John Chapter 11
Glory is…
As far as the children remembered, Father had two muscular arms. One on each of his arms, Jiejie and Didi used to dangle on him like monkeys on a tree. Although the children had never seen their Father eating spinach, he reminded them of Popeye. When he played arm wrestling with the children, he allowed them to team up. Four little arms against his one big muscular arm. It was said, Father was trained a parachuter when in military service. He could jump from the airplane flying in mid-air and land on the ground softly. Of course, you wouldn’t normally see Father’s arm muscles, unless he rolled up his sleeves. After every arm wrestling, the children always came to an even firmer conviction of Father’s strength and invincibility. He remained their favorite sturdy super-duper tree extraordinaire. Ergonomically adjustable, friendly to touch and hug, and beneficial for training muscular strengths in little monkeys.
What is glory? Could I feel, touch, and hold it? If so, I wonder what size, shape, color, brightness, texture and temperature is glory?
Jesus was literarily ‘dying’ to show His glory in John 11.
Lazarus died. Mary and Martha grieved. Their friends moaned. The Jewish authority slaughtered in their hearts. The disciples, though physically with Jesus, were often spiritually, cognitively and emotionally apart. In the midst of a palette of intentions and emotions, Jesus only thought of one thing. He wanted to show them His glory and was resolved to do so even unto death.
To the Jews, there are different shades of death.
There are the just dead, the dead, and the very dead. They believe that after a person breathes his last, his or her soul lingers for three days and then finally departs on the fourth. Jesus therefore deliberately delayed His trip for couple days. He made sure by the time He reached Bethany, Lazarus would be considered very dead.
Even though Mary and Martha believed in resurrection, they didn’t entertain the idea that they would see the resurrection of their own brother in their life’s time. Yet that was exactly what they saw. Lazarus walked out from the tomb. Grief was instantaneously transformed into rejoicing.
Yet for Jesus, His glory was far from over. Lazarus’s resurrection was in fact a reference to His own resurrection, and the resurrections to come for those who believe in Him. If Lazarus’s resurrection was awesome, what was to come and will come would be even more awesome. Of course, no one knew at the time God’s master plan, nor did they know the full extent of His glory.
While Jesus was ‘dying’ to show God’s glory, Moses was ‘dying’ to see it. In Exodus 33, God promised goodness, mercy, compassion, and the proclamation of His very name in Moses’s presence. Yet, Moses was unsatisfied. He asked for more, he wanted to see God’s glory (Ex 33:18).
The request was so great that God had to have a conversation with Moses. Seeing His glory was tantamount to seeing God himself face to face, at the risk of Moses’s own life. But to give Moses a sense of what God’s full glory might be, God found a way around it.
He hid Moses in the cleft of a rock, and covered him with His hand as His glory passed by. Then God quickly removed His hand, just in time for Moses to catch a glimpse of His back. By allowing Moses to see the ‘edge’ of God’s glory, Moses’s life was presevered. What Moses asked was to witness and experience the essence of God – the fullest extent of His brilliance, dignity, beauty and might.