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16 Introduction
Scripture is not reserved for scholars but is available for all who have
eyes to see.
And it is devastating because no human being can see this glory without
God’s help. This is not because we are helpless victims of blindness
but because we are lovers of blindness. “This is the judgment: the light
has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the
light because their works were evil” (John 3:19). We are not chained
in a dark cell, longing to see the sunshine of God’s glory. We love the
cell, because sin and Satan have deceived us into seeing the drawings
on the wall as the true glory and the source of greatest pleasure. Our
prison cell of darkness is not the bondage of external constraint but of
internal preference. We have exchanged the glory of God for images
(Rom. 1:23). We love them. That is our blindness.
What must happen is described by the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians
4:6. The God who created light in the beginning must shine into our
dark cell to reveal himself. “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of
darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” The answer to our darkness
is the shining of divine glory into our hearts by means of the light
of knowledge—the knowledge mediated by God’s inspired Scripture.
That is what this book is about.
This does not mean that there is nothing we can do in our quest
to see the self-authenticating glory of God in Scripture. Jesus gave the
apostle Paul an impossible mission. He sent Paul “to open their eyes, so
that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan
to God” (Acts 26:18). If it is hopeful for the apostle to move toward
the blind, then it is hopeful for the blind to move toward the apostle.
Blind or seeing, that is what I hope you will do with me in this book.
The Peculiar Glory
Thus the main burden of this book is parts 4 and 5 (chapters 8–17).
In part 4, I probe into what really happens in our experience when we
see the glory of God in Scripture; and I try to show how this authenticates
the Scripture as God’s life-giving, infallible word. In part 5, I
argue that the way the Scriptures convince us is by the revelation of
a peculiar glory. In other words, the power of Scripture to warrant