This article begins with a self-centered boringly personal focus and then expands to glory.
As a 4th generation SDA, I was born to the Bible and Bible courses from cradle roll to a doctorate, but never bothered to pick up the Book on my own time. Then I moved on into the practice and teaching of medicine and the required copious reading of medical literature. At age 65 I retired from medicine, closed the office door, slam!, behind me, at last freed from all obligatory study. I could read what I wanted.
After catching up on Hemingway and Updike, by then curiously humdrum, a bit of Plato always good for a chuckle, and whatever history, notably Greek, that tickled my fancy, I found myself at age 75 unaccountably reading a Bible, only the Bible.
I’d never done this before, and, truth to tell, didn’t know how. I’d heard that the Bible, certainly the KJV, is great literature, and, having gone to an SDA academy where old Miss Speh instilled in me, an embarrassed teen, an unlikely and secret liking for poetry and poets such as T.S. Eliot.
So that’s how I read the Bible, finding Isaiah not unlike TS Eliot but somehow more poetic with a more apparent message, and the gospel John likewise. In the beginning was the Word. The same was in the beginning with me.
So there I was contentedly reading, until I came to John 12 where certain Greeks had requested of Philip, “Sir, we would see Jesus.”
Here’s where I perked up. I noted with surprise that Jesus seems to be ignoring the inquiring Greeks. Sounding like Miss Speh analyzing a transcendental poet, I figured He is lost in a transport of free association. He intones: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”
But then He adds, “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?
Startlingly, Christ immediately pleads, “Father, glorify Your name!”
Instantly the Father thunderously responds from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.”
Neither Christ nor the Father had mentioned, but had deeply implied, Christ’s imminent horrible death on the cross. Instead, only the glory, and for the Father.
I, of course, was hazily familiar with that dialog, perhaps one of the most bizarre recorded in Scripture and thus too simply ducked or dismissed. Now, however, I was stunned, astounded, confounded. The “glory” part is what appalled me! A death so grisly is … GLORY? For the Father?
Had I ever before heard anyone so tightly connect glory to a cruel death? Not that I could recall. My many teachers had emphasized mainly or only the bloodiness of the Cross. Certainly in the popular mind and in Catholic theology bloodiness prevails, as in Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning (for makeup and special effects) movie, “The Passion of Christ.”
I slapped the Bible down on my lap. I was too stunned and disturbed to read more.
Christ has a way of stunning us, as he did Pharisee Paul nee Saul (Acts 9) on the way to Damascus, and Pharisee Nicodemus (John 3) when he invited his exalted self into Christ’s presence and schmoozed Him with flattery. Christ dispensed with small talk and forthwith whacked him with, “Ye must be born again” (‘You came into the world the wrong way’…modestly paraphrased).
My own stunned consternation must have been at least 15 years ago. Ever since then I have found myself trying to figure out, like Plato would if not Miss Speh, how Christ’s death could be glory. But just now, after many years, I have re-read Desire of Ages where EGW tells of Christ’s encounter with the Greeks by reviewing His miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, His imminent death on the cross, with His and the Father’s glory deeply implied. And now I realize the Bible is not to be picked up without appealing for the Holy Spirit’s guidance, not Miss Speh’s.
In John 3, after whacking the learned Nicodemus, and me, Christ proceeded to unfold a truth crucial to my understanding of John 12,
“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him might not perish but have everlasting life.”
God so loved doomed humanity, me, you, despite our breaking His law, thus rejecting His very character, that He and His Son covenanted together whereby the Son would save us from otherwise inevitable eternal death through the Son’s sacrificing His divinity to become one of us, even to suffer the most cruel death known, in order to pay the price we were to pay, yes, to propitiate the law.
That the Father and the Son could so love us as to make such astounding sacrifice of themselves and each other is not merely a cosmic act exceeding as a marvel their creation of yet another constellation or subatomic particle/wave, but their crowning glory. Only God us due such glory. Only God could save doomed man. Therein indeed is glory.
Did the Greeks, famous for dealing with obscure metaphysics, catch it? I’d like to think those theatrically and metaphysically inclined Greeks were uniquely able to intellectually grasp Christ’s message customized for them, as no others, even the disciples, could. Soon, at Pentecost, they were to hear Peter explain the spiritual meaning, hear it in their own language, again (Acts 2:6—11).
Did the listening disciples grasp this? No. But later they did. After beholding Christ die on the cross, then after His resurrection, then ascending to His father, then being themselves anointed with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and themselves facing cruel deaths, they did.
As He died on the cross, did humanity apprehend His glory? No, but the angels and the watching universe did, and they all shouted and sang the glory of the Lamb. And they all and the Father welcomed the Son of God back to heaven with a formal entry of triumph through the everlasting, uplifted gates.
Do we now grasp it? Nominally, some of us have made a show of it.
But through the coronavirus panic pandemic, He is whacking us into paying full attention for a change to this old message: God so loves the world that he shall soon send his Son back to this earth, this time glorified and in consummate glory to receive us unto Himself that we may be where He is, heaven, there to dwell among us, He as our God and our brother. Look up, arise, and be joyful indeed!
The Father’s and the Son’s glorious sacrifice of themselves will throughout all eternity be our study but never be fully comprehended. And throughout eternity we, as well as the Holy Angeles and the unfallen universe, shall shout and sing the Father’s and the Son’s glory for redeeming us.
I’ve never learned to sing, but now let us sing together selected verses of our beloved old Hymn modified and updated, which, like reading of John, has been all but forgotten, “Oh, that will be glory!” (Charles Gabriel, 1900),
When the End-time plagues and panics are o’er,
And I am safely on that other shore,
Just to be near the dear Lord I adore,
Will through the ages be glory for me.Refrain:
Oh, that will be glory for me,
Glory for me, glory for me,
When by His grace I shall look on His face,
That will be glory, be glory for me.When, by the gift of His infinite grace,
I am accorded in heaven a place,
Just to be there and to look on His face,
Will through the ages be glory for me.
Brother Kime was born in 1929, in Los Angeles, California.
Kime pursued dual careers in art (since childhood) and medicine (physician; specialties in internal medicine and pathology; clinical and academic). He studied the principles of art, chemistry of paint, and the works of master artists as assiduously as medicine. After retiring from pathology at Kettering Medical Center in 1994, Dr. Kime has concentrated on his art, producing portraits, seascapes and figural work mainly in oils, and urbanscapes predominantly in watercolor. Dr. Kime currently lives in Redlands, CA.