Kavod: The Weight of Glory
“And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.” (Isaiah 6:3-4)
The glory of Adonai is dense - uncontainable and ever-expanding.
Even holy houses ooze the smoke of heaven from every crack and crevice for their lack of accommodations. Doors and windows and the very scaffolding itself bend outwardly at the inflation of God’s sacred occupancy.
David said it best: “Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27)
The glory of the Lord - kāḇôḏ (kavod), in Hebrew - is a powerful presence. It is the amplification of God’s abundance, splendor, honor, value, and reputation - the aura of goodness that exudes from him.
Like fresh blooming honeysuckles at the peak of springtime is the way in which we are greeted by Divinity’s smell and taste and touch as it approaches us.
But our Maker’s glory is equally thick in compactness as it is far-reaching in vastness and beauty.
As it is, at the etymological root of the word kavod is the word for heaviness, both in terms of physical weight and emotional gravitas.
For instance, when Elohim instructed Moses to keep his staff raised in battle as a means of supernatural victory over the Amalekites, we are told that “Moses' hands were heavy (kāḇaḏ); so they took a stone, and put it under him.” (Exodus 17:12)
Moses assumed a posture of submission to the God who went before him, yet even the strength of his arms found themselves trembling beneath the weight of glory.
As we behold a Creator who transcends our physical dimensions - a Spirit God extending into infinitude - it still remains a fairly effortless task for our imaginations to associate largeness (rather than smallness) with the glory of God.
However, when it comes to this weightiness on an emotional level, we often have an alternative tendency.
Although an affective connection to the heavy presence of God persistently avails itself to us, we frequently find that our shame - as a byproduct of our stories - creates an artificial mount producing distance between Adonai’s glory within us and that which seeks to disfigure our true selves.
Consider the words of Rabbi Yeshua, for instance, as he rebukes a gathering of religious leaders for measuring his actions against their self-aggrandizing pseudo-piety: “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (John 5:44). “For,” as he would later put it, “they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.” (John 12:43)
Since the moment of our conception, we have each been infused with glory - glory being a term, in many ways, synonymous to our understanding of value or worth.
In other words, we are each filled with an inherent value immeasurable before man.
But our value - our glory - finds its source in the proverbial DNA of our Father now coursing through our veins. It is who we are - our likeness and belonging.
We then hear Yeshua - returning to his confrontation - fundamentally pointing out that those sanctimonious few were finding their identities - their esteem and self-worth - in an immensely inadequate source: namely, each other.
The great rabbi knew, in all his wisdom and love, that such seeds planted fall only on compromised soil, unable to bear lasting fruit.
For them, connection with their greatest and truest value had been lost, and, as it is, there is no loss of self-value without an embodied experience of shame, be it conscious or subconscious.
Yes, glory may be an outworking of fame and reputation, but all outworkings find their origin from within, flowing either through woundedness and insecurity or through the esteem that comes with a grounded sense of identity in Adonai.
When we allow our eyes to look unhindered, not only at the external glory of our Messiah, but at the indwelling abundance that his Spirit has inscribed on the peculiarity of our personhood, we discover the words and perceptions of others dwindling in their weightiness.
Shame does indeed atrophy in the presence of a story healed and retold in the gleam of God’s faithfulness and love, as does dignity spring forth within a soul secure in its divine heritage.
And this is where we ultimately find our hope: in a King whose Kingdom will one day decimate all counterfeit glories. God will surely guide all of creation into a renewed sense of worthiness within the undying light of his eternal splendor - a new heaven and earth filled to the brim with his glory.
