Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

So much of Christian faith and practice hinges on the concept of the glory of God. But what is that? The theology books struggle when they try to define it. I believe it is because the glory of God is actually the combined magnitude of all God’s attributes and qualities put together. The glory of God means what can be called his infinite beyondness. He is not a “tame” God, a God at hand. He is not someone you can always figure out, or expect to figure out. This is a God beyond our comprehension, and it is one of the aspects of the biblical God that modern people dislike the most. We are always saying, “I can’t believe in a God who would do this” or “I can’t believe in a God who would judge people.” One of the things that may mean is that we don’t want a glorious God, one beyond our comprehension. The glory of God also means his supreme importance. The Hebrew word for “glory” is kabod, which means “weight”—literally God’s weightiness. Fortunately, we have an English word that has the same lexical range and that functions in the same way—it is the word matter. Matter means “as opposed to the immaterial, something solid, something substantial,” but it can also mean “importance.” And therefore, when the Bible says that God is glorious, it means he should matter, and does matter, more than anything else or anyone else. And if anything matters to you more than God, you are not acknowledging his glory. You are giving glory to something else.