Glory is a tricky thing to define. For Christians, it is nearly always associated with God. After all the core of the Christian belief is that He created everything, He holds it all together and is guiding it to a specific end. But what if you don't believe in God? As humans, and more specifically as humans in an affluent society, glory is much different. In fact, it has been morphed into a personal goal, even an obsession. When I was looking for a good way to define Glory I came across this definition:
A high renown or honor won by notable achievements.
If that doesn't define the goal our culture has set for us then I don't know what does! Since we aren't relating this to God yet, let's make some changes to that definition to relate it to the person that really matters. Namely me. Maybe it could look like this:
The high renown or honor won by my notable achievements.
Looking at it that way you may ask: "don't we have a word for that?" And indeed we do, good old Pride.
But in a world without God, is there a legitimate reason to care about anything other than yourself? I can see the question coming:
"But what about the generous people who give so much to others?"
To which I would answer:
"Even charity, when unrelated to God, is undertaken to meet some goal or need that these people have."
You see pride is defined as a feeling or deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements. That actually doesn't sound all that bad. But regardless of how it sounds, even being generous is a form of pride because the outcome is a good feeling about ourselves. Let's combine these two ideas and try and define pride in terms of glory. How about this:
Pride is seeking and finding glory in our own achievements.
The search for glory is innate in all of us. But without a bigger reality than ourselves, it becomes a never-ending obsession fueled by Pride. A big part of this cycle is the culture. Pair this with the easy access we have to all kinds of media and things get out of control. First, the culture sets standards for us as to who is worthy and who is not. Then, thanks to television and social media, we are constantly reminded if we are meeting these standards or not. The people found to be worthy are put on a pedestal while those who fall short are ignored and even shamed.
Remember we have eliminated God from the picture, and when we do that there is a pretty obvious substitute. Me. The worship that our culture gives to whoever can climb to the top of their arbitrary totem pole is all the motivation we need to do everything we can to get there.
But this worship of self introduces a major problem. Instead of moral laws set up by a creator that apply to everyone, the whims of our culture and sub-cultures become the moral arbiters of right and wrong, moral and immoral. This cultural judge is not only a tyrant, but it accepts one moment things that are chastised the next.
For Christians, this should come as no surprise. After all, this was the devil's original sin. It was the sin that he convinced Adam and Eve to partake in, and it is the sin that will haunt us until the end of our lives. The thing that makes pride (or glorying in ourselves) so appealing is the partial truths that it contains. You see, it's true that there is glory in every human. This glory is what gives us worth. But this type of glory is not earned on social media, and a Hollywood award* can't garner any more of it. Instead, the glory we display is the reflection of God's glory in us. After all, we are all created in the image of God! Unfortunately, our sinful desires, rightly observing this innate glory, take this truth and twist it, convincing us that we did something to deserve it instead of rightly acting as a conduit that points to the creator of it.
A great analogy for this is the moon. This morning I was driving to work and the full moon was out with a clear sky. If you can observe the moon with a clear dark sky it's actually very bright. But how bright is it? What if we compared it to the sun? How much brighter do you think the sun is compared to a full moon? 100 times, 1000 times, 100,000 times?
Scientists have come up with something called "apparent magnitude" to measure stars and other heavenly bodies. It's math that is a little tricky, but interesting (that is if you like math, check it out here). It's tricky for a couple reasons, first brighter things have lower numbers, so a star with an apparent magnitude of "2" is actually brighter than a star that is a "4".
The second reason is even trickier. The scale is not linear, that is a 2 is not twice as bright as a 4. Instead, the scale is logarithmic. This means that a brightness of 2 is actually 6.3 times brighter than a star with a brightness of 4. Finally, there can be brightness's that have negative numbers. This would mean that a star at -2 is brighter than one at 0 or 1.
The formula for figuring this all out looks like this:
So if we want to compare the sun (which is actually the brightest thing we can see in the sky) with a full moon, we first need their apparent magnitude. The apparent magnitude of the Sun is −26.74, and the average magnitude of the full moon is −12.74 (not as bright but you could still read by this amount of light at night). To do this calculation we then need to find the difference between the two magnitudes, which is simple subtraction:
Then we take that number (14.00) and put it into the original formula to find the Brightness factor:
This tells us that the sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full moon, which is a lot more than I would have guessed.**
Our mathematical comparison gets even better when we use it to describe glory. Let's use "glory" instead of the term "brightness" in our comparison. Now we would say that the sun is 400,000 times more "glorious" than the moon. Nothing wrong with that right? Except that even in assigning the moon this minuscule bit of glory we would be wrong. Because all the light (glory) we see in the moon is from the sun! It's just reflecting it. Do you see how we as humans do the exact same thing when we try and glorify ourselves? God is the glorious one, only instead of 400,000 brighter, he is infinitely times more glorious. We created nothing, did nothing to come into existence and have no power over our inevitable death.
Just like the moon reflecting the light of the sun, we too reflect the image and glory of the God who created us. But because we can reason and think and act, we have a choice of whom we will see as glorious and whom we choose to worship.
So the next time you accomplish anything, before you think about how awesome you are stop and think of who created you with the capacity to think and act and coordinate things to accomplish that achievement. Because if you say that you believe in God, he deserves a all the praise!
I'll end with a great verse about glory that serves as reminder of the insignificance of our achievements when it comes to glorious things:
Psalm 19:1 "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge"......
When we hear this in our day and age, it's as if if we are saying:
*Side Note 1: I do find it rather ironic that many Hollywood actors, who are where they are most often from glorifying themselves, still thank God. At least that part of the award shows get the bigger picture, no matter how insincere they may be.
** Side Note 2: One of the reasons I like big numbers is because you can often find things in the Bible that bear them out. For example in Isaiah 9:2 we are told that: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has a light shone. Can you see it, people are stumbling around in the dead of night and all of sudden the noonday sun appears. That is what Jesus' appearance on earth is compared to. Or what about this one, in John 8:12 Jesus is talking about himself and says: "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Imagine that, the difference between a life that is stumbling along in the dark compared to one that not only walks in the light but has the light of life?
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