The Glory of God
Via Iwand’s sermon, “The Loincloth”
“Just as a man binds a loincloth about his loins – in the same way,” says God, “I have taken you to myself.” As a man takes his loincloth. And he includes what that means: “That they should be my people, to be a name for me, a praise and glory.” This means Jesus Christ too; this is the graceful bond of baptism, this is the New Testament in His blood – that we should be His people. “So that I may be his own and live under him in his kingdom and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness” – did not we all learn as children that this is our ultimate, most blessed destiny? Yes, it is indeed so. God does not want to be alone, He wants to have us around Him, He wants to adorn Himself with us, He wants to make Himself a name on us, preparing praise and glory out of our mouths. It is not, as one has often said to us, God is our God because we need Him; no it is much more wonderful and beautiful: God needs us for the glorification of his name. Only God can do this. Only He can glorify His righteousness on sinners, only He can glorify His life creating power in those doomed to death, only He can prove Himself to be the truth that still exists, still shines, still triumphs in us who err and doubt. In human beings, who are characterized by weakness, fallibility, sin, death and damnation, God will glorify Himself! He will build His kingdom out of such human beings. That which is nothing God has chosen so that he makes that which is something to be nothing. Of course, this does not appeal to us all. We think entirely differently about God. We think of Him as the righteous one who leads the party of the just, as the omniscient one who stands on the side of the wise and the clever, as the immortal one who becomes incarnate in the heroes of world history. We think of God as a partisan of everything that he Himself is. As if God were nothing other than a human god, nothing other than an invention of our spirit and our wishes – as if God were not the living, graceful, merciful, actual God whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts.
It is with this God alone that we have anything to do with here. With the God who has made us to be his possessions in Jesus Christ, who bows Himself down to the troublesome and burdened, who seeks the lost and carries them home, who does not become weary of calling after us, of grieving, of crying, of suffering because of us. Because He needs us. He needs us in order for Him to glorify Himself in us.