CC--Christianese 24b: Glory/Glorify (part 2 of 4)

--As I explained yesterday, the Glory of God isn’t merely all His various perfect attributes or excellences, it is the very significance or weight of God.
--And whenever one encounters His Glory as it really is, it produces far more than a mere impulse to worship that which is so much better than you are. It has a demolishing effect, reducing your own opinion of yourself so dramatically that you feel worthless and insignificant in His presence. When you meet your favorite athlete, you are in awe of his superiority. When you meet God, you are devastated.
--This sudden existential catastrophe comes from having vastly underestimated God’s Glory and from having simultaneously vastly overestimated your own. Even though we all know God is more than we are of everything, we still all suffer from the erroneous tendency to put Him and us on the same scale or into the same category even to be compared to each other.
--It’s as if you had the ability to blow up a firecracker, and so you find yourself about to enter the presence of God thinking that He has the ability to blow up a stick of dynamite or even a bundle of sticks. So you anticipate standing back a few hundred feet just to be safe, only to discover that God’s Glory is on the order of a 100 megaton nuclear explosion, the sort of thing for which 200 feet makes no difference at all.
--And being so unprepared for this level of distinction, you are completely ruined by it.
--That’s why whenever God’s Glory appears to people, whether in the Temple at Jerusalem or on Mount Sinai or on the Mount of Transfiguration, it is a crushing, overwhelming, terrifying, unraveling sort of experience.
--And even when other things are brought into this proximity, if they survive, they then become even so transformed by carrying just the residual effects of this encounter that the ordinary person can’t even tell the difference (like with Moses needing to wear a veil after Sinai or with John the author of Revelation wrongly thinking that “glorified” Christians are really God Himself), again like something that’s been irradiated by a nuclear explosion becomes a source of dangerous radiation.
--Glory, then is the aesthetic beauty, rational, moral, and relational perfection, historical reputation, and existential and metaphysical significance of God all combined together.