Scriptures selfattesting authority question doctrine truthfulness Scriptures

Majesty in Meekness: The Peculiar Glory in Jesus Christ 225
love him for it. If he recruited only like the Marines, who want strength,
we would despair of coming.
But this quality of meekness by itself, separated from Christ’s majesty,
would not be glorious. The gentleness and humility of the lamb-like
Lion become brilliant alongside the limitless and everlasting authority
of the lion-like Lamb. Only this fits our worldwide dreams. To be sure,
we are weak and weary and heavy laden. But there burns in every
heart, at least from time to time, a dream that our lives will count for
something great. To this dream Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and
on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all
nations. . . . And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age”
(Matt. 28:18–20).
We know, from the built-in template of our own weakness together
with our longing for transcendent greatness, that the glory of Jesus
Christ—the Lion and the Lamb—is the glory we were made for. This is
the heart of the glory that shines into our hearts through the Scriptures
by the power of the Holy Spirit and convinces us that they are the very
words of God.
Majesty Expressed through Meekness
We are still probing into the meaning of the answer of the Larger Catechism
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.” I argued
in this chapter that the Scriptures do, in fact, give all glory to God.
Not only that, but from beginning to end they present God himself as
giving all glory to God. He does all that he does with the aim of communicating
his glory. What gives this portrait a distinct and compelling
glory is that God magnifies his greatness by making himself the supreme
treasure of our hearts, at great cost to himself (Rom. 8:32), and so serving
us in the very act of exalting his glory.
The heart of God’s glory, as he reveals it in the Scriptures, is the way
his majesty is expressed through his meekness. I called this God’s paradoxical
juxtaposition of seemingly opposite traits. Jonathan Edwards
called it “an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.” This pattern
of God’s self-revelation in lion-like majesty and strength together
with lamb-like meekness and service runs through the whole Bible and