From the Pulpit: God's indescribable glory

Several years ago, we took a family trip through southern Colorado. We drove through a long, flat area called the San Luis Valley that is about 7,000 feet above sea level. Mount Blanca rises up out of that more or less flat valley and soars to a height of more than 14,000 feet. It seems out of place. All around it is flat land and here is this massive peak jutting up above the tree line like a huge and forbidding sentinel. The God who can create something that awesome has to be powerful beyond description.

That isn’t all of the surprises in that valley. As you leave the main highway and drive around to the north side of Mount Blanca you are suddenly transported to another world. Suddenly you come into sand dunes, high up in the mountains, that cover an area of more than 50 square miles and that, at times, rise to heights of more than 1,000 feet. When you walk back into those dunes you can easily lose perspective of where you are. You can easily forget that you are in the Rocky Mountains and you almost expect to see camels and Bedouins come over the dunes toward you. It’s a wonderful experience to find something so unexpected in that environment. This world declares the glory of God in all of His wonderful character.

The message that we find in Ezekiel 1 is that our God is glorious beyond description. Ezekiel’s job is to present God to us in all of the different aspects of His character. He starts with God’s glory and he finds that he can’t even begin to describe it. But he finds that he can let it wash over him and fill all of his senses and change him. He finds that he can understand some of the glory of God, as much as his mind can hold, and the rest is a sensory experience that he can’t fully understand, but he can definitely know that it happened.

As Ezekiel prepared to enter his ministry as a priest, the Lord appeared to him and gave him the message that would be the mark of his ministry for the rest of his life. It began with a vision so vast and fearsome that it would change him forever.  

The first sense that Ezekiel gains of the glory of God is that of immense power. In verse 4 Ezekiel describes a great storm.  Anyone who has ever seen thunderclouds billowing up in the distance and watched as they became dark and ominous and forbidding can have a sense of the power that Ezekiel is seeing. Ezekiel sees that dark and ominous cloud in the distance and he knows that there is a storm brewing like none that he has ever seen before. The word he uses here that is translated ‘north’ in English is a Hebrew word that actually speaks of that which is dark and forbidding and fearsome. Jeremiah 1:14 tells us that God’s wrath burst upon Judah from the north and that it would do it again. Storms which came from the north were considered to be especially dark and destructive. By using that word Ezekiel is adding to the atmosphere of horrifying power in this storm that he sees.

The black, foreboding clouds are filled with lightning, described by Ezekiel as a fire that seemed to seize and enfold the clouds.  The fire within the clouds is described as shining like a glowing metal. The metal is identified as amber in some translations, or more accurately as electrum, a brilliant metallic substance compounded of gold and silver. The violence of this approaching storm is indescribable.

What adds to the power of the storm is the light that seems to surround it. Ezekiel describes it as a brilliance that encompasses the entire cloud. Clearly this horrible storm was different from anything he had ever seen before.

We can only imagine the fear and the sense of wonder that gnawed at Ezekiel’s soul as he saw this terrifying vision bearing down on him. He describes for us only what he can understand. He only begins to touch on the fullness of the power of God he is seeing. Yet the little bit that he can comprehend is enough to produce mortal dread.

Above all else the glory of God is power. We can know only a small part of God’s power. We can see it in mountain peaks that rise up from nowhere and brush the sky. We can study it in the explosion of a nuclear weapon. We can feel it in the warmth of the sun, or the tender touch of a child. We can understand some of it, but we can’t fully describe it. Until we acknowledge that fact we will never be ready to know the power of God.

The glory of God is power. Let the vision of that power sweep over you and fill your senses. That’s where we begin to know the glory of God.