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A few years ago I was in a women’s group at the church I attend, and we were blessed to have some “newer” Christians there with us. As we were discussing, those of us more experienced Christians kept using various Christian-ese sort of words, and the leader could tell that the newer ladies were puzzled. So she stopped us and asked us to define some of those words; one of them was this week’s word, glory. I recall that word in particular was hard for us to define. We use it all the time, but what does it really mean?

The first place I go to try and understand words like these is my Theological Dictionary. It defines ‘glory’ as, “Exalted praise and honor. Glory is an attribute of God.” It further defines ‘glory of God’ as, “The divine essence of God as absolutely resplendent and ultimately great. The praise and honoring of God as the supreme Lord of all.” It lists some Bible passages to help out a little more: Revelation 21:23, 1 Corinthians 10:31, and Philippians 2:11.

As you can see from those definitions, glory is hard to define - especially when talking about God! Our human brains cannot understand God, so it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to define his attributes, or characteristics.

We do know that we should be in awe of God’s glory, because nothing on earth compares to it. The most beautiful summer day is completely ugly and dim compared to God’s glory. The most majestic sights on earth pale in comparison to God’s glory. He is so majestic and awesome that we simply cannot comprehend it. God’s glory can refer to God Himself, or it can refer to heaven as in Colossians 3:4, since heaven is simply being in God’s eternal and infinite presence.

God’s glory is one of the reasons we worship Him, because He is so much greater than us. We need to live our lives to honor Him because He is our glorious and majestic Creator. Nothing on earth can compare to God’s great and glorious essence.