Glory

This morning we’re going to be talking a fair amount about God’s glory. And it’s a word Christians can use a lot but we often don’t define it.

I was trying to think of a way to illustrate what glory is.

Glory is the reason people watch the Olympics. These Athletes put so much work into becoming excellent athletes. They pursue excellence in their sport. They develop a skill set. But they also develop a strength of character. You don’t win on skills alone. These athletes develop mental fortitude, ability to get back up after failure, determination to gut it out when it’s hard, the cool head to perform under pressure.

And then the Olympics comes, and you get to see what’s in them. It comes out. Some people shrivel in the Olympics. And others shine. Their performance shows not just the skills but their ability to perform under pressure. The glory of these athletes shines out from them. It’s not just skill. You see something about their inner character – who they are. And that’s often what we appreciate about the best performances. That’s why we talk about seeing athletes shine. They get to display their glory.

 Glory is the outward shining of something’s essence.

When we talk about God’s glory, that’s what we’re talking about. He is perfect in all his attributes, perfect in love, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, truth. And he shows us in different ways what all that perfection looks like. It shines out. That’s what his glory his. Visible manifestations of God’s perfection.

Psalm 29 we see that God shows us his glory in different ways. We see,

God shines in heaven and displays the glory of his holiness.

God thunders in the storm and displays the glory of his power.

God Sits over the flood and displays the glory of his sovereignty

God dwells with his people and displays the glory of his love.

And when God shows us his glory, the only right response is to worship him.

God shines in heaven and displays the glory of his holiness.

This Psalm begins with David commanding praise be given to God. He says, “Ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.” Ascribe just means “give” or really “acknowledge.” We don’t really give God anything. We don’t give him strength. But we ascribe, we proclaim that God has all glory and strength. We praise him.

But actually, David isn’t calling us to do this directly. In our call to worship we used Psalm 96, where David uses this language, but he calls all families of the earth to do this. There he calls people to praise God.

Here he calls angels to praise God. In Hebrew he is calling “sons of God” or “sons of might” to ascribe glory and strength to God. That term is used in scripture to describe angels, heavenly beings. David is telling all heavenly beings to praise God.

It’s worth pausing at the start of this sermon and thinking about that. God doesn’t just deserve for all people to acknowledge his glory and strength. It’s too limited a scope to call all people on earth to worship God. When we worship, we ought to call all creation, including every spiritual being, to worship God.

If you are here today too proud to give glory to God, I want you to know this: there are spiritual powers far greater than you or I can conceive that humbly bow their knees before God. Isaiah 6 says that they serve him in his throne room and cannot look at him because of his glory, and so they cover their eyes and their feet in his presence and they sing “Holy Holy Holy.”

David focuses that same thing here: God’s holiness. Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. God is holy, and this demands all worship.

We often think of God being holy as God being morally pure. And that’s true. That’s part of it. But holiness is really describing his total otherness. The fact that in his perfection he is entirely unlike us. Transcends us. He is above us. He’s even above the angels.

But his holiness, this otherness, has a splendor to it. The angels cannot look at God as they serve in his throne room because he is so holy, and its more because God’s holiness is too beautiful than that it is too scary.

And we’re called, along with the angels, to worship God in response to the glory and splendor of his holiness. That’s how David frames this whole Psalm. We ought to praise God for his holiness.

So we see God displaying the glory of his holiness in heaven.

Next, we see

God thunders in the storm and displays the glory of his power.

David moves from this heavenly throne room scene, to describe a great storm. It’s possible that David was inspired to write this Psalm after observing a thunder storm.

We can follow the path of this storm in verses 3-9:

It starts “over the waters” (v3) – over the Mediterranean sea, to the West of Israel.

It lands in the area of Lebanon (v5), North of Israel and it is quite the storm. It breaks the cedars of Lebanon – would be like us saying “he snaps the California Red Woods”. These are trees that can grow over 100 ft tall and have a diameter of 8 ft. Big trees. These were the trees Solomon had imported to Israel for the construction of the Temple. Best, strongest trees around. And the storm snaps them like a tooth pick.

The storm moves over to Mt Hermon, called Sirion, inland and slightly south, and the other mountains in Lebanon, and makes them “skip like a calf” – makes mountains terrified like they were nervous calves hearing thunder.

Then he says the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. Kadesh is either referring to a city to the north, keeping the storm up to the north. Or there is a Kadesh in the very southern part of Israel which specifically has a wilderness area associated with it. I think that’s likely the Kadesh referenced. So the storm moves from North to South.

There’s lightning, it strips forests and is so violent it makes animals go into labor (or it shakes oak trees) — Hebrew was written just with consonants and if you put different vowels into the consonants they could be rendered “shakes oak trees” or “makes deer give birth” – (usually Hebrew poetry repeats and amplifies ideas, so I think probably “shakes oak tree” and “strips the forest bare” makes most sense given the poetic parallelism,) but either way, the idea is: this is quite the storm!

And seven times in this section David repeats the phrase “The Voice of the LORD” —seven, the number of perfection. David is saying that God displays the glory of his perfect power and majesty through this storm. It’s his voice you hear in the storm.

That tells you something about our God, how great his power is. When he speaks lightning strikes. Trees shatter. He thunders. He is not like us and we cannot control him. He is free in the use of his power. A storm reveals the glory of his power.

I think we’ve been trained to think that first a storm is just a storm. Nature is just nature. There’s nothing or no one that the beauty and grandeur in this world points to. But that’s just not true. Every snowflake, every flower, every sunset points beyond itself to its maker. The glory of Olympians point beyond themselves to the God. So does a storm.

Plenty of people could give you a scientific description of lightning.  We can explain how water evaporates and forms into clouds. We can classify types of clouds, and know what kind of systems cause them. (don’t throw away science and blindly adore God. Make us more deeply adore God. Marvel that this world WORKS)

But so often we fail to see the creator in his creation. We live in a world where we’re told that the laws of nature are all there is. And so many pursue science and the study of natural laws without looking for a Lawmaker.

A pastor and Bible commentator named John Calvin once said, “It is a diabolical science… which fixes our contemplation on the works of nature, and turns them away from God.” He said that if you study science this way, you will learn in such a manner that you will never know anything.”

But, Psalm 29 reminds us that God is shouting at us through storms. Storms display his power and glory, not randomness and chance. Those are false narratives, that we need to speak against.

David is actually doing that in this Psalm. He’s presenting a counter to a false narrative about who controls storms. There was a god worshipped by people actually around the area of Lebanon, named “Ba’al”. He was known as the god of storms and fertility. This is the god that later a king of Israel actually worshiped. Ahab married Jezebel, who was from Sidon, a city that worshiped Baal, and she led Ahab into Baal worship. The prophet Elijah’s ministry was effectively an anti-Baal ministry.

He shows up on the scene when people just start to worship a god of storms and fertility and he proclaims a drought, and there’s a drought for 3.5 years – the storm god doesn’t stand a chance against the Voice of the LORD speaking through his prophet.

And in David’s day, you likely could find a song written by Baal worshippers that might have some similarities to Psalm 29, with Ba’al in place of YHWH. And whether David wrote an entirely original Psalm, or David is coopting a pagan song, kinda like if Central Michigan took Hail to the Victors and changed it so it made fun of Michigan, David is sticking it to Baal and his worshipers.

Instead of Baal riding on the storm, YHWH rides on the storm and wrecks Baal’s back yard. Lebanon and Sirion are his home turf. He can’t defend them against YHWH. The story that Baal controls the storm, that worshipping Baal will bring blessings on the land is a false narrative, just like a godless, naturalistic worldview presents us with a false narrative.

No, in every storm, every tornado and hurricane, in ice and thunder and lightning, God is shouting to us. The glory of God’s power shines out. The glory of his freedom confronts us in the uncontrollability of the weather. In every storm God proclaims his glory to the world. And to you.

And we glorify God, make God’s glory known – by telling the world, “No, all creation sings his glory! He wrote the laws of space and time. He fashioned worlds to his design”

God shouts to the whole world in the storm and displays the glory of his power.

Third,

God Sits over the flood and displays the glory of his sovereignty

David gets to the end of his description of the thunderstorm and he says,

“The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord sits enthroned as king forever” (v10).

David says, God isn’t just in the storm. After reading about the storm in verses 3-9 and the association of God’s voice with the thunder, you might be tempted to think that our God is only as powerful as the storm. Or that David is this superstitious person who hears thunder and says “that’s the voice of God.” (angels playing football)

But David says, “God sits enthroned over the flood.” God is not limited by the forces of nature. God isn’t one with nature. His essence isn’t dispersed throughout creation.

He is above it. He sits enthroned over it. There were ancient flood myths, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the gods bring about a flood on the earth, but once they get this flood going, they can’t contain it, and they‘re terrified by it. They can’t control it.

But God does. And in fact, this word for “flood” is only used in OT to refer to The Flood, in Genesis 6. Then the world had gotten so wicked that God chose to flood the entire earth, and he spared Noah and his family in the ark.

And God wasn’t surprised by the flood. He wasn’t delayed by the flood. God was sovereign over it. In fact, far from being random, the flood was God’s means of judgment. God worked his sovereign, perfect plan through the flood. It didn’t disturb him. He sat, like a parent sits next to their kids in a bath tub, and brought his people safely through the water like the giant ark was a toy boat.

David reminds us that just like that flood, where God was over, ruling and reigning as king, God is ruling and reigning, sovereign over every storm. He’s not just powerful. He has a comprehensive plan, and it’s bigger than we can understand.

But if we’re honest, talking about such a powerful God who shows us the glory of his power in storms, who is king over everything – that can be a little scary. Even upsetting.

Because now this storm that moves in a destructive path over Lebanon and all of Israel, that’s actually purposeful. God intends that destruction. God’s awesome power that makes mountains cower – that’s scary.

And it can be hard to reconcile when the storm that God is completely in control of, hits you. Or your family. Your loved one. Sometimes God shines the glory of his sovereignty in particularly painful ways. And you’d rather God’s sovereignty would stop shining.

That’s the kind of God that Psalm 29 describes though. There’s a relentless way in which this Psalm goes out of this way to show us that God is all-powerful, all-glorious, almighty, even in the most devastating ways.

And if this is all we knew about God – that he was all-holy, all-powerful, and all-sovereign, if that’s all the glory that shines out of God, then God would only be all-terrifying.

But God displays his glory in another way.

Because not only does God shine in heaven, thunder in the storm, and sit over the flood.

God also dwells with his people, and there he displays the glory of his love.

If you look back up at verse 9, to the end of his description of the storm, the Lord’s voice has been flashing flames of fire, shaking the wilderness, breaking trees. But in the midst of this, “in his temple all cry, “Glory!” This storm is moving from north to south across Israel. And as it moves over Jerusalem, God’s people, are in God’s temple, worshipping.

They hear and see the storm about them. They may have been personally impacted by the storm. They know others whose lives have been wrecked by storms. The very storm that God controls does not leave his people unaffected. God sends his rain on the just and unjust, and he sends storms on the evil and the good. But still they worship. Why?

How can God’s people trust, and draw near, and worship this God whose glory and power is overwhelming? OT Israelite would say “Because he loves us.” How does he show you he loves you?” “He gave us his Temple, to tell us that he wants to be with us.”

I was reading Psalm 29 last night for our family Bible time. I asked Maria, “Is God more powerful than this storm?”

“Yes. He’s more powerful than anything!”

(Then she started to list things God was more powerful than. She was looking around the room, and so it was an interesting list, I think Santa, Santa’s toys, chairs, and the counter” were in that list)

But then I asked her, “If God is so powerful, isn’t that scary?”

“No!”               “Why not?”                “Because he loves us.”

“How does God show us he loves us?”                 “He sent his Son.”

“Who is God’s Son?”             “Jesus.”

God didn’t just build a temple to show us he wants to be with us. He became one of us.

And Jesus now is our temple. He is our way to draw near to God. And in fact, he made it possible for us to draw near to God.

By standing in our place, and facing the storm of God’s judgment.

Every storm is meant to remind us in part of God’s judgment. Because ultimately we don’t have a storm problem. We have a sin problem. That’s part of why David brings up the flood. The flood was a means for God to judge sinful men and women who have ruined his world.

Sinful men and women deserve nothing but a fierce storm. Deserve a just and righteous storm cloud of God’s wrath. How do you escape from the storm? In the Old Testament you go to the temple, and offer a sacrifice, reminding you that God will deal with your sin through a substitute. And once a year they sent a scapegoat into the wilderness, to symbolize God casting our sin away.

And then Jesus came. And he went outside the city of Jerusalem, symbolically into the wilderness, and was crucified. And what happened when he was crucified? The skies darkened, and the wilderness, the earth shakes, as God’s Son bears the brunt of the storm on the cross.

You want to see the glory of God on full display? Look at the cross. There is the love of God. His glory is show in the storm. And his glory is shown in him taking the storm in our place.

And how does that storm end? With our sin paid for, and the curtain of the temple torn in two– the curtain that kept people away from dwelling in the presence of God.

Jesus brings us into God’s presence. He is the temple, in which we draw near to God and cry, “glory.”Because we’ve seen the glory of God’s love on full display in the cross of Jesus.

And it’s only in Jesus, in the temple that we see God’s love for his people, and can have confidence to pray that God would give strength and peace to his people in the midst of the storm.

Notice, David doesn’t pray for God to take away the storm. He prays that God will give strength and peace to his people. Strength to persevere. Grace to hold onto Jesus in the storm.

And peace. Calm. Safety. Security. Assurance. Rest.

For those of you who know Jesus, these things really are yours. Strength and Peace are yours for all circumstances. You don’t have to fear storms.

William Cowper suffered terribly from storms in his life. But he wrote this hymn:

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform:

He plants His footsteps in the sea,

And rides upon the storm.

 

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy, and shall break

In blessings on your head.

 

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust Him for His grace;

Behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

You don’t have to fear that God’s glory hides a sinister plan for you. He loves you. He has shown you in Christ that he loves you and will give you strength and peace.

And if you have never really felt that peace, please find shelter from the storm of God’s judgment today in Jesus. Trust in him and cry glory.

God is showing you his glory today. Glory in the storm. Glory in the face of Jesus Christ. The only right response is to join with the angels of heaven and bow down and worship.