ABOUT GLORY

Many struggle with the concept of glory. I asked a preacher one day, a doctor of theology, a simple question; What is glory? His answer was a confused look, and his response was “Well, glory.” Apparently, professors of divinity at Chicago Theological Seminary had not taught about such an important topic is gloriousness. 

Because Jesus said, “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). There is a symbiotic relationship between sin and glory, is there not? Sin is missing the mark of a glorious condition. “Glory,” is essentially excellence or splendor, both characteristics of a Perfect God.  So, what does glory have to do with people? 

“God created man in His own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.  And God blessed them...” (Gen 1:27-28). Therefore, man was created glorious like God! Image in that passage is literally “shade” (Strong’s Definitions) so therefore man is a “shadow” of God. The image was not the flesh but the bodily shaped living soul of the man whose kind from which everyone descended. In other words, the species of human beings was originally like God inside. His “blessing” was identifying them with His ID (“id” in analytical psychology). 

The “shadow” in analytical psychology is “the thing a person has no wish to be.” That is not from a Christian source (Karl Jung), but after sin, indeed, nobody wants to be that “awful thing.” From Strong’s Greek Lexicon, the word hagios means “awful thing.” Pertaining to the birth of Jesus, Matthew wrote, “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost” (Mat 1:18). 

“Holy” in that passage is “hagios,” meaning that Jesus was the child of the “awful thing,” specifically pneuma (ghost); hence an “awful spirit.” Jesus was the child of an awful Spirit, and He was “cloned,” so to speak, in the Image of God; not that God is awful, but mankind, since original sin, has considered Him so! 

God is glorious and whatever the substance of Adam’s flesh, his soul was the glorious shadow of God. Scripture confirms that conclusion: Pertaining to the sixth day when Adam was made (read that “mankind,” both male and female), it is written, “God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good (maod tob)” (Gen 1:31). It was “exceedingly good” in the sense of fertility (Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon). Both Adam and Eve had superb genetics for reproduction. With that said, glory has much ado with genetics!  

God was glorious because He generated Adam, and Adam was glorious because he generated Eve from the Good Seed that God had imbued in him. God had made Adam “the awful thing” a “perfect thing” with the same Spirit as Himself. As such, Adam was of God (wo-God) and Eve was of Adam, or “woman.” Adam and Eve were of one flesh, and both were of one “awful thing” — the Holy Breath (pneuma) of God. 

Jesus, for the remission of sins, “breathed on them, and saith unto them, ‘Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (John 20:22). Jesus breathed that “awful Ghost” into those who followed Him. 

Therefore, from the perspective of the world, the Holy Ghost is an “awful thing,” which is obvious to most Christians, but to God, the Holy Ghost is a “splenderous thing”! It is the glorious “Shadow” of God. Christians know that when they sin, indeed God shadows them, and guilt ensues. Guilt is the tool that God uses to correct the sin within. 

Sinners — everyone — because all have sinned, “come short of the glory of God.” As glory is “exceedingly good fertility,” then glory is genetic. It is coming short of the image of God generated in Adam, who was glorious himself — with the image of God within.  

Now for more on the spiritual “shadow.” Physical things (Col 2:16) “Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Col 2:7). First among those things is meat. The flesh of man was a “shadow” of the forthcoming body of Christ. The “shadow” is not Jung’s “awful thing” within, but God’s glory that is manifested in the body (flesh) of Jesus. There is some “Thing” in Jesus that was in God. Of course, it was that “awful thing,” the Holy Spirit, but there was some “thing” in the flesh of Jesus as well. 

God identified His new creature as “Adam” and his name was his kind. Likewise, Eve was of the same kind with dependence on the first kind; hence the female gender is “woman.” God identified them with a code to differentiate them. That code was “Adam’s kind” from God’s “Supreme Kind.” The Supreme Identity is JHWH, “I AM THAT I AM” an acronym from the Hebrew Yod He Waw He. As it turns out, the elements in the DNA of mankind almost contains “God” in its content — “JHWG.” It makes sense that before sin, that Adam’s identifier encoded in his chromosomes would be identical to God’s. Sin could have made JHWG come short of JHWH. (See the text below; Adolph Tan, 2014)

Therein was man (Adam) after sin, coming short of the glory of God! No longer would the new “existence” “be as God” (Gen 3:5) but only desire to be God. Thusly, Adam missed the mark of God which is “sin.” Thereafter, as David wrote about himself, he was “shapen in iniquity” (Psalm 51:5), or literally, genned with depravity (Strong’s Definitions). That original sin wherein Adam came short of the previous glory with which he was endowed, was passed along by the genesis of Adam from generation to generation.  

“Gloriousness” is essentially like God in genome and Spirit, or in identification and desires. 

King David wrote some psalms that have been found since canon was determined. One of particular interest is, “O Lord, cleanse me from the evil leprosy and do not let it again return to me” (Psalm 51:5). 

Leprosy is dead and dying flesh. Evil leprosy would be the depravity of the dead flesh. Hence, “evil leprosy” of which David wrote is the degeneration of man’s once glorious condition — Good flesh and Good Spirit — the flesh with the Identity of God within. “Evil leprosy” is the glorious image of God that has gradually degenerated through the generations.  

David wrote this as well, “In a great voice glorify God; in the congregation of the many ones proclaim His Glory” (Psalm 154”1). I am doing that as I write.  

To be glorified, requires that God be glorified. The mark of God is His Glory. That is who He IS! He is not an “awful thing” but a “Perfect thing”! He is the Image in which Christians are His “shadow.” Proclaiming the Glory of God is done in remembrance of Him (Luke 22:19) — that we should be like Him in the body and blood, both of which contain what? The genome of God in Jesus.  

The flesh is weak because it is no longer glorious. It has become the “awful thing” and misses the glory of God. The Spirit is willing because it is endeavoring to be like God despite the depravity (degenerate) flesh.  

So, be like God as best you can; that is to love one another as God loves us. That is to be the nature of the renewed creature!