November 23

November 23, 2008

Celebrating the Glory of God
a sermon on Ezekiel 1
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama
Our sermon begins with the story of a young man who wanted to follow his father into the ministry, but he got sent to Iraq because of the war. Something happened to him there, something unexpected. I do not know his mental state, though I suspect his morale was on the low side. There, just a little south of Bagdad, he had a vision of the glory of God. The young man’s name was Ezekiel.

In Ezekiel’s day, nearly 600 years before Christ, the place wasn’t called Iraq. It was called Babylon. And the war had nothing to do with American forces, terrorism, or Saddam Hussein. King Jehoiachin of Judah decided he had had enough of being a vassal of Babylon, so he rebelled. As always in such cases, the Babylonians didn’t take that well. They showed up with their army and captured Jerusalem. This was the first time they captured Jerusalem, in 597 B.C. Ten years later the same exact thing would happen, but then they destroyed the city. This first time they put a new king in charge and took away some of the best people as captives. Ezekiel was among them.

He was 25 years old. In another five years he would have been eligible to serve as a priest in the Temple. In those days the office of priest was hereditary. Only those from priestly families could aspire to temple service. His father was a priest, and Ezekiel was to be a priest. Like so many people today who find themselves or their families caught up in the machinery of global politics, Ezekiel’s plans didn’t quite work out. You know what, though? It was OK. Ezekiel’s plans didn’t turn out, but God’s did. God had a plan for Ezekiel. He never was a priest, but God made him a prophet. God’s people needed a message of hope, a Word from the Lord to guide them and to sustain their faith through their difficult struggle with loss and exile. God chose Ezekiel to bring that Word.

His career began with a vision of the glory of God, about five years after he was taken into captivity. Let me tell you what did not happen. Ezekiel was not crazy and he didn’t just dream this up. He did not have a drug induced hallucination. He did not see aliens. These are just a few of the more outlandish explanations people have offered for the other-worldly imagery of his vision. What did happen? Ezekiel himself tells us: “I realized I was seeing the brightness of the Lord’s glory!”

As Joshua was reading this passage, you must have been wondering, “What in the world? What is this stuff, and what does it have to do with me or life today?” What are we to make of wheels within wheels and living creatures with four faces? What is all this bizarre imagery about? It’s about the glory of God. One reason I am confident Ezekiel’s vision was authentic is that he struggles to put it into words! Over and over he says what he saw looked like this or that. Words do not exist to describe what he saw because what he saw is not part of our everyday experience. He therefore had to resort to offering us approximations. “The creatures glowed like hot coals.” Their wings sounded like the ocean … or maybe like a large army … or maybe like the voice of God Almighty. Ezekiel did the best he could relating his vision within the limits of human language. Words fail because our vocabulary is too limited. Images fail because our experience and even our imaginations are too limited. He tried to describe the indescribable, so we shouldn’t be surprised if the result leaves us scratching our heads.

This sermon celebrates God’s glory. I dare say multi-winged living creatures and wheels with eyes hold little interest for practical people with practical problems. What human being ever gets a vision like Ezekiel’s? Probably none of us. Yet the glory of God, which was the point of Ezekiel’s vision, that’s a different matter entirely. You do not have to see God’s glory to appreciate it. And all you need is the slightest hint of God’s glory and everything in life looks different. Your problems are not so big. Selfish motives become less compelling. You discover something really, really big (see how my vocabulary fails too!)—something worth spending your life in pursuit of—something worth celebrating because it is better than anything in all the universe. It transcends the universe. It transcends beauty. Nothing else is remotely like it, and it simply overwhelms us. I am talking about the glory of God.

The glory of God … what is that? What is glory? In Hebrew the word is kavod. Originally it meant something heavy, as in weight. Later it came to mean wealth. Talking about people, glory means honor and social prestige. One gains glory by doing great things or having high social standing. Talking about God it means God’s power, majesty, and transcendence.

Although the word glory can be used generically of people or God, in scripture it has a special meaning reserved for God alone. Only God has true glory. All other glory derives from his as a shadowy reflection of the divine glory. Glory is a way of saying God is unique: uniquely powerful, uniquely wise, uniquely self-sufficient, and uniquely holy. That’s worth celebrating, but there is a bit more that may be the best of all.

Glory in the Old Testament almost becomes a technical term for God’s presence with his people. To understand this, you have to go all the way back to Moses when he came down off Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. As you recall, he was shocked and horrified to find the Israelites worshiping the golden calf. They were already breaking commandments, so Moses broke the tablets on which the commandments were written. God was angry too. He told Moses—this is in Exodus 33—to take the people on to the Promised Land without God. God told Moses to tell the people, “I will not go up among you, or I would consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.” You might think of an enraged parent who sends a child to his or her room so the parent can cool off and not overreact. God said, “I can’t put up with this! You people go on without me!”

Moses was again horrified. Jesus once asked his disciples, when the crowds were deserting him, “Will you go away too?” Peter answered, “Where would we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Moses felt the same way. God’s people were nothing, they had no hope, without God. So he interceded for the people and pleaded with God: “If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.” God answered, “I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.”

Are you still with me? In response to Moses’ prayer, God promised to go with his people to the Promised Land. He would be with them, just as he had been with them since they left Egypt. At this point, Moses, ever the bold one said, “Show me your glory, I pray.” What’s this about? Was Moses feeling insecure? Was he worried God would change his mind? He needed to be confident of God’s presence. He was saying, essentially, “I need to know your presence and power, Lord. Your people need to know you are with them in all your might.” And how did he word this request? He asked to see God’s glory!

God must have liked Moses, because he granted his request. God told him: “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The LORD’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” The LORD continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

Once again you need to recognize that words are being used to describe the indescribable. Does God really have hands, a back, and a face? No. Not like we do. God is Spirit. So what’s this about? It’s about the glory of God. It’s about a glimpse of his glory. It’s is about a vision that cannot be put into words or literal images because God is transcendent. Yet at the same time, he is willing to make himself known. He is willing to pass by Moses, to give him the assurance he needs, and to speak the divine name to him. This is about a God so far above us that we cannot begin to comprehend him. Imagine you are watching a football game broadcast in high definition on a giant digital television. Your screen has billions of pixels, and the image on it is constantly changing. Now imagine you are given a pile of little one inch squares of construction paper in different colors. You are told to glue those one inch squares onto a nine by twelve inch sheet of white paper to show the football game you are watching. You are stuck trying to use 108 little squares instead of the billions of pixels on your television, and your paper picture doesn’t move. That’s what expressing God’s glory in words is like. God is so far above us, what hope do we have?

And yet … and yet … God is present. He makes himself known—to Moses, to Ezekiel, even to us. God’s glory meant God’s visible, active presence. God is here. He is doing something. We can see his power at work. That’s his glory. He is so far above us that we cannot comprehend him, yet he stoops low to make himself known to us. We need to celebrate God’s glory because in today’s religious climate, we focus so much on God’s nearness that we forget just how far above us he is. Yet because of his love, his transcendence is not something to be feared or lamented. Rather, it is the source of great comfort and confidence.

This is the message God wanted Ezekiel to take to his people. Back then, people thought of gods as belonging to a particular nation. Each nation had its own gods, and the gods of one nation might be more powerful than another, but they all pretty much had jurisdiction only over the territory of the people who worshiped them. Not so the God of Israel. He was known as the Creator of all the earth. He had power everywhere, even in Babylon. I think we see this in Ezekiel’s vision. The whole image is a kind of chariot, sort of carried by the living creatures and sort of carried by the wheels, but the point can’t be missed: God’s throne is mobile. He goes where he wants and does what he wants. His sovereign power knows no limits. His people wondered, “Is God with us here?” Tell them, Ezekiel, is he? Yes, he is! Ezekiel received a vision of the glory of God: he saw how the transcendent God of power is present with his people in ways they can recognize.

A couple more passages may help us understand this tricky concept of God’s glory. Habakkuk was another prophet who knew a lot about hard times. Through him God promised this: “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” [2.14]. What a hopeful promise! Someday everyone will see, everyone will know. God is awesome, and he is with his people. He moves among us with power.

And of course, where has God made himself known most clearly? Where is his glory most accessible? In Jesus! John 1.14: “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

As long as God showed us his glory in visions, we were left with two feelings: (1) Wow! This completely blows my mind! And (2), huh? Take Ezekiel’s vision for example. We get a sense of God’s power and beauty and holiness and glory—all that. But we are still left scratching our heads about the creatures and wheels and so on. We understand words are insufficient. The trouble is, words are all we have. So the visions help us, but they do so in a kind of vague way.

Fortunately, God did not limit himself to visions. He wanted us to really know him. So what did he do? He became one of us. Where words failed, enter the Word. The Word became flesh. Jesus is fully human—just like you and me. He is also fully God, and as such he reveals God to us in a way that goes deeper than words. “We have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son.”

Maybe we can think of God’s glory this way: God’s glory is what happens when God in all his infinite greatness meets us where we are. Transcendence comes near. The infinite enters the finite. God draws near to us, and we get just the faintest glimpse of who he is, and it just blows us away. That’s God’s glory.

What God’s glory has to do with us ought to be clear by now. God’s glory is worth celebrating. We ought to worship and adore God for his own sake, not for any benefit we get out of it—the way a lover loses himself in his beloved and basks in her beauty and sweetness. When we worship we celebrate this amazing God who is both vastly wondrous beyond our understanding yet who has loved us by coming to us and even dying on the cross.

Yet while we worship God and celebrate his glory for his sake alone, we cannot be unmoved by what he shows us. It changes us. Therefore I will be boldly point out two reasons we so desperately need to celebrate God’s glory in these times. The first I have already mentioned. We tend to focus so much on God’s nearness that we forget his infinite power and transcendence. Jesus becomes not Lord and Savior but “my bestest pal.” At the extreme, this leads to the kind of liberal theology that thinks God could not be nicer or more loving, but unfortunately cannot do anything about the problems of this world. This is a distortion. Yes, God is beside you to share your sorrow. But he is not smaller than your sorrow. He is bigger. What makes his presence so comforting is that he is so much bigger than our problems. He can do something. He already has done the most important thing—the death and resurrection of Jesus. And he will finish what he started. So we need to keep perspective and remember that God stands over us and this world.

The other thing we need is what Ezekiel and his friends needed: guidance and comfort. We live in distressing times. We have a lot to fear. We have legitimate worries. What we need most is a glimpse of God’s glory. More than we need health or money or security or anything else, we need a vision of God’s glory, because then we will know. We will know what Moses wanted to know and saw. We will know what was given to Ezekiel. God is enough! He is with his people and his strong arm sustains us.

Reflecting on this passage, Walt Kaiser wrote something profound I want to end this sermon with. He wrote: “No one can see God and live, yet neither can one live without seeing God in some form. If God does not reveal himself, how can mortals keep from being overwhelmed by the normal events of life itself, much less a captivity?” [The Majesty of God in the Old Testament, p. 124]

“No one can see God and live, yet neither can one live without seeing God in some form.” Remember that. It is true. My prayer for you is that you will know God’s glory, because he will make himself known to you. And that knowing him, you will be changed—born anew in Jesus Christ and sustained in his strength all your days. Amen.

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