“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of your glory.”
The eternal song of the angels who surround the throne of God in Isaiah's vision of heaven (Is. 6:1-4) is given also to earth to sing. The splendor of that song was lost to us in the Fall but not the splendor God has woven into the fabric of all things. It had to be revealed to us and so it was and is. It might seem that the glory of the earth was nothing compared to the miracle of God in flesh, the death that paid for every sin, the resurrection for all who live under death's shadow, and the ascension to the right hand of the Father. Is it nothing? In the Holy Eucharist, the God who made all things and entered into our world prepares for us a table to give us the gift of life.
Heaven and earth are full of Your glory. Heaven breaks into the world until both heaven and earth must display what cannot be hidden. Oddly enough, Luther proposed moving the Sanctus after the Words of Institution precisely because the reality of these words and their fulfillment in the bread now His body and the cup now His blood. Here we confess in the blessed song that the earth is full of God's glory and that this is part of the proclamation every bit as much as the heavenly redemption. It is the end of any neat distinction between sacred and secular, of the lie that it is all just stuff. It is the end of everything the world wants to believe about religion, about the ability of mankind to deny the spiritual character of our identity and of the image of God placed in us though distorted by sin yet not obliterated.
We sing it in the Te Deum and in the Sanctus and we read it in the Scriptures. It is our statement that the earth cannot deny the reality of this everlasting truth. The world battles emptiness and depression with all the wrong remedies. Stuff is just stuff. Things are just things. People are just people. As much as I hate to speak of it this way, the affirmation that heaven and earth are full of God's glory is therapeutic -- not in the sense of some patient listening to feelings but real therapy that gives honest consolation, comfort, and peace. The answer to our longing is not a conversation about feelings but the affirmation of the truth. Heaven and earth ARE full of God's glory. His glory is His saving love, His merciful countenance, His sin-forgiving heart, and His gracious disposition.
2 comments:
Amen. The secular is full of His glory. We may not see it, the world does not recognize it. The cup runs over, and goodness and mercy follow all the days of our lives.
What you have described affirms our understanding that secularism is in reality connected to the philosophy of existentialism. This idea was popularized by such as Kierkegaard, Nietzche, and Sartre, but the idea of humanity being free to embrace a subjective meaning of life and that we are responsible for defining ourselves remains a widely held view both inside and outside of academia. During my early college years as a freshman, a professor in an elective philosophy class was all on board with existentialism, and I can understand how some of the students began to accept this as a worldview. But not all of us. We needed the elective credits to be matriculated, but understanding the origin of the concepts we were taught did not lead to our acceptance of false truth. In many respects, the word of God has been assaulted by secularism and existentialism because it deprives our species of re-inventing ourselves apart from God. It is diabolical and its’ purpose was to deconstruct our faith in God. It has never succeeded in destroying the genuine and true faith of God’s elect, because the word of the Lord warned them and us to turn away from philosophy and other deceitful and vain beliefs. Indeed, Heaven and Earth are full of Your Glory, O Lord.
Soli Deo Gloria
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