God's Intrinsic Glory

According to I Corinthians 10:31, we understand that glorifying God is to be the chief motive for all we do. The chief end of man, as stated in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” If our desire is to do that, first we must understand to a degree what God’s glory is, and second, we must investigate how it is that we can be part of glorifying him. This post will address the former idea, while the next post will address the latter. We will look again to an excerpt from Dr. Lawson’s Made in Our Image.

First and foremost, God’s glory refers to the sum total of all His divine attributes. It is all that He intrinsically is. It includes all the divine characteristics that are innately His and all the divine perfections that are inherently His—His holiness, righteousness, wrath, truth, love, grace, goodness, sovereignty, and power. God and His glory cannot be separated, for it is who He is.

For an example of what I mean by intrinsic, look around you at the created world. All the things that you see have characteristics that tell you what they are. The sun is bright, the sky is blue, and water is wet. We do not make them that way; that is what they are. One does not make the sun bright—it isbright. One does not make the sky blue—it is blue. One does not make water wet—it is wet. In all of these cases, the attribute is intrinsic to the object, inseparably bound to the essential nature of the thing.

It is precisely this way with God’s glory. God’s glory is as essential to His being as light is to the sun, as blue is to the sky, and as wet is to water. When we speak of God’s glory, we mean first of all His intrinsic glory. It is all that God is, the whole of His attributes, the sum total of the greatness of His divine being.

In this sense, we cannot give God glory, for He by His own nature already is glorious. We cannot add to or subtract from His intrinsic glory one iota. As the God who was, is, and is to come, He is forever glorious and perfect. In this sense, the glory of God is intrinsic within Himself, unaffected by outward forces or circumstances.

All quotations taken from Made in Our Image, by Steven Lawson.