--The word glory has a pretty simple meaning, glory is the characteristic of being excellent or outstanding in some quality. We might say that the sunset was glorious or that the recital was glorious or that the glory for the victory went to some key agent in the activity.
--Naturally, since God is the perfect Being, He is uniquely excellent in every way possible. Thus, the glory of God is simply His perfection or wonderfulness as shown through His character and actions.
--But to say it this way understates the importance of the concept.
--We know from the Bible that when people came into proximity or contact with God’s Glory, they were always affected by it tremendously. And the primary way they responded was with a sense of not only their own badness or worthlessness (being very much not excellent, one might say), but also of their own insignificance.
--They weren’t just full of admiration for some high-performing individual they finally got to meet in person. They were undone, even ruined by the encounter.
--You see, one way of talking about Glory is as the catch-all for goodness. But God isn’t merely a very good being, He is Being itself. And so, His very essence or nature is significance itself, what modern authors (following C.S. Lewis) refer to as having weight or gravity (a word which nicely captures both seriousness and weight. God matters more than anything else, to such a degree that God is “mattering” itself. Nothing matters apart from Him (both in the sense of existing as matter and in having significance).
--Thus, the Glory of God is the sense that if we are like planets or small particles in space, He is not merely the Sun but the grandest and most impressive sun possible.
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