Brothers and fathers, listen to me! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham. —Acts 7:2
If we want to see the glory of God, we should know something of the God of glory. I fear that an unhappy difference with so many of us, compared to Stephen, is that we are experts in speaking of the glory of God but not in seeing it.
What do you suppose was the first thing that crossed Stephen’s mind when it came to describing God? Jesus said that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. If you had to fill in the blank and come up with the one word, above all, that best describes the God of the Bible, what word would you use? The best single word to describe the God of the Bible is glory, and that is what Stephen said.
There is so much that we could say about this word. But the glory of God is the sum total of all His attributes, and I think after all is said and done, it comes down to two things:
* His mind: that is His will, what He wants, what He is up to—you could say the glory of God is the dignity of His will.
* It’s the very way He manifests Himself, the way He chooses to reveal Himself.
When we get to know God, we discover that the greatest thing about Him is His glory, and we want to see that glory. What a sight it was that this man who could begin talking about the God of glory would in the end see the glory of God. He fell asleep. He lost his life over it. He lost the battle, but he won the war.
Excerpted from The God of the Bible (Authentic Media, 2002).
