Heaven's Breakthrough in Glory

I don't know if you've been listening to many carols in this sort of early Christmas season. I can tell you that I have. I have a wife who really, really loves her Christmas carols. And it's on in the morning and it's on at night. I know that Rob here loves them too.

I don't know if his coworkers love it as much, but I think they often get a good dose of Christmas carols each year. But have you ever noticed that some of the best Christmas carols, some of the most famous Christmas carols, have this one mark, this one feature in them? They love spending time to mention the time of day and the physical environment in which the arrival of Christ came. We sing lyrics like "Silent Night" and "O Holy Night". We sing things like "When fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains repeat the sounding joy." Why do the hymn writers mention these physical aspects of the environment when describing the arrival of Christ?

Well, firstly, you'll say because it's biblical. The best Christmas carols are the ones that reflect the story found in scripture. They meditate on the arrival of Christ and the purpose of His coming. The Bible points out that when it talks about the arrival of Jesus, the physical environment and how it was actually somehow impacted. This morning, in our text from Luke 2, we see how sleepy shepherds in the middle of the night have the darkness around them turned into light when an angel arrives.

For the magi in Matthew's account, a star, a comet, or an unusual orbit of a planet pronounces the epoch of something momentous. It is as though nature itself recognises and declares some things which we humans will be slower to grasp. Something huge has happened. For all the nineteen nineties pop culture fans, it's like there's a glitch in the matrix. Heaven and earth shudders for a moment, and just for a split second, we see something of what is described as glory coming through.

And then it goes quiet again, and there is just a baby in a manger. And that's what our Christmas carols try to communicate: that the arrival of this child was glorious. A few weeks ago at our carol service, we reflected on this verse in our passage, Luke 2:14, the angelic song, which in Latin we know as the song "Gloria in Excelsis Deo": Glory to God in the highest. Today at Christmas, we are going to reflect on glory.

But what do we mean by glory? What is it? Well, for us Christians, the term is fairly familiar. For modern-day non-Christians or people that are sceptical about Christianity, this word is fairly unusual. But ask a Christian or a non-Christian to define it or describe it, and we're both stuck.

The word itself, the concept perhaps, comes closest to other words like majesty, like brilliance, or splendour. The essence of the word captures something that we can only describe as being transcendent, something that is above us, greater than us. Psalm 8, for example, comes closest to describing it with these sort of transcendent features. Psalm 8:1, "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth. You have set Your glory above the heavens."

God and His glory is seen, according to Psalm 8, as being everywhere. It is throughout the earth, and then it is something that is even greater than the stars and the galaxies, which we know and feel as being far bigger than us. God's glory is greater than the galaxies. It's no surprise then that the word glory has always carried with it godlike qualities. Christians aren't the only ones that have used the term, the word glory.

Throughout history, kings and queens have had that word associated with them. Their wisdom, their power, their influence has been part of what has been described as their glory. But this has always, almost always, been because kings and queens were godlike in the eyes of their people. Their fame, their power, their wisdom was often trumped up as being unequal with the gods. In scripture, the one whose glory is obviously most talked about is God.

His glory is expressed in absolutely otherworldly terms. In fact, sometimes terrifying descriptions. For example, during the Exodus, God's glorious presence is described as being dark, heavy smoke intermingled with fire. Remember, on top of Mount Sinai at the giving of the law, that is what surrounded the summit of the mountain. God's glory, His presence in smoke and fire.

In Deuteronomy 4 and 9, God's glory is experienced as being, quote, "a consuming fire." Fire, we know, for the people in those days, ancient Israel, was a daily occurrence. So, you know, they would have known what fire was. But something of God's presence was like a fire that consumes. Now, ask yourself, doesn't all fire consume?

We've seen wood burn up, paper burn up. Something of God's presence, something of His subsequent glory, is so powerful and unbearable that the light, the heat, the visual disruption seen in physical time and space looks so extreme, it feels like it's a fire that can incinerate anything. Take, for example, also Ezekiel's vision, his overwhelming vision of God's glory by the Kebar River in Ezekiel chapter 1. The prophet struggles to find descriptive words for what he's seeing when God allows him to experience something of His glory. He says it's a vision of gleaming metal, white hot fire, rainbows upon rainbows.

And then at the core of the vision is a vague resemblance of a man, something that looks like a man attended to by terrifying creatures standing watchfully at His command. This being that then speaks has a voice that sounds like thousands of rivers roaring, combined with thousands of voices in an army screaming. Ezekiel struggles to be able to describe what he hears and what he sees. It is something of God's glory and it is something utterly outside anything we know and are familiar with. So to speak of God's glory is to touch on the uniqueness of God Himself.

It's the way in which we come to understand Him as being completely distinguished from anything else in existence. To put it bluntly, God's glory refers to that thing in which and by which He is God alone. So even though people can speak today of things that are glorious, and we use that word sometimes to define things, to describe things, glory only truly belongs to the one transcendent being in all existence, God. Glory is then the magnificence of His being. It is a beauty that emanates from the perfection of His character and everything that He is.

That is what glory is. Now, the very important next question is to ask: why does glory matter? Why is it that people, once that they're Christians, become so obsessed in talking about glory? We love. We can always hear an "Amen" echoed when we say something is done to the glory of God. Why do we care about glory?

And importantly for today, what does that have to do with Christmas? Well, God's glory, we're told, isn't static. It overflows and permeates creation itself. The Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards talked about the nature of God's glory as he summed it up from the Bible. He says that there are basically three aspects of God's glory in scripture.

Firstly, His internal excellency, which means that the glory that He possesses is a possessed value. The second thing is His glory in public display, the glory in the public display of His goodness, the glory that radiates out from Him. And then thirdly, glory as the honour or the praise that He receives from creatures. Basically, across those three, God has glory, God displays glory, and God gets glory. But why God's glory matters to us, and why it's an integral part of the Christmas story, is that God delights to share His glory.

God delights in showing His glory. And it's for this purpose that His glory can be known by us and cherished by us. And that's not because God is egotistical, but as Edwards argues, He's the one who knows everything perfectly, and so He fully understands the perfection of His character. He doesn't need to show fake modesty because He can be somehow wrong in overestimating Himself. God correctly values the glory of His own nature, and because He knows its inherent goodness, and because He Himself is good, He desires to share it with others.

His glory is good. He is good, and so He shares it with others. For this reason, Edwards argues that the purpose of God's plan of salvation, the whole story of the Bible, the purpose is actually to reacquaint us with His glory. You could say that is the main purpose of the plan of salvation: to reacquaint humanity with His glory. Or as John Piper would later rephrase that sentiment, God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in Him.

Since the beginning, the Bible says God's glory has been woven into our existence, so much so that everything good that we experience, everything nice that we ever experience, is simply a reflection of the glory of God. And so to put wheels on this, glory is something that we have all experienced. In fact, the desire to know God's glory is innate in every human being. It's something we all want, even if we're not sure how to get it. But you and I all know intimately what glory is.

Now, to try and sort of bring this sort of esoteric, ethereal concept down into real life, I'm going to try and describe glory to you. Alright? Ready? Glory is the wide open plains of the Australian Outback stretching out so far that your eyesight fails. Glory is an imposing mountain stretching so high it darkens the sky.

Glory is a silently creeping sunrise over African bushveld as birds slowly wake up. Glory is a crystal clear night with a billion galaxies dappled across a blue velvet sky. It is a perfectly timed cover drive on a Boxing Day Test with Tony Gregg's commentary: "Marvellous." It is the cuddle you receive from a child unexpectedly, but just when you wanted it. It's a bit of music that speaks to your soul.

It's a bit of literature or film that lingers even after you've put it down. It's the smell of your mum's roast when you walk through the door. It's the smell of your husband's shirts hanging in the wardrobe. It's the smell of two-stroke and grass from a perfectly mowed lawn. Glory is tied to all these things.

In fact, if you listen carefully, someone may even use that word to describe those situations. We speak of glorious sunrises, don't we? Glorious cover drives. A gloriously landscaped lawn. Why? Because something in them communicates transcendence.

It's the one thing that atheist philosophers truly today struggle to be able to explain. If everything is here and now physical, why do we like beauty? They can't explain it. And so every human being actually knows glory. And across human history, we've tried to articulate this truth in some way.

We attribute words like beauty, or nostalgia, or romance, or satisfaction, or peace, or rest to those experiences. And yet, these things that I've listed, by their very nature, we also know are remarkably fleeting. Because to taste something of glory is to experience at the very same moment a remarkable sense of longing. As C.S. Lewis once put it:

Just as soon as you have experienced that perfect sunrise, the moment is gone. The sun is up. It's starting to get hot. The birds are now too noisy. As soon as that perfect cover drive has been hit, the ball has been fetched, and the bowler tries again.

The smell of two-stroke is soon replaced by the smell of your own body odour. The moment of glory is gone. And the reality of the human condition means that glorious things in this life are all too brief. But for a moment, it pointed to something greater, and that transcendent thing is glory. Glory matters, therefore, because we want it.

We long to experience it. And so this brings us all the way back to Christmas, back to our passage in Luke 2, when we ask the question: is it even possible to know God's glory? Our passage in Luke, we see the explicit mention of God's glory. Do you notice that? Luke 2:9-14 reads as follows: "An angel of the Lord appeared to them, the shepherds, and the glory of the Lord shone around them. They were filled with great fear. The angel said to them, 'For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.' And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased.'"

You can actually see two of those three different aspects of glory. Firstly, the glory, verse 9, is the radiating glory. It shines. It is so bright. It feels like it's daylight where they sit. Verse 14 and verse 20 in the passage, the angels and the shepherds ascribe, or they direct glory back to God. That third aspect of glory: that glory is praise being given back to God.

The angelic hosts and all the earth are called to bring their honour to God for what has taken place in Bethlehem. So at first, we see glory being displayed at the arrival of Jesus Christ at that first Christmas. But then later, in Luke's account of Jesus' life, as we see Jesus heading towards Jerusalem to die on the cross, that final showdown, as He's heading there, we're told that Jesus goes up to a mountainside to pray. And He takes with Him Peter, James, and John. And this is what Luke writes about what happens next.

"As Jesus was praying, the appearance of His face was altered, and His clothing became dazzling white. And behold, two men were talking with Him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of His departure, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and those who were with Him were heavy with sleep, but when they became fully awake, they saw His glory and the two men who stood with Him." On what the church later describes as the mount of transfiguration, glory is again, we see, mentioned alongside Jesus. But notice in verse 32 here, it's described by Luke as being His glory.

Moses and Elijah, they appear in glory, but Jesus at the end is standing there in His own glory. All of this, in the context, has taken place after just after Peter had confessed that Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Messiah. And for a moment, Jesus has been transformed into this heavenly figure before their eyes, and glory shines again all around Him. But even in this snapshot, again, this breaking through into the heavenly veil, we see a breadcrumb being left by Luke.

Something is about to take place where? In Jerusalem. Something must be accomplished, says Luke. And that thing is described for us in the final chapters of Luke's account, summed up by what happens here in Luke 24: "But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they, the women, went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared, and they found the stone rolled away from the tomb.

But when they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, 'Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how He told you while He was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and on the third day rise.'"

And they remembered His words. A few verses later, Luke, through the words of Jesus Himself, gives expression to exactly what was remembered by those disciples. To the two men on the road to Emmaus, Jesus says this, Luke 24:26: "Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and then enter into His glory?"

So we see at the birth of Christ, the transfiguration, and then His death and subsequent resurrection: glory. What Luke is doing is attesting to the fact that Jesus is the glorious God. Unmistakably, that is what Luke is making us decide on. But not only, he says, is Jesus God, but He is God who has come to earth. Heaven itself, so to speak, has broken through into earth. And the reason for this happening is given to us by the angel in Luke chapter 2: "Unto you is born today a Saviour."

All the things leading up to glory, seen here on earth, is tied to His salvation. To a world permeated with inherent glory, the glory of its Creator, comes the news that we have also needed a Saviour. And so in the words of John Calvin: "The glory of God shines indeed in all creatures, but never more brightly than in the cross." It was the cross, that thing that needed to be accomplished in Jerusalem, where God's glory shone brightest in Christ. John 1:14, that Tony read for us, the apostle John writes: "We have seen His glory. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."

And so we find this to be true: that on the one hand, every human being has an inkling of glory, and on the other, glory is seen most fully in and around the person of Jesus Christ. Glory is the thing that makes life beautiful, worthy, and precious, and it is found in Jesus. So what that means is that in the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 1: every single human being is without excuse. We all know God because we have seen His glory. And we know that glory and we know that glory matters because we love those things that are glorious.

But here's the rub: only some of us will experience that glory fully and forever. To the question, is it possible to know God's glory? The answer is yes. It is possible. It was initially seen in the person of Christ momentarily, but it is available in a lasting way, says the Bible, through faith and trust in His work.

You and I can experience glory forever, the Gospel says. So much so that, paraphrasing Paul in two Corinthians 3:18, through faith in Jesus, the veil of the mundane, the veil of the physical, has started falling away from our eyes, so that we've already started experiencing the glory of God more clearly now. Amazingly, He says, this beholding of glory causes us to be conformed more and more into something glorious ourselves. In the words of Paul, this is what he says: "We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord at the cross, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another."

In closing, friend, as you sense the glory of God this Christmas, as you enjoy it through all the wonderful experiences that can only be described today as glorious, the food we're going to eat, the drink we're going to drink, the love of beautiful grandkids, Cherry, the sound of belly laughs.

As we sing "Fields and floods repeating resounding joy," remember and believe that these are the reflections of glory being displayed at Christmas. That glory of heaven, which broke through in the person of Jesus Christ, so that we may know and taste for ourselves what glory is. And so good is this news that on one fateful night two thousand years ago, creation itself could not hold back its delight when night, for a brief moment, turned into day. A valley was filled with singing, and praise was directed back to God. A Saviour had been born. And because of that, friend, you and I may find peace, joy, and even glory.

Let's pray. Lord, we pray with anticipation and longing this morning that we may see something of Your glory. Lord, if it was possible only for a brief moment in this past twenty, thirty minutes of hearing Your Word and thinking back on what happened, Lord, if we could only have a taste, for a brief moment, of glory, we ask that You will complete that glory in us through genuine faith. Help us, Lord, to experience the truth as the apostle Paul said in two Corinthians: that we, as we behold the glory of the cross, as we behold the glory of God in Christ, may experience something of a transforming glory for ourselves, that we will be conformed more and more into things, creatures, beings that are glorious. We thank You, Lord, for this day that we can remember, but Lord, ultimately, we thank You for the moment it commemorates: that God became man, that He was God with us, and we saw His glory.

And so in His precious name, we pray. Amen.