The Light and the Glory

“God is light, and in him is no darkness.”

   -1 John 1:5 

Light is one of the most powerful images of God. God is light. Light of the Divinity is brilliant, blinding all who try to look directly into it. 

Ultimately God is beyond our comprehension. Standing outside the time-space continuum in which we live, God is above anything our created minds could grasp. The image of physical light gives us but a tiny glimpse, a hint, as to God's brilliance. Who and what God is surpasses human understanding. 

God's light displays God's glory.

The term "glory" has been all but lost in our contemporary culture. About the only place we use the term is in sports, describing the short-lived honor of winning an athletic contest. While such recognition is worthy, it falls far short of genuine glory.

True glory is the splendor of the skies, bursting with color and new life at dawn or blazing across the whole horizon at sunset. Glory is displayed in brilliance of light and breath-taking grandeur. Beyond human accomplishment, true glory lifts our eyes toward the heavens and transports us into the transcendent. 

Such cosmic glory, in turn, points beyond the material world. Glory that we see with our physical eyes is but a window to the uncreated glory of the Divine. God, enthroned in eternity, flashes light and splendor and majesty. Whenever people in Scripture had opportunity to peer into the spiritual realm, the eternities of heaven, they stumbled for words to describe the resplendence of God's glory. (Rev 4)

That glory, then, cascades down into creation. The physical heavens declare God's glory, as Psalm 19 tells us. As we see light and splendor across the skies, we get a taste of the divine glory flowing from God's throne!

2017 © Glenn E. Myers

This series is Creation Proclaiming God’s Divine Nature, as Romans 1:20 declares, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.”