Dear Family

My family and I were driving back from East London a few nights ago, and I happened to glance up at the skies through the sunroof. The air was crisp and the visibility perfect. What I saw literally took my breath away (causing my wife to lecture me about keeping my eyes on the road). The sky was indescribably beautiful – plastered from the one end to the other with a display of stars unlike I had ever noticed before. Wow! My mind raced to Psalm 19 which says “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

“The heavens declare the glory of God….” What is the “glory of God”? Well, probably many answers would be correct, but I share the following option with you. For me, the glory of God is simply the indescribable, indefinable beauty of His spirit. Not an aesthetic or material beauty, but the beauty that oozes from His character, the very essence of His being. So, as I gaze at the heavens’ declaration, I humanly understand something of that beauty, complexity, wonder, majesty, weight, etc of who God actually is. Moses understood this as God’s goodness, and yes, it is that as well. But who can actually verbalize the glory of God – this eternal glory that is manifested in so many different ways, in so many attributes that He chooses to reveal to us?!

And the wonder of wonders is that the all glorious, Almighty God, chooses to cover us and even infuse us with His glory! The Psalmist in Psalm 8 says of man that God has “crowned him with glory”. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:6,7 “ For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” And again in Colossians 1:27 “…Christ in you, the hope of glory…”

All around us, all over us, and even in us, the awesome beauty of who He is. Why not pause a while to celebrate the glory of God – who He actually is? Eish!

Paul