It is standard for persons who believe they understand Scripture and history that faith and feel for God’s majesty should be common. To make God the kindly old man next door, the sweet grandparent who smiles at children’s follies, the man upstairs, the peripatetic teacher looking something like a shepherd/pastor – is to miss the idea that God is quite other-worldly. He has a glory that we can’t penetrate; a largeness we can’t adequately imagine; an invisibility we can’t perceive; and, a luminescence that makes the Sun a mere flashlight. All of this is marked by perfection – no darkness, or wrinkle, or evil. God’s majesty ought to silence us, imposing worship. We seem to have difficulty in perceiving and objectifying what God is like, so we use natural things to give us hints that may partially capture his essence: 1) light, so there is no darkness, and this demands truth, for truth reduces mental and spiritual darkness; 2) love, so there is no hate, and this demands forgiveness so that hate is banished – and so the story goes. Here Isaiah offers justice as one facet of God’s majesty. This means the good is for all, no favoritism. God is majestic and just for all. Justice in love prevails. God is ultimate paradox for mankind.
Where there is injustice God is pushed into human shadows, and corruption is engendered. He refuses irreverence, and will judge those who hold so little light of the fact that God is related to glory in presence, truth, justice, love, life, hope, holiness, trust and the like. We little realize that eternity is assured in its perfection. Mortality must end eventually, because it is imperfect – even if wonderful while we see it in a kind of transitory glory. That glory is so tainted that it provides only shadow comparison to God. But the comparison may tell us more about ourselves than God. Our justice is quite faulty, and for many reasons. We find it difficult to find majestic truth. So poorly is justice applied in some courts that persons are condemned to execution, for crimes for which they are innocent. Such never happens with God. He will ultimately make sure that all things are treated with equity and justice. He will enforce justice, for mankind’s faulty millennia.
Persons describe things they believe to be majestic, especially in the physical world: lofty mountains, great canyons, high waterfalls, even personal ecstasies. Astronauts admit they can’t find words to express the beauty of the earth – the blue planet – from outer space. Persons standing at the base of the 35 stories high rocket carrying astronauts into space noted the event as majestic. The firing of the engines and the rise of that giant tube into the air made onlookers fall silent with what they considered a majestic event. I felt a kind of majesty as a boy looking upward between downtown buildings and saw the great airship, The Akron, flying over the city at about 2,000 feet, looking something like a great silver skyscraper on its side, casting a great moving shadow over Main Street. From such moments one feels largeness in the unknown. Something seems surreal for us. God’s majesty is much more than we conjure, and when perceived beyond earth’s lonely focus makes us more humane. Perceiving the majesty of God has much to do with justice in the earth. There is glory in it. Reflected majesty will be a part of immortality, even though it will be borrowed as granted by God so to accent the intimacy he designed. It will be the ultimate in the proper expression of humility, so to be perfect in the assigned divine context, but also to know that it is not of our own doing that makes it so. Christians will be touched with perfect opposites in humility and ecstacy – paradox. If all this seems too grand for imagination, the Christian has enough for the mortal sojourn, but the Apostles thought it valuable that the magnificent context be known in faith. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020