Tracking on What is the Glory of God and Not of God

June 4, 2021              John 5: 44-45

39 ‘You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. ⁴⁰Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. ⁴¹I do not accept glory from human beings. ⁴²But I know that you do not have the love of God in you. ⁴³I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; if another comes in his own name, you will accept him. ⁴⁴How can you believe when you accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God? ⁴⁵Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope. ⁴⁶If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. ⁴⁷But if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?’

6After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias.  ²A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. ³Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. ⁴Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.

            I had to read verse 44 a few times to decipher what Jesus was saying.  Flip the first part, before the ‘and’, to something like “when you accept glory from one another, how can you believe?” (in God); “when you not seek the glory that comes from God alone?”  The issue at play here is not just that they do not seek after God, but that they have replaced God, one with another.  The reward is ‘glory’.  How do we define that? 

            If we go to the Confessions, specifically the Westminster Shorter Catechism, glorifying God is defined as the chief end of humanity, that and enjoying God forever.  “How” is given answer in question 2, and I quote “The Word of God which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him.”

            So…why go to the Confessions?  Why not do a word study in Scripture ourselves to see what it means about God and Glory?  Have you heard the expression about reinventing the wheel?  The Confessions and Catechisms and Statements of Faith that are gathered together in the Book of Confessions of the PCUSA are the primary guide to understanding the big sweeps of the Bible.  Each was written in a time and a place and for a purpose important to the Church in that moment. 

            The Westminster Standards, the Shorter and Longer Catechisms and the Confession, were all written to become law in England in the time after the Reformation.  They were written in Westminster Palace and Westminster Abbey, where the English Parliament sits and where Royal rituals take place in London.  It is a lesson in English history to read how these became and then un-became British law, but their purpose was clear, to establish what they believed and how to teach it in their churches.  So to use the Shorter Catechism is to use THE premiere confessional foundations of the Presbyterian tradition.

            So the rule for glorifying God comes from the Bible.  And Jesus narrows the scope for us.  He tells them that it is not Jesus himself accusing them before the Father, but rather the accusations come from Moses-upon whom they set their hopes. 

            Moses is the traditional author of the Torah, the Law, the first five books of the Bible.  It is from these books that the entire Jewish law code of the time of Jesus was drawn.  This legal code covered the moments, covered the precedents, covered the issues that the Torah did not.  At best, it filled in the gaps, at worst, it created a minutia of legal bindings that tied the people in knots. 

            Let us return to the issue of Sabbath, which we looked at again a couple posts back.  Jesus was all for the power of the Lord, on the day of the Lord, to heal the man who was in need.  The Leadership was all about how Jesus transgressed the rules of the Sabbath in telling the man to dare to pick up his bedroll, to do work on the day of Rest.  They were very proud of their laws, that is where they found their glory, in one another, creating this religious system built, in their minds, on the law of Moses.

            This goes to why Jesus has come in the first place, to bring the faith back to God the Father.  In this debate with the Leadership, he is showing how it has gone astray.  More focus on Moses next time.

            Peace, Pastor Peter