God Shines Forth E-Book

Michael Reeves

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Union
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Why Missions and Evangelism Are an Overflow of Delighting in God  Evangelism and missions are parts of the Christian life often accompanied by fears, insecurities, and cultural pressures. In this addition to the Union series, Daniel Hames and Michael Reeves argue that an individual's relationship with God influences their evangelism and missions more than anything else. Scripture clearly shows that a believer's responsibility is to make God known in the world, but this cannot be done without first knowing and enjoying God. To illustrate how knowledge of God influences evangelism and missions, Hames and Reeves address biblical themes such as the glory of God, Christ's sacrifice, the fallenness of man, and the church's future hope. There is hope for those who find these topics intimidating—when believers focus on the glory of the lamb of God, the gospel will shine through them.  - Ideal for Laypeople, Pastors, and Students: Specifically for those interested in theology and missions  - Union Series: The final ebook in the Union series which invites readers to experience deeper enjoyment of God  - Concise Version Also Available: What Fuels the Mission of the Church? by Daniel Hames and Michael Reeves  - Biblically Grounded: Teaches how biblical themes such as the glory of God, Christ's sacrifice, the fallenness of man, and the church's future hope inform evangelism and missions

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“The church in the West is experiencing a lull in evangelism at a time when the need has never been greater—nor the opportunity brighter—for the church to tell the world the good news in Jesus. In God Shines Forth, Daniel Hames and Michael Reeves take us to the heart of the biblical motivation to share Christ: a proper vision of our great and glorious God. The more we are overflowing with the glorious love of God, the more we will overflow with words of the gospel to others. This book will show you how to overflow with gospel love.”

Ed Stetzer, Executive Director, Wheaton College Billy Graham Center

“I could hardly put this book down—it made my heart sing. God Shines Forth is an immensely joyful and faith-building encouragement to all who love and long to enjoy and participate in God’s mission.”

Gloria Furman, coeditor, Joyfully Spreading the Word; author, Missional Motherhood

“After decades of mission work, I’ve witnessed the various motivations driving missionary efforts, from the worst (a guilty conscience or vain ambition) to the good (a genuine concern for the lost). But Hames and Reeves call us to remember the best: that knowing and loving God deeply, fully, with a reckless abandon is our first and most essential priority for missions. They make it clear that when we truly know the nature of our loving, giving, gracious God, when we delight in him, we have the true fuel from God for missions. Don’t let anyone you know go to the mission field without reading this book.”

J. Mack Stiles, former Pastor, Erbil Baptist Church, Iraq

“The big idea of this book is both simple and life-transforming: ‘It is precisely because God is outgoing and communicative that he is so good and delightful.’ Thus, as this God’s beloved people delight in him, they are propelled to speak about his goodness to others by communicating the good news. Yes, evangelism is a biblically commanded duty for all Christians. Yes, the Great Commission is a scripturally grounded purpose of the church. Yes, missions is a theologically supported enterprise for the benefit of the world. Ultimately, however, this endeavor is an overflow from knowing God. This book gets this truth right!”

Gregg R. Allison, Professor of Christian Theology, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Secretary, Evangelical Theological Society; author, Historical Theology; Sojourners and Strangers; and Embodied

“Missiology tends to be long on pragmatics and short on theology. What a mistake! This book grounds our missiology in our theology, and provides a vision for how the truths of the Bible shape us and authentically motivate us toward the Great Commission.”

Josh Moody, Senior Pastor, College Church, Wheaton, Illinois; President and Founder, God Centered Life Ministries

God Shines Forth

Union

A book series edited by Michael Reeves

Rejoice and Tremble: The Surprising Good News of the Fear of the Lord, Michael Reeves (2021)

What Does It Mean to Fear the Lord?, Michael Reeves (2021, concise version of Rejoice and Tremble)

Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners, Dane C. Ortlund (2021)

How Does God Change Us?, Dane C. Ortlund (2021, concise version of Deeper)

The Loveliest Place: The Beauty and Glory of the Church, Dustin Benge (2022)

Why Should We Love the Local Church?, Dustin Benge (2022, concise version of The Loveliest Place)

God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church, Daniel Hames and Michael Reeves (2022)

What Fuels the Mission of the Church?, Daniel Hames and Michael Reeves (2022, concise version of God Shines Forth)

God Shines Forth

How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

Daniel Hames and Michael Reeves

God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Hames and Michael Reeves

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

Cover image: Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images

First printing 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the authors.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-7514-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7517-4 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7515-0 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-7516-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hames, Daniel, author. | Reeves, Michael (Michael Richard Ewert), author.

Title: God shines forth : how the nature of God shapes and drives the mission of the church / Daniel Hames and Michael Reeves.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2022. | Series: Union | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022005075 (print) | LCCN 2022005076 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433575143 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781433575150 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433575167 (mobipocket) | ISBN 9781433575174 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Spirituality—Christianity. | Mission of the church. | Missions—Theory.

Classification: LCC BV4501.3 .H3535 2022 (print) | LCC BV4501.3 (ebook) | DDC 266—dc23/eng/20220414

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005075

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005076

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

For Paul and Janey Hames

Psalm 113

The Mighty One, God the Lord,

speaks and summons the earth

from the rising of the sun to its setting.

Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,

God shines forth.

Psalm 50:1–2

Contents

Series Preface

Introduction: The Great Admission

1  The Glory of God

2  The Lamb on His Throne

3  Fullness

4  Emptiness

5  Born in Zion

6  Arise, Shine!

7  Those Who Look to Him Are Radiant

8  We Will See Him as He Is

General Index

Scripture Index

Series Preface

Our inner convictions and values shape our lives and our ministries. And at Union—the cooperative ministries of Union School of Theology, Union Publishing, Union Research, and Union Mission (visit www.theolo.gy)—we long to grow and support men and women who will delight in God, grow in Christ, serve the church, and bless the world. This Union series of books is an attempt to express and share those values.

They are values that flow from the beauty and grace of God. The living God is so glorious and kind, he cannot be known without being adored. Those who truly know him will love him, and without that heartfelt delight in God, we are nothing but hollow hypocrites. That adoration of God necessarily works itself out in a desire to grow in Christlikeness. It also fuels a love for Christ’s precious bride, the church, and a desire humbly to serve—rather than use—her. And, lastly, loving God brings us to share his concerns, especially to see his life-giving glory fill the earth.

Each exploration of a subject in the Union series will appear in two versions: a full volume and a concise one. The idea is that church leaders can read the full treatment, such as this one, and so delve into each topic while making the more accessible concise version widely available to their congregations.

My hope and prayer is that these books will bless you and your church as you develop a deeper delight in God that overflows in joyful integrity, humility, Christlikeness, love for the church, and a passion to make disciples of all nations.

Michael Reeves

series editor

Introduction

The Great Admission

Let’s get it out in the open right at the beginning. Doesn’t something about mission and evangelism just feel “off” to you? Every Christian knows we’re meant to share the gospel and look for opportunities to witness to Christ, yet almost all of us find it a genuine struggle, if not a gloomy discouragement. The vital, final thing Jesus left his followers to do—the Great Commission!—seems to be the one thing about the Christian life that, frankly, doesn’t feel so great. While we’ve heard the motivational sermons, sat in the “how to” seminars, and tried to crank ourselves up to initiating a deep conversation with friends or colleagues, the whole enterprise tends to flood us with dread rather than enthusiasm. And that leaves us feeling awkward and ashamed.

Complicating matters is that most of us do have a sincere desire that the people we love would come to know the Lord as we do. When we give even a moment’s thought to the blessings of the Christian life now, let alone the hope of eternity with Christ, we hope and pray with real feeling that our loved ones might come to saving faith. The thing is that this longing doesn’t seem to translate very easily or very often into actual evangelism. Any passion and boldness we may have in prayer apparently evaporates under the spotlight at the dinner table or on the coffee break. Our words dry up, our confidence deserts us, and we could wish we were almost anywhere else in the world.

If this all sounds familiar to you, you are not alone. Christians the world over will recognize your guilty gulp when evangelism is mentioned in the pulpit. We all experience the strange tension you’ve felt between the theory of cheerfully sharing the good news and the reality of frantically retreating and locking the door behind you. So, what is going on? What is the mysterious cause of our complicated relationship with mission?

Mission Fatigue

Some Christians have decided to dispense with evangelism altogether, because they believe it to be downright inappropriate. The Barna Group found in 2019 that 47 percent of Christian millennials (defined here as those between ages twenty and thirty-four) believe “it is wrong to share one’s personal beliefs with someone of a different faith in hopes that they will one day share the same faith.”1 After all, is it really any of our business who goes to hell?2 Surely, they argue, it’s the epitome of pride to press oneself and one’s God onto another person. Within mainline denominations, “born again Christians” who believe in such “conversion” are sometimes looked on with suspicion as oddball fundamentalists. In 1993 representatives of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches drafted the Balamand Document, which included an agreement not to seek “conversion of persons from one Church to the other,” calling it a “source of proselytism.”3 This was a moratorium on mission.

Meanwhile, some argue that certain groups are out of bounds when it comes to mission. In 2002, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops produced a report on Catholic-Jewish relations, which concluded that “campaigns that target Jews for conversion to Christianity are no longer theologically acceptable in the Catholic Church.”4 Similarly, in 2015, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews published a document that made it clear “the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”5 In the secular world, attempting to bring someone else over to faith in Christ may once have been viewed as impolite or crass: now it may be regarded as something far more sinister. With the history of Western missionaries importing European culture to Africa and Asia, forced conversions, the complicity of the German church in the Holocaust, and Christians’ generally conservative social outlook, the spread of Christianity is seen as a means of oppression. Christian mission is associated by some with imperialism, White supremacy, and the hegemony of the powerful over minority groups. Brian D. McLaren argues that evangelism has historically been “a proclamation of the superiority of the Christian religion.”6

These intellectual and cultural sensitivities might be on the radar for some of us, but they are almost certainly not the real root of our internal nagging discomfort about mission. They may be a hindrance, but they don’t get to the bottom of what we’re feeling. It’s possible that other explanations come closer to the mark. Perhaps insecurity keeps us from evangelism. We worry what other people might think of us if we start “Bible-thumping,” so we keep quiet. Or perhaps our problem is fear of failure. We don’t feel well enough equipped or aren’t confident enough in the power of the gospel, so we dare not risk rejection or (perhaps worse) indifference. Again, these things may play a part in our predicament, but the diagnosis still doesn’t quite fit the symptoms. Cultural pressure, personal insecurity, or fear of failure seems to presuppose a burning passion in us to share the gospel that is simply being inhibited by some external barriers needing to be removed. A little training or a good pep talk could have us out on the streets in no time, fulfilling our hearts’ desire to proclaim Christ every moment of every day!

But here is the great admission that many of us need to make: when it comes to the Great Commission, our hearts aren’t really in it. Something far deeper than practical or operational limitations is causing our mission fatigue. What ails us goes right to the core of our relationship with God.

Here’s the Catch

If we are entirely honest, when we think about evangelism, we often feel something close to resentment. Many of us silently grumble that, in being recruited to evangelism, we’re being put upon. We first came to know Jesus very happily, receiving his mercy and his invitation to new life, but then along came this unexpected and slightly puzzling additional step of having to be a witness to him in the world. Like a car shifting into the wrong gear, we came to a juddering halt. We’d been offered free grace and forgiveness, but now there’s a demand? Christianity, we fear, was just too good to be true. Mission is the inevitable catch tacked on to the list of benefits we signed up for. It’s the complicated and rather unwelcome add-on to salvation that God has included in the deal as the sweetener for himself.

So we imagine that, in our salvation, God has done his part, and with that dealt with, he now sits in his heaven with his feet up while we are left below with what seems like the hard, dirty work of mission.

Psalm 96:3 says,

Declare his glory among the nations,

his marvelous works among all the peoples!

Isaiah 12:4 is similar:

Give thanks to the Lord,

call upon his name,

make known his deeds among the peoples,

proclaim that his name is exalted.

There is simply no avoiding these clear commands of Scripture. God wants us to make him known in the world. This is our responsibility and our work as Christians. Jesus only adds to the task when he says that, as well as making him known, we’re to persuade other people to become his obedient followers: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:18–20). As if the pressure weren’t enough already, Paul writes that the fate of the world is dependent on our broadcasting the message, for “how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Rom. 10:14).

So it seems that the Christian is left with no choice. In light of everything God has done for us, we owe him—and this is what he’s stipulated. So we buckle in, brace ourselves, and make the occasional attempt at sharing the gospel, when we can bear it. Like stepping into a cold shower, we grit our teeth and get it over with.

When encouragements come from our snatched evangelistic conversations or a friend agrees to come to church with us, we reveal our true approach by our secret reactions. We tell ourselves we’ve ticked the evangelism box or met our mission quota, paying off little installments on our debt to the Lord. Now we have something holy sounding to report to our church friends. We pat ourselves on the back for our moment of pious bravery.

Nevertheless, having been drawn in by promises of easy yokes and light burdens, we have the sensation of being trapped in a contractual obligation. The thought of enjoying God forever had sounded warm and inviting, but the very word evangelism can send a chill down the spine. It makes the whole dynamic of the Christian life—even the very gospel we tout as such good news—seem almost distasteful. The worst of it is that all this ultimately reflects very badly on God, who begins not to look so good and attractive as we first thought. Like a PR agency representing a difficult client, we begin to wonder what we’ve got ourselves into. This reveals the real issue. The problem at the root of all our struggles with mission is almost certainly right at the beginning: with our view of God.

Getting God Right

If we believe that God is simply out to impose himself on the world and suck it dry of glory and praise, then we will never love and want to share him (even if we tell ourselves that God is entitled to do whatever he wants). If God seems to us a demanding taskmaster, we will never be his eager ambassadors in the world. If we feel ourselves conned into having to perform evangelism, we will never warm to the calling he has set before us. Unless we honestly find God to be beautiful and enjoyable, we’ll have nothing worth saying to the people around us. Until we see him aright, we’ll have no genuine desire to fill the world with the knowledge of our God.

This book, then, is not a practical “how to” guide for mission, devoted to the methodology of evangelism and how Christians can best equip themselves for it. Nor is it a biblical theology of mission, exploring the scriptural contours of calling, sending, and the growth of the kingdom of God. Plenty of good books do these things already. This book is an invitation to start again at the beginning with your vision of God. Our aim is to set before your eyes God as he truly is: God who is so full of life and goodness that he loves to be known; not as a campaign to impose himself on us or on the world but to give himself and share his own life with the world. We want to show that the God of mission is no different from the God of the gospel. In fact, it is precisely because God is outgoing and communicative that he is so good and delightful. His natural fullness and superabundance mean that he does not need to take or demand from us but freely and kindly loves to bless us. His mission is not to wring out the world for every last drop but to fill it with his own divine joy and beauty. Seeing this glorious God will change everything for us.

Mission is no clunky add-on to your own delighting in God. Instead, it is the natural overflow and expression of the enjoyment you have of him so that, like him, you gladly go out to fill the world with the word of his goodness. None of us can drum up enthusiasm for “mission” as an abstract activity to be gotten on with, especially if it’s caked in all kinds of negative assumptions and worries. But to see God as he really is is to delight in him. And as we grow in the knowledge and love of this God, we’ll find blossoming in ourselves his own desire to see the world filled with his blessing.

William Tyndale once described the gospel as “good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him sing, dance and leap for joy . . . [for] which tidings, as many as believe, laud, praise and thank God.”7 The surge of happiness we know, as we appreciate God in his radiant kindness, is one and the same movement that opens our mouths in praise and proclamation. Our going out to the world with the gospel is not an endeavor that Christians have to hitch on to knowing God, bringing to the task a vigor and vim outsourced from elsewhere. Rather, the heart-gladdening, feet-quickening reality of God is itself at once all the motivation, the content, and the zest of our going. It is precisely because God, from his own glorious fullness, fills us with joy in him that we begin to bubble over with it to those around. This is the theological dynamic of mission. The wellspring of healthy, happy mission is God himself.

1  “Almost Half of Practicing Christian Millennials Say Evangelism Is Wrong,” Barna (website), February 5, 2019, https://www.barna.com.

2  Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2001), chap. 14.

3  “Uniatism, Method of Union of the Past, and the Present Search for Full Communion,” Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, June 23, 1993, http://www.christianunity.va/, 10, 15.

4  Consultation of the National Council of Synagogues and Delegates of the Bishops Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, “Reflections on Covenant and Mission” (PDF), August 12, 2002, 1.

5  Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, “The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable,” EWTN (website), December, 10, 2015, https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism, 6.40.

6  Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (London: HarperOne, 2010), 216.

7  William Tyndale, A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, in The Works of the English Reformers: William Tyndale and John Frith, ed. Thomas Russell, vol. 2 (London: Palmer, 1831), 490.

1

The Glory of God

Happy mission presupposes happy Christians.

There is a kind of mission that can be carried out by miserable Christians, and though it may be doctrinally correct and carefully organized, it will only reflect the emptiness in their own hearts. Christians who don’t enjoy God can’t and won’t wholeheartedly commend him to others. If we fear that God’s love for us is reluctant or that his approval rests on our performance, we won’t feel any real affection for him, our service will be grudging, and the world will likely see through us.

This was the experience of Martin Luther as a young monk who, though profoundly devoted and spiritually zealous, was nevertheless filled with dread at the thought of God. “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God,” he confessed, “and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God.”1 Two hundred years later, Jonathan Edwards, also an intensely religious young man, was racked with “concerns and exercises about [his] soul” and recoiled from the “horrible doctrine” of God’s sovereignty.2 These were deeply unhappy men trying to be Christians.

Luther and Edwards both underwent transformations in their views of God that lit up their lives, melted their hard hearts, and fueled years of sincerely joyful ministry. Both discovered—and then preached, taught, and wrote about—a God who is delightfully good. Carrying them through illness, loss, persecution, and poverty, their fresh understanding of God truly changed everything for them. At the heart of their happy Christianity was the realization that knowing God rightly must always begin with Jesus Christ.

Step into the Light

A whole array of spiritual paths and philosophical traditions claims to give us clarity on what God is and is not like, but Jesus declares himself the unique and totally sufficient gateway to God. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” he says. “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). In fact, the knowledge of God is hidden from “the wise and understanding” and must be “revealed” (Matt. 11:25–26). Even those we might expect to have the most intelligent, imaginative thoughts about God cannot know about him unless he shows himself. Jesus says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27).

The truth of God is naturally hidden from the world in the closed loop of relationship between the Father and the Son, and none of us can guess our way in. Only the Son, the one who knows the Father, can open this knowledge to us. In Jesus Christ alone, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3), do we see God as he truly is. Jesus puts this rather specific (even exclusive) approach down to his Father’s “gracious will” (Matt. 11:26) and clearly does not see it as a means to privilege an elite few over the masses, for his very next words are as inclusive an invitation as we could imagine: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). Anyone can come to know the living God and find rest in him, but it is uniquely to Jesus they must come.

All this is encapsulated when Paul calls Jesus “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). He is the one who stepped into the world he had created, showing us the God we could not see by ourselves. John also carries this theme with his title for the Son, “the Word” who was “in the beginning” with his Father (John 1:1). Just as our words reveal and expose who and what we are (Luke 6:45), God’s Word—his eternal Son—perfectly expresses and reveals him. This Word is also “the true light, which gives light to everyone” (John 1:9). Here we meet a very common scriptural theme: that of the Son enlightening us. John here is clearly drawing on the light “in the beginning” of Genesis 1:3. Paul does the same in 2 Corinthians 4 when he speaks of “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (v. 4). Indeed, he writes that “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (v. 6).

Time and again, Scripture is clear that sinful humanity languishes in unknowing darkness, and, left to our imaginations, we dream up a miserable god, quite deserving of our dislike and mistrust. The unique and cheering work of Jesus is to be the light in the dark rooms of our hearts and minds, showing us the Father. As John Calvin put it, “We are blind as to the light of God, until in Christ it beams on us.”3

Source and Beam

To get a right and true understanding of God (and to correct any faults and distortions we may continue to pick up) we must look to the Son. But when Jesus reveals his Father to us, he is not just passing on information about God. Because Jesusis himself God—the eternal Son of the Father—he is God with us. Not an expert lecturer or detailed commentator we may learn from, but God in person, reaching out to us to be known by us.

The writer to the Hebrews describes Jesus as the “exact imprint” or perfect representation of God to us, and also “the radiance of the glory of God” (1:3). To speak of Jesus as the “radiance” of God’s glory is to say that Jesus is not a light directed at some other subject, like a flashlight pointed at your shoes in a tent at night. Radiance, like the sun and its beams, speaks of something—or someone—that, by nature, shines out and gives light. In other words, it is not that God is hiding in the dark and we must enlist Jesus to help us seek him out. Rather, God himself is the source of that light that comes to us in Christ. Put another way, the light that shines on us in Jesusis the light of the Father. The Father and the Son are one being, one God. The eternal life of God is the Father begetting his Son in the Holy Spirit. What we see in Jesus is not peripheral to the being of God. No, the Father, radiating his Son, shines like the sun in the sky and, by those beams, communicates himself to us. “God is light,” writes John, “and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5), and so his Son is “the light of the world” (John 8:12). The Puritan preacher Thomas Goodwin saw this and said, “The sun doth not only enrich the earth with all good things . . . but glads and refreshes all with shedding immediately its own wings of light and warmth, which is so pleasant to behold and enjoy. And thus doth God, and Christ the Sun of righteousness.”4

In the radiance of Jesus, we not only are learning something about God but are receiving God himself. To see God rightly, to whom else would we turn?

Jesus, the Glory of God

This brings us to the language of “glory” that we have only danced around so far as we considered the light of God’s self-revelation in Jesus. It is there in John 1 as John writes, “We have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (v. 14); it is there in 2 Corinthians 4, where Christians are given “the light of the knowledge of the