One of many insightful excerpts from Chad Bird’s latest book, Your God Is Too Glorious: Finding God in the Most Unexpected Places:
“These Old Testament stories that illustrate God’s backward ways of engaging us in the world—then and now—are all preambles to the Lord’s ultimate revelation. Genesis to Malachi is one long drumroll that summons the cosmos to stand at attention before the climactic unveiling of the glory of God.
And there it is, in a dying man. Soldiers gamble for his clothing. His closest friends have skulked away. His fiercest enemies spit insults in his face. Even a fellow condemned man mocks him. There is nothing, not one iota, of obvious God stuff going on here. It looks like hell. No one would walk outside Jerusalem to this spot of public execution, stand at the foot of this man’s cross, look up, and say, “There is the glory of the Almighty. There is the unveiling of who God is, how God woks, how he comes to us.” The opposite would be said. “Looks like the devil’s work. There is the shame of failure.” (23)
COMMENTS
4 responses to “The Climactic Unveiling of the Glory of God”
Leave a Reply
Except those standing at the foot of the cross did recognize the unveiling of God.
Matthew 27:54
When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”
Jonathan,
I think Chad’s point stands: the glory of God was unveiled in the death of Jesus and no recognized it. The centurion identified Jesus as the son of God, or perhaps even “a” son of God based on “the earthquake” and all those other supernatural things going on, not the crucifixion of a carpenter. We expect God to be in the obvious things like hurricanes and such, like when preachers talk about natural disasters being one of the ways “God” punishes. But when there is a mass-shooting, everyone says “Where is God?!”
The presence and glory of God is one of the major themes of the Old Testament. Describing the OT as merely a drumroll is too much of an understatement.
[…] bottle dropper’s mystery continues to captivate and intrigue, the anticipation mounts for the climactic unveiling that promises to bring her identity into the spotlight. The enigma that has woven itself into the […]