The Glory Of God- Or Not?

16 October 2026  Ephesians 1:11-14

“…[W]e who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of His glory.” (Ephesians 1:12)     

Some people are embarrassed by the miracles of Christianity, and wish they could be suppressed. The Real Presence, the healings, the exorcisms are distractions, they think, from the “real value” of Christianity, which is its ethics. What they really want is a religion of “love thy neighbor,” soup kitchens, food pantries, and help for the homeless.

They want others to be able to discern their faith by “the way I live my life,” without having to mention things like the Red Sea, Bethlehem, or Calvary.

Secularists fear that they will die if they behold the glory of God – and of course, they will. They will either cease being secular, or so insist on being secular that they will deny what is most real, the source of all reality, and finally descend into nonsense and irrelevance.

But you can’t do that with Christianity and have it remain Christian. As C.S. Lewis said:

[T]he Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, which is uncreated, eternal, came into Nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing Nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away, there is nothing specifically Christian left. There may be many admirable human beings which Christianity shares with all other systems in the world, but there would be nothing specifically Christian. (The Grand Miracle, p. 55)

The great Christian proclamation is that in Jesus Christ the glory of God has drawn near to us all without killing us, but rather teaching and saving us, and showing us heaven. Prior to Jesus, the glory of God was a thing to be feared – “no one can see God and live” (cf. Exodus 33:20). Some, like Moses and Jacob got obscure glimpses in the dark and in a cloud; others, like Isaiah and Ezekiel, received clearer visions and expected to die moments later. In Jesus, however, God descended into the very smallest form of human life, a human embryo, descended even further into a human corpse, and raised it all up, alive and fit for heaven in Him, and only Him. When St. Paul encountered the Risen Christ, the experience initially blinded him with its brightness, but the same Christ in baptism restored his sight, and thereafter St. Paul resolved to live only “for the praise of His glory” (Ephesians 1:12). Baptism is still the beginning of that life.

Some are embarrassed by the miracles of Christianity because they are scorned by the secular world, and so they want to talk about only those things that the secular world admires. The secular world pressures people like this because it is just as afraid of the glory of God as anyone in the Old Testament. Secularists fear that they will die if they behold the glory of God – and of course, they will. They will either cease being secular, or so insist on being secular that they will deny what is most real, the source of all reality, and finally descend into nonsense and irrelevance. We see that now when some still deny the most basic distinction between persons, viz. how they are either male or female.

We are not yet done with the nonsense, but we will be, for everyone must make up their minds about the glory of God sooner or later. Only joy and peace await those who confess it, who live for it, who live in it. For those who don’t, they will get what they wish – a life that finally lacks coherence because it has rejected the One Thing that can hold it all together.

We live for the praise of His glory, or we reject reality and live with the consequences. At the end of the day, those are the choices.