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212 How Are the Christian Scriptures Confirmed by the Peculiar Glory of God?
of the gospel. This is most clearly seen in 2 Corinthians 4:4–6 (which
we unfolded in chapter 8). Paul refers to “the light of the gospel of the
glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” In other words, the gospel
is summed up as the gospel of the glory of Christ. And this glory is said
to stream out from the gospel with a light. In verse 4, “the god of this
world” (Satan) blinds people from seeing that light. In verse 6, God reverses
that blindness: He “gives the light of the knowledge of the glory
of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
In other words, the way the gospel wins the well-grounded confidence
of its hearers is by shining into the heart with “the light of the
gospel of the glory of Christ.” Don’t miss how amazing this is. The
gospel is a verbal narration of the events of Christ’s death and resurrection
and the meaning of those events (1 Cor. 15:1–4). And this verbal
narration is the prism through which God causes spiritual glory to
shine into the human heart. In this way, divine glory becomes the selfattesting
power of the gospel to win our heart’s embrace.
So when the catechism says that “the Scriptures manifest themselves
to be the word of God by the scope of the whole, which is to give all
glory to God,” it is linking the self-attestation of Scripture to the selfattestation
of the gospel (2 Cor. 4:4–6) and the self-attestation of the
whole created world (Rom. 1:18–21). One of the most important implications
is to show that this way of thinking about a well-grounded
confidence in the Bible is not only biblical but is at the heart of the
Bible—the pervasive exaltation of the glory of God, reaching its apex
in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
That God Is Glorious and How God Is Glorious
One question remaining from the last chapter is whether the Larger
Catechism is actually correct in saying that the “scope of the whole” of
Scripture is in fact “to give all glory to God.” So what I aim to do in this
chapter is show that the answer to that question is yes. In doing so, we
find that there are two ways that the Bible aims to give all the glory to
God. One is that the Bible says repeatedly, from beginning to end, that
God does all that he does for his own glory and that we should do the
same. The other is that the Bible describes what it is about God’s ways
that actually make them glorious. In other words, what we find is that