Glory: A Word Study

{A huge welcome & thank you to Amanda for this beautiful guest post. You can read her bio and find her links at the bottom of this post!} 

The Beauty of His Spirit

-a word study on Glory

Glory.

When I asked God what He wanted me to study for this blog post, He immediately gave me this word. I’ve read it thousands of times in the Bible, but I’ve never stopped to examine what it really means. Not only that, but as I started my research for this post, I quickly realized that there was a depth and a beauty to “glory” that I didn’t expect!

So, I’m truly excited to bring you this word study about “glory” and give you some ideas about how you can write the Scriptures through Bible journaling with it.

How to Do Biblical Word Study

Before we move forward, I want to let you know how I personally go about doing a word study.

1. Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance: Usually, the first place I go is Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance where I look up the definition for the word.

The reference for the word “glory” I will be using is Psalm 19:1. In Hebrew, it is “kabode” (3519) and it means “properly weight; but only figuratively in a good sense, splendor or copiousness: – glorious (-ly), glory, honour (-able).”

2. Look at multiple occurrences: From there, I look for other places the word appears in the Bible. The word “kabode” occurs 200 times in the Bible, so it gets used a lot! I wasn’t going to read all of them, so I specifically looked for references where people experienced God’s glory and I read about those. However, I often look at a variety of contexts in which the word is used to give me a more rounded understanding of what the word REALLY means.

3. Commentaries: After I feel like I have a strong grasp about how it is used in the Bible, I move onto commentaries. Some of my favorite places to look are DesiringGod.org, GotQuestions.org, and BibleStudyTools.com. In this case, however, reading these commentaries did not ease my concerns about how I was going to define what glory meant!

Nowhere could I find glory = _____. It didn’t exist. But thankfully, John Piper helped a sister out and explained that trying to define the word “glory” was like trying to define the word “beauty”. After my studying, this comparison made a lot of sense.
PINNING “GLORY” DOWN-

How would you go about defining the word “beauty” to someone? You can’t define it simply, like you might define a bird or a tree, beauty encompasses too many things. You have to show them examples of beauty. It is the same with the word “glory”, you have to show people where glory occurs and allow them to experience it.

Glory is the beauty of God’s Spirit and the clearest picture of glory I can give you is Jesus.

Jesus is the most tangible definition of God’s glory (Hebrews 1:3). His life, what He stood for, why He died, how He loves you, all of these things are the summation of glory.

It can be easier to understand what glory is if we describe how we respond to it as people. Glory is something that occurs all around you. It occurs in you. It refreshes your heart. It connects you to God. It provides for all your needs. It helps you realize what you were meant for.

I know, I know. All this waxes on poetic, but glory is like poetry. It is the rustle of the leaves in the fall. It is the breathtaking view of the mountains that makes you cry. It is the ocean crashing onto the shore. It is in the shining of the moon and stars (1 Corinthians 15:41)!

Encountering God’s glory is that moment during the worship service when you forget where you are and time seems like a distant concept. Glory connects you to God. It is something God radiates. Heaven is full of it (Revelation 21:23). You are destined to be full of it (Ephesians 3:16-19).

THE FULL WEIGHT OF GOD:

Glory can be described as the full weight of God’s nature. All of His goodness and faithfulness, all of the “I AM” statements He makes about Himself, all of His power and kingliness, all of His creativity, holiness, righteousness, wrath, and love, all of these things make up His glory. Glory is not one thing: it’s all the things about God!

We can liken glory to a cut diamond. It is brilliant, it reflects light, it is beautiful, and it has many different facets. Or we can compare glory to the sun: it brings life, warmth, light, and healing to our bodies and the earth, it is overwhelming big (a million earths can fit in it), and you can’t look at it directly or get too close or you’ll die.

REACTIONS TO GOD’S GLORY:

All in all, glory is pretty much mind-blowing, and we see this in how people often react to it in the Old Testament.

Moses asked to see God’s glory, to which He agreed, but only allowed Moses to see His back because looking at His face would have killed Moses (Exodus 33:18-23). Whoa, that sounds intense! Ezekiel saw God’s glory in a vision and he described it as a rainbow all around him, and then he fell on his face (Ezekiel 1:28).

Isaiah also witnessed God’s glory in a vision and it made him cry because he became painstakingly aware of his sin (Isaiah 6:5).

CONCLUSION:

So, how do you define glory? It is the essence of God and it is so good (holy, righteous, full of justice, wrath, and love) that too much of it will kill you. So, handle it with caution! 😉

BIBLE JOURNALING PROMPT:

At the beginning of this post, I told you I was going to give you some ideas about how you can Bible journal and write the Scriptures with the word “glory”…but how do you do that if “glory” encompasses so many things? Don’t worry, I got you covered!

One of my favorite ways to commemorate a word study is to take the Hebrew or Greek word (we just studied the Hebrew word “kabode”) and to letter it in my journaling Bible and to think of a word picture that I can easily draw with my lettering.

Because glory is a lot like the sun, I decided to hand letter the word and, above it, to draw a simple rising sun. Below the word “kabode”, I wrote the definition from the Strong’s and did a bit of journaling about what I found in my word study. You could do the same or rewrite the key verse below the definition of kabode.

As a Bible journaling teacher, my favorite medium is watercolor, so I added a touch of yellow paint and it really made the whole entry pop!

If you don’t like the idea of a drawing a sun, we also likened glory to a diamond, so you could draw to a diamond. You could paint a view of the mountains, the ocean, or someone worshiping God with their hands raised. You could draw Jesus, the stars in the sky, or simply stick with hand lettering “kabode”. If you felt very brave, you could try writing kabode in the original Hebrew language!

There are so many possibilities because glory encompasses so many things. I would encourage you to try the idea that speaks the most to your heart!

If you give it a try, I’d love to see it! I am very active on Instagram at @movethemountains, so don’t forget to tag me. If you would like to learn more about Bible journaling for beginners, I have a free tutorial series called “Tuesdays to Create”: you can sign up for it at bit.ly/biblejournalingtutorial.

Thanks for joining and journaling with me!

Peace and love,

Amanda

Amanda Schenkenberger is the voice behind Move the Mountains and a Bible journaling teacher. She has a passion for helping women get into the Word creatively and creates tutorials and kits for Bible journaling beginners and those who don’t feel artsy. Join her free Bible journaling tutorial series called, “Tuesdays to Create” at bit.ly/biblejournalingtutorial.