilled inside of you.” That’s pretty BIG. And yet Christians everywhere successfully avoid this very LOUD indication of God and man together. They do not “see” it.

They do not see it because humans are blind.

Two Parts of Seeing. This lesson is titled “The Glory of God,” and we will arrive at a definition of glory, but glory exists in conjunction with “seeing.” The big words of God’s Completion and our Completion together are all tied up with seeing. – Apocalypse, manifestation, ekenosis, incarnation, unveiling, revelation, transfiguration, glory, and so on.

Seeing has two parts. The first part is light and the second part is eyeballs connected to a brain. Light reflects off of an object, thus taking into itself the visible characteristics of that object. The light then travels through the eyeballs to the brain, where the brain interprets the meaning of that light and – voila! We see. God made visible; God seen and known.

No One Knows. For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). The earth is filled with the glory of God, but such a reality does no good for anyone, because humans don’t know what is real, that is, they do not see.

The prevention of seeing, then, goes in two directions at the same time. In one direction, the light must be turned off and in the other direction, the eyes must be made blind. Notice, however, that the removal of the light and the blinding of the eyes changes nothing real. Everything is what it is, even though none of it is seen or known.

God IS – yet no one knows.

Our Path. Let me set out our path in the remainder of this lesson. Before continuing with an understanding of “seeing,” we want to have a more complete definition of, not just glory, but “the glory of God.” Then we will return to an explanation of what causes the dampening of light and the blindness of eyes. Following that explanation, we will consider the big words of God’s completion, for some of them relate to the shining of the light while others relate to the opening of the eyes. In this age of blindness, these words are all falsely defined. Finally, we will return to glory, that is, we will place the glory of God, for God is hyper-concerned that there is only one place where His glory is to be known.

Definitions of Glory. I have taught that glory means two things, both of which are defined clearly in the context of John 17. In this lesson, I want to add two more critical meanings to those two. 

The first definition is in the Greek word, doxa, which, at its center, carries the meaning of “that which is most valued.” It is easy to set forth from Scripture that one thing that is most valuable to God above all. That one thing is – His Word proven faithful and true. Then, the second meaning of glory is the celebration of a job well done. When Jesus said, “I have given them Your Word,” He also said, “I have done the job You sent Me to do.”

The third meaning of glory, then, has to do with seeing.

What God Wants. I was thirty years old when I sat in Buddy Cobb’s Bible course titled “The Plan of God.” This “plan of God” was so confusing to me that it sent me into a frenzied and desperate search for REAL. It was there inside my distress that I made a firm decision for myself regarding “what the Bible says.” My decision was that I seek one thing only in my Bible – What the Father desires – What God wants.

In spite of the confusion, however, Buddy Cobb taught me much Bible, and many things I learned from him are woven into what I teach. And so, at that same time, I did a study of Genesis Chapter 1 in line with Buddy Cobb’s teaching.

A Visible Representation. In that study, I took every word or phrase in Genesis 1 through the entire Bible and wrote down every single verse that said something meaningful concerning that word. A couple of years later I did the same thing with every major word in Revelation. It was these two studies that showed me how tightly God’s Beginning and God’s Completion are woven together.

In my study of Genesis 1:26, I wrote out every verse in the Bible containing the word “image.” With the resources I had at that time, I determined that the word “image,” whether in Hebrew or in English, means – a visible representation of an invisible being.

My Determination. And so, while I was still thirty, inside my desperate longing to escape all my confusion so that I might KNOW God my Father, I made an absolute determination concerning my only direction. – That WHAT GOD WANTS is to be seen and known, that God is seen and known through humans, and that God seen and known is LOVE.

Let me point out that God-seen is the light side of things and God-known is the eyeball-brain side of things. Glory is God-VISIBLE and God-KNOWN. But there is a fourth aspect to a complete understanding of the glory of God. This God who WANTS to be seen and known as Love is the most Personal Person in the universe.

Impartation of Person. A reader shared with me a connection she had seen between glory and “teaching.” She shared that when I taught, I imparted my own person with the topic being taught. Because I made the topic personal, she was able to make it personal to herself as well, that is, my teaching was not “ideas for the mind,” but an impartation to her of a Personal Father.

Glory, then, is also the impartation of a Personal God. By including my own story of God-with-me, I have made God-with-you more known to you. – Glory. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we looked upon His glory… – No one has ever seen God. The Only-Seed/Kind of God (He who sees Me sees the Father), He has made [an invisible] God known (John 1:14 & 18 & 14:9).

God Made Personal. Then John said this. – That which we have seen with our eyes; that which we have gazed upon, and our hands have touched and handled concerning the Word of life; and the life was made visible [God seen and known] (1 John 1:2). John is saying “Jesus made God personal to me,” that is, glory. He’s saying, “God is my personal Friend,” that is, glory.

Let me give you a clue concerning God’s Completion and our Completion together coming up in the next Symmorphy text. The All-Salvation of God is, in its essence, friendship with God, in all that friendship with God can mean. So – if the Glory of God is all ours now, as Paul claimed in Romans 8:30, then why the blindness and the blocking of light?

The Cause of the Blindness. The blindness is God’s doing, and the blocking of light is man’s doing. Here is God’s doing. – Also for Adam and his wife the Lord God made tunics of skin, and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become as one who knows good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”– (Genesis 3:21-22). Unregenerate humans are clothed with the skin of a beast, blinding them to all heavenly realities. Then, God closed off the Tree of Life so that humans could no longer see it.

But the gospel removes all that from us and gives us Jesus as our LIFE! So how does the Church not see?

Hiding the Light. Hiding the light has been the intense labor of thousands of theologians and Bible translators from the first century after Christ until today. As Jesus said, after John left the scene, the enemy planted tares amongst the wheat. – The Bible is the field containing both trees, the tree of knowing good and evil and the tree of knowing Life.

The tares are every Bible verse interpreted inside “the great struggle of good versus evil inside of us.” The Tree of Life is every Bible verse fulfilled as Christ Jesus inside of us, our very and only life. One bite of the tree of death and you cannot see the tree of life.

Apocalypse and Manifestation. And so Nicene theology has made the BIG words and verses of the gospel and of the glory of God revealed through us, His Church, to be HERESY and BLASPHEMY. Thus the big words in our list above have been misconstrued and falsely defined. Let’s set out the real definitions.

The first two regarding this topic of seeing are apocalupsis and phaino. Apocalypse means “taking off the cover so that what has been hidden can now be seen by all.” And phaino is best translated “made visible,” as in light as it carries the information to the eyes. The word “manifest” or “manifestation” is okay if you know what it means.

The Unveiling. The Apocalypse, then, is the removal of blindness and God made-visible is the bright shining of the light. Both words reference that which is already there, already the only thing real and true, just not visible to humans. Then we see that it is NOT the “manifestation” of the sons of God in Romans 8, but the apocalypse of the sons of God. People will be able to see what we truly are.

The shining of light is on God’s side of things and the removal of blindness is on the human side of things. “Unveiling,” then, is the best word for apocalupsis. I like using “apocalypse” because it strikes so strongly against the falsely defined “apocalypse” in modern English.

The Incarnation. Incarnation, then, has to do with phiano; God made-visible in human flesh. The New Testament is filled with verses regarding God INCARNATE in the Church on this earth, that is, the gathering together of human believers in Jesus.

It is amazing, however, at how those many verses remain completely invisible to Christians who eat of good versus evil. And they look at those who are eating of the tree of life as “blasphemers.” Yet Jesus lives in their hearts as well and carries them all the way through the darkness into life. The Church of Jesus Christ on this earth is Babylon. The Church of Jesus Christ on this earth is Jerusalem.

The Place of Glory. Jerusalem is the glory of God. Jerusalem is the place of His glory. I do not look for God’s glory to be revealed in any other place than the gathering together of Christ Community. God made Personal IS Love among us. God seen-and-known IS Christians loving one another in full reciprocity.

A great sign was perceived in heaven, a woman enclothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a victory garland of twelve stars. And having a child in her womb, she screamed, being in travail and being tortured to bring to birth. – And she brought forth a male, a son, who is about to shepherd all the nations with a rod of iron, and her child was seized into God and into His throne (Revelation 12).

Jesus Proven Faithful and True. This woman IS the glory of God. Look upon her, millions of believers in Jesus all across this earth. Yes, she is a MESS; a woman giving birth is a mess. But she is clothed with the Lord Jesus Christ, and the cry of her travail is to bring forth on this planet EVERY WORD GOD SPEAKS fulfilled through her, faithful and true.

If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem, then let my right hand forget her cunning, and let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I prefer thee not above my chief joy.

Christ Community, brethren dwelling together in unity, walking together in all that friendship is and means. Here alone will we know the Glory of God.

Now We Know That God Is True. We have just two more lessons remaining before we wrap everything up in our second attempt at a definition of the human. In Lesson 27.2 “Incarnation – Ekenosis,” we will define the human as God-made-visible and our action that makes God visible. Then, in Lesson 27.3 “The Apocalypse,” we will define the human as the revelation of Jesus Christ.

You will know that the apocalypse has occurred, according to Jesus, when you hear people all around shouting, “Did you see that? Did you see that? Christians together, loving one another with pure hearts fervently!!! Now we know that God is true.”