All for God's Glory #1

You and I cannot add to that intrinsic perfect glory of God. We can't make Him any more glorious than He already is. God's glory is perfect, and it is what it is, and we can't detract from that intrinsic glory.

We can't make it better than what it is. If someone were to ask you what the purpose of Jesus offering us salvation is, we might tend to answer, well, so that we can be forgiven and go to heaven when we die. Now, while that is absolutely true, believe it or not, it is not the main reason. Welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm Bill Wright, and as we continue with our series titled, The Glory of the Gospel, Don will show us from the Scriptures that the main reason the Father sent His Son to earth is so that God would be glorified.

If you have your Bible open, let's join our teacher right now for part one of his message titled, All for God's Glory, here in the Truth Pulpit. Now, in the New Testament, the word glory comes from a Greek word doxa. It's used 166 times in the New Testament. Now, once in a while, occasionally it's used to refer to the glory of human beings. For example, Jesus referred to King Solomon in all of his glory in Matthew chapter 6. But the vast majority of the uses of the word glory in the New Testament are referring to the glory of God. Now, that word doxa have an echo of familiarity to maybe some of the older ones among us.

We use the word doxology. There's a particular doxology that I used growing up that our church used when I was a child before I was a believer. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him all creatures here below. Praise Him above ye heavenly hosts.

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. A doxology like that is a hymn. It is a song that ascribes glory to God. It praises God.

The purpose of a doxology is to ascribe glory to the God to whom we sing. And when it's used particularly in respect to the person of God, this New Testament word glory expresses, watch this, it expresses honor and splendor and radiance and the highest of magnificence. It denotes the divine and heavenly radiance of God. The word glory expresses His loftiness and His transcendent majesty. And when we speak of the glory of God, we are speaking in the highest of terms, which while we understand them in part, they transcend our ability to fully comprehend. The glory of God refers to His inherent brilliance and His intrinsic grandeur. And so we are speaking about the greatness of the glory of God. The glory of God is the sum expression of the multitude perfections of His essence. The glory of God was manifested in the Shekinah glory that Isaiah saw that undid Him in Isaiah chapter 6.

Peter, James, and John saw it unveiled for a brief moment in the transfiguration of Jesus Christ when the brilliance of His glory was shed through, was broadcast through the veil of His human flesh. And there is this great glory of God that is overwhelming and lethal to the eyes of men. That is His inherent glory. Now, you and I cannot add to that intrinsic perfect glory of God. We can't make Him any more glorious than He already is.

God's glory is perfect, and it is what it is, and we can't detract from that intrinsic glory. We can't make it better than what it is. But you and I can do something different. And we have to realize that we're using the word glory in a different sense.

There's something different that we can do. We can't make God more perfect than He is. That very thought is silly to think about that we, as sinful creatures, could somehow make the holy, uncreated God more glorious than what He is.

That's not the case. But we can do something different in a different sense, in a slightly different use of the word that we're going to see in these seven realms here. We can give glory to God. We can ascribe glory to God. We can speak of His glory. To give glory to God, I'm going to give you a definition here, to give glory to God is to ascribe praise to Him. It is to ascribe excellence to Him. And so as we give glory to God, we speak well of Him. We obey His word. We praise His character. We give thanks to Him for His revealed character and for His work in creation and in our lives. Stated differently, my friends, we respond to the intrinsic glory of God with our love and praise, which ascribe glory back to Him.

You could think about it like this. We have no glory of our own to give to Him. We can't make Him more glorious than He is. But in our hearts, in our minds, with our lives, we can function something as a mirror that reflects that glory back to Him, that reflects His own glory back to Him vertically and makes it known horizontally among men. In that sense, we can give glory to God in the same way that the dark rock of the moon reflects the light and brilliant splendor of the sun. Now, let me just say this in just trying to keep the theme consistent here and prevalent before your mind. That means that in the midst of our sorrows and our difficulties, it means in the course of this changing world, it means that in the unfaithfulness of other realms of so-called Christian thought and teaching that are betraying the gospel before our very eyes, it means that you and I, it means that true Christians everywhere, it means that our church, that what our focus is and what gives us the orienting perspective that we need to get through these difficult days, to prosper through these difficult days, is to have our minds focused on the glory of God, to understand that that is ultimately what is at stake and that our supreme purpose in life, no matter what our circumstances might be, would be to give glory and honor back to the God who created us and that saved us.

In other words, what we're about to see here, I love these kinds of biblical perspectives and these biblical themes. When we talk about the glory of God from Scripture, we are talking about that which defines our worldview. It defines our life goals. It defines our daily habits. It defines the deepest aspirations of our heart. It should be the deepest aspiration of your heart that God would be glorified in your life far more than anything else that you might want or aspire after. The glory of God is infinitely more important than your personal prosperity. It is infinitely more important than whether you are recognized in life or whether you live in obscurity.

It is infinitely more important than anything that happens in the world around us. The glory of God is everything, and we bow before that and seek to be a vessel that ascribes glory to Him in response to our salvation in Christ. So let's look at Scripture now. Let's see the seven realms of the glory of God that give us clarity on these things. By the time we are done here, everything that I have just said will be undeniable in your mind. There will be no alternative but to realize that the glory of God is the supreme element in the universe. It is to be our supreme aspiration and to be that to which we give ourselves come what may. And so we've got seven points.

We're going to launch into them now. I've alliterated them all with the letter S to help you try to remember them as we go along. First of all, this first realm of the glory of God, the first place that we see it, the supreme place that we see it, is in our Savior, Jesus Christ. In our Savior, Jesus Christ. Now, Jesus Christ is God incarnate, and Jesus Christ radiates the essential glory of God. Look at Hebrews chapter 1, and you're going to need nimble fingers today to stay with me. We're going to go to several different passages to find how this theme is woven throughout the entirety of the New Testament, the centrality of the glory of God. We see it, first of all, in our Lord Jesus Christ. And in Hebrews chapter 1, verse 3, every place that you see the word glory in the message here today, it's a translation of that Greek word doxa.

It is a consistent theme and a consistent translation, and that's what unifies our understanding here today. Hebrews chapter 1, beginning in verse 2, let's say, God, verse 2, in these last days has spoken to us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world. Lofty statements about our Lord Jesus Christ. And in verse 3, it says this, and he is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature. And so for us to find a revelation of the glory of God, what the glory of God looks like, we see it preeminently and perfectly revealed in our Lord Jesus Christ. Because he is God, when we read about him in the four gospels, we are seeing the glory of God revealed. Jesus said to one of his disciples, Philip, he said, he who has seen me has seen the Father.

He has seen what the Father looks like. He has heard what the Father says, because there is this perfect identity of essence between God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ so that when you look at him, when you hear him speak, when you see what he did, you're seeing the glory of God manifested before you. And so Christ is the radiance of God's essential glory. Now, with that basic thought in mind, turn over to John chapter 17. John chapter 17, in the high priestly prayer where Jesus is praying to his Father on the eve of his crucifixion, I want you to see how Christ, in his own words, summarized what he did leading up to his crucifixion. What is it that Jesus did in relationship to God the Father? Notice in verse one that that's who he's praying to. He says, Father, the hour has come.

Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you. The hour had come for his crucifixion. The hour of redemption at the cost of his lifeblood had arrived, and now he is praying in preparation and in anticipation of that great eternal moment for which he was appointed.

But up to that point, Christ had lived for 33 years, from the time of his birth to Mary, all the way through to his public ministry, his manifestation to his disciples, his teaching, his miracles, all of these things. Notice how Jesus summarizes it all in verse four. He says, I glorified you on the earth, having accomplished the work which you have given me to do. There's a sense of anticipation in that past tense, I have glorified you.

He's including the cross that was just about to happen. So in this final prayer before his crucifixion, he gathers it all up. He looks at the totality of his life, and he can sum it up by saying, I glorified you during my time on earth. And he goes on to say in verse five, Now, Father, glorify me together with yourself with the glory which I had with you before the world was. And so he's looking back into eternity past, remembering, as it were, the glory that the triune God had shared among the three persons, before Genesis 1-1 was even spoken into existence, so to speak. Jesus says, Father, now that I've finished the work that you've given me here, return me to that prior glory.

Restore me to that prior glory. But know that in between those two points of pre-eternal glory and the glory that would become Christ again in his ascension, Jesus says between those two points, Father, I have glorified you on earth. He didn't add to the essential glory of God. He himself was the embodiment of that glory. But rather, through his life, he reflected glory back to God. He made God's glory known. He manifested the glory of God through his life and through his ministry. And so Jesus summarizes the totality of his life by saying, Father, I have glorified you during my time on earth, and now the crucifixion awaits. What does that mean for us today as we're thinking about the glory of God?

You and I should have clarity on this particular point because it lays the foundation for everything else. In a real sense, in a true sense for us, the glory of God begins and ends with Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the one who revealed the glory of God to us in human flesh. Jesus Christ is the one who obeyed him perfectly. Jesus Christ is the one who makes it possible for us to enter into that realm of glory. And having saved the believer, Jesus Christ is now the one who strengthens us to display the glory of God, to ascribe glory to God in life. There is no meaning to the glory of God to us apart from Jesus Christ because we would not have eyes to see it. We would not have a mind to understand it. We would not have a heart to seek it apart from the work of Christ that he did for us.

And I say it directly. Those of you that have not repented of your sin and humbly come to Christ for forgiveness, you are outside the glory of God looking in. You are a contradiction in his creation to exist in his creation and yet not have the whole purpose of your life be directed to the glory of God come what may.

God does not exist for your happiness. You exist for the glory of God. If Jesus Christ, God incarnate himself, the highest, loftiest feet that ever walked on this earth would say that his purpose, his accomplishment in life was to glorify God, on what possible grounds could any man think that he has any different purpose than that? To live for any other purpose than the glory of God found in the Lord Jesus Christ is a contradiction of the order of the universe. And so we look to Christ, we see the glory of God revealed, we see Christ himself summarizing his life as being aimed at the glory of God, and we move from there, we move on from there. Secondly, we consider our sphere of existence, our sphere of existence. And for that you can turn over to the book of Romans chapter 11 to a familiar text.

We're trying to take these things from the broadest of circles and then just kind of bring them in in smaller concentric circles as we go along. Romans chapter 11 says this in verse 36. Notice how sweeping and how comprehensive it is after the Apostle Paul has summarized the doctrine of justification by faith, after he has explained how things work out between Israel and the Gentiles in days yet to come. He says in verse 33, oh, the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments and unfathomable his ways. Paul says, I have been speaking about things that thoroughly transcend the human mind's ability to understand.

It is so great, it is so deep, it is so lofty, it is so wonderful, it is so unsearchable. He's just speaking in these magnificent superlatives to jar us, as it were, out of our preoccupation with earthly things to summarize the greatness of the things that he has already said. Now in verse 36, watch what he says here.

I'm making a very simple point. He says, for from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever, amen.

So be it, in other words. And so Paul summarizes it all and says, everything invisible and visible, everything in salvation, everything in creation, everything in life comes from this God of whom I have been speaking. It comes through his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to us. And the ultimate end of it all is that it would go back to him and to the ascription of glory to him. So that all of creation, all of salvation for all those that Christ has saved, all of the manifestation of the glory of God in the skies and in his revealed word, all of it, it aims for this one great particular purpose. It all aims for the glory of God and it aims for his glory forever, amen. What that means is, let's put it this way, a little more accurately stated, one application of the significance of that for us is this, is that everything that is in existence in the created world exists ultimately to bring glory to God. There is nothing in the created world that is outside of that purpose. God's sovereignty, as we've talked about many, many times here, God's sovereignty, God's providence is over all of it. God is directing all things to accomplish his eternal purpose. And the climax of his eternal purpose is that everything that he created and that everything that he does and even the rebellion of man against him, it is all designed ultimately to accomplish this great purpose of ascribing glory to God. The saints of God, the saints through the ages will come to heaven and they will give glory to God for his mercy in saving them from their sins.

The justice of God, the holiness of God will be vindicated to his glory in the judgment of ungodly, unholy, unrepentant men. And so we find that everything is swept up in our sphere of existence and Paul says all things and then he says to him be the glory forever, amen. And so we, you can think about it in this sense I guess, we are walking in a realm, we are walking in a realm that belongs to God. There's a sense in which we are guests in his realm.

And as guests we should be concerned with what the host wants out of his realm. What the host is working everything toward is the acknowledgement of his own radiance, his own glory, his own brilliance, his own excellence. That's Don Green declaring the magnificent glory of our perfect Heavenly Father. And friend, we're so thankful that you've spent this time studying God's precious word with us. Now just before we end our time together today, Don, one of the things you've talked about today is the realm of God.

Is that something you could elaborate on a little more for us? In other words, how is it different from the realm we live in and where exactly is the realm of God? Well Bill, when I've spoken about the realm of God on today's broadcast, we're simply talking about those areas of life in which God displays his glory. He has made his glory known in the person of Jesus Christ. He has made his glory known in the natural world. He has made his glory known in his holy word, the 66 books of the Bible.

And on it goes. In one way or another, wherever you look, God's glory is on display. And it's our responsibility to recognize his glory as he has made it known in these different realms and then to ascribe glory to his holy name because of the evident greatness of who he is.

Supremely found in the Lord Jesus Christ and the salvation that he brings to guilty sinners through faith in him based on his atoning work on the cross. Thanks, Don, for that very helpful explanation. And friend, you can hear more of Don's teaching anytime at thetruthpulpit.com. And while you're there, we'd ask you to share with us the name of the city and radio station where you listen to this broadcast. That information helps to keep Don's teaching on the air where you live.

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