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Majesty in Meekness: The Peculiar Glory in Jesus Christ 223
(Rom. 15:9). This is why Paul reaches the climax of all God’s merciful
work with the words, “To him be glory forever” (Rom. 11:36). This
is God’s unique glory—to be glorious in the condescension of his transcendent
greatness in mercy toward sinful man.
Jesus’s entire life and ministry were the embodiment of this peculiar
glory of God. At the end of his life, Jesus prayed to his Father, “I glorified
you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to
do” (John 17:4). His entire ministry was aimed at this: make the Father
look glorious. Earlier, he had cried out,
“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me
from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father,
glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have
glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” (John 12:27–28)
This was his mission. But how would it happen? By self-emptying and
servanthood and humiliation and death:
Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with
God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form
of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in
human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point
of death, even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:6–8)
Because of this majestic lowliness, in love for sinners, God exalted Jesus
and gave him a name above all names (Phil. 2:9). But the aim of it all
was that “every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory
of God the Father” (v. 11). This is the peculiar glory of God and of his
Scriptures: the glory of God is everywhere the aim, and the central means
is the self-humbling of God himself in Jesus Christ. This is the “light of
the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4).
The glory of the paradoxical juxtaposition of seeming opposites in
Jesus Christ is at the heart of how God shows himself glorious in the
Scriptures. Jesus said that all the Old Testament Scriptures were pointing
to him. “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted
to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke
24:27). The coming together of these paradoxes in Christ, with beautiful
harmony, is the center of the glory that shines through Scripture.