C.S. Lewis preached a sermon called The Weight of Glory in 1941. It’s fantastic and if you haven’t read it, you should. But Lewis takes the idea somewhere different, but his title and opening words inspired this article.
What does “glory” mean?
How would you describe glory? If someone asked you, what would you say? If you’re anything like me, for a long time my best answer was something like Laaaaaaaaahhhhh — some kind of onomatopoeic angel radiance. Glory felt real but difficult to pin down into a definition that resonated (no pun intended).
The Hebrew word sitting behind almost every use of “glory” in the Old Testament is kavod. Its root means: heavy; weighty; significant.
This actually makes a lot of sense.
Glory isn’t brightness, or fame, or a feeling in a worship service. At its most fundamental, glory is weight. It’s the quality of something that has substance, significance, reality. Think of a solid oak dining table next to a flat-pack knock-off: the difference isn’t just aesthetic, there’s a tangible difference in substance, in presence, in what each one actually is. Or think about the difference between a meeting request from your colleague and one from the CEO of the company. Same calendar invite, same requirement of your time, but a completely different weight. We experience these differences of significant throughout life and we intuitively understand them. Perhaps that’s why glory is so hard to pin down, we intuitively understand it, but explaining it… Laaaaaaa. ahem
The conceptual opposite in Hebrew is hevel, the word Ecclesiastes uses over and over, often translated “vanity.” Breath. Vapour. Mist. It’s something with no weight to it at all; something insignificant.
When Scripture speaks of God’s glory, it’s speaking of his sheer thereness. His reality. The fact that he is not vapour, that’s he’s the most significant.
Isaiah finds himself in the throne room, and the seraphim are calling to each other:
“And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!””
Isaiah 6:3-5 ESV
Isaiah doesn’t respond with wonder. He doesn’t say how beautiful it is. He says woe is me, I am undone. That’s not the response of someone admiring a sunset. That’s the response of someone who has just felt the weight of something they’re unable to bear.
That’s kavod.
Can you add to it?
Here’s the question that changes how I think about glory.
If glory is intrinsic weight, something that belongs to God because of what he is and not because of what we do, can we actually add to it?
I don’t think we can. Well, at least not in the literal sense.
Consider what it would take. You’d need to bring something to God that he didn’t already possess. You’d need to increase his significance, bulk up his substance, make him more real than he was before you walked in. And this is the same God who spoke the universe into existence from nothing, who holds all things together, who needs nothing from anyone.
If that’s the case what does it mean to “glorify”?
So if we can’t add to his glory, what are we actually doing when we “give” glory to him? What does it mean to “glorify” God?
A word used in the Psalms is havu: give, bring, ascribe.
“Ascribe to the Lord , O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness.” Psalm 29:1–2 ESV
We’re giving back what was always his. We’re recognising what already is. We’re correctly attributing significance to the one who already possesses it. When eyes are on us, we point those eyes to God: “don’t look at me, look at HIM!”
The word “worship” has been quietly saying this all along. It comes from the Old English weorthscipe, worth-ship, the condition of having worth. To worship something is literally to declare its worthiness, to name what it is. Which means worship was never primarily a feeling, a music style, or an atmosphere in a room. It’s a statement about reality. And when you put that next to kavod, the two ideas lock together. Worship is the act of correctly declaring the weight of something that already has it. We’re not generating worth when we worship God. We’re recognising it.
That’s doxology.
The heavens are doing it already
The heavens aren’t going to wait for us to get started.
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” Psalm 19:1-2
Creation has been declaring the glory of God from the moment they existed. The stars aren’t waiting for a congregation. The mountains don’t need a worship leader. They simply exist as they were made to exist, and that existence points outward to its source. Creation is a permanent witness to God’s weight.
Which means our doxology isn’t introducing something new. It’s joining a chorus from the dawn of time. We’re latecomer participants in a declaration that the universe has been making since its first moments.
Mirrors, not light sources
So where do we humans fit into all of this?
Firstly, we were made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), that’s a solid foundation. An image isn’t the thing itself but a reflection, a representation; an image points back to its source. We were made to be the creatures in whom God’s weight becomes visible in the world, not because we generate it, but because we carry it outward.
We’re mirrors, not light sources.
A mirror doesn’t create the light, in a dark room a mirror is dark. What a mirror does is reflect light. And what makes a mirror useful is the quality of its surface. Scratched, tarnished, dirty or cloudy: the reflection is distorted. Clean, polished, true: the image reflected back is clear.
Paul writes this:
“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” 2 Corinthians 3:18
The Greek word there for “beholding” is: katoptrizomenoi, which means “beholding as in a mirror”, it means seeing a reflection. We’re not just looking at the light, we’re seeing its reflection in each other.
And notice what produces the transformation: it’s the reflecting itself. As the mirror is used, it is changed. As we faithfully point to God’s weight, we are being made into better pointers. This is what sanctification is doing: polishing the mirror so the reflection is truer.
Our glory is borrowed light
Just like a mirror, the moon has no light of its own. It’s a rock. But on a clear night it can illuminate an entire landscape, and we call it “moonlight” as if it belongs to the moon. It doesn’t. Every photon came from the sun.
Human glory is like that.
“O Lord , our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. […] what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” Psalm 8:1,4-5
The Psalm uses the same word: kavod. Humans genuinely bear weight and significance. But it’s a crowning from outside, not a quality we generated. It’s tied directly to the image-bearing vocation: we reflect God’s significance into creation as stewards and bearers of his image.
And this is why Paul can call his own impressive credentials, his lineage, his training, his standing, rubbish compared to knowing Christ (Philippians 3:4–8). They were real but not the source. The moment he treated them as a self-originating source of significance, they became hevel. Breath. No weight at all.
And when you really see it, when the weight of God actually registers, something happens. Think of the merchant in the parable who stumbles across the pearl of great price. He doesn’t talk himself into selling everything. He goes away in his joy and sells everything to acquire it. You can’t really perceive kavod and stay unmoved, any more than the merchant could leave the pearl behind.
God isn’t glorified by our compliance. He’s glorified by us recognising and reflecting his significance. When we orient our lives around God, his Word, his commands, we’re showing the world his significance and worth. When we are satisfied in him, when our hearts find joy at the source, we become a beacon, a mirror highlighting to the world God’s glory.