I AM THE LORD, THAT IS MY NAME, I WILL NOT SHARE MY GLORY WITH ANOTHER

IN THE DAYS OF HIS POWER SERIES.

TOPIC: I AM THE LORD, THAT IS MY NAME, I WILL NOT SHARE MY GLORY WITH ANOTHER

COMPILED/EDITED BY-:
Rev. Innocent Chukwudi Peace-Udochukwu President Living
Fountain Ministries Int’l LIFOM

“I am the LORD, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another, Nor My praise to graven images”
Isaiah 42:8

What is the glory? “Glory” refers to a quality of God’s character that emphasizes His greatness and authority and involves beauty, power and honor. It is used in three senses in the Bible. First, it may refer to God’s moral beauty and perfection of character, which is beyond man’s understanding (see Rom. 3:23 – for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God).

Glory” may also refer to God’s beauty as a visible presence(see Ex. 13:21 – God led the children of Israel by day with a pillar of cloud and by night with a pillar of fire).
And “glory” sometimes refers to the praise and honor that God’s creatures give to Him.

God’s glory is His honor, splendor, and dignity, and He will not share it with anyone. In telling Israel of how He was sparing them from destruction and giving them new prophecies, God says, “For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this. How can I let myself be defamed? I will not yield my glory to another” (Isaiah 48:11).

God will not give His glory to another because all glory, honor, and praise belong to Him alone. He will not allow His works to be attributed to a false god, which is “nothing at all in the world” (1 Corinthians 8:4).

Also, God will not allow humans to take credit for what He does, as if it were our own skill, wisdom, and power that deserve the praise.

God will not give His glory to another because it is immoral for someone to take credit for something he or she did not do. Whether it’s cheating on a test, plagiarizing a book, “stealing valor” by posing as a military veteran, or attempting to take credit for what God has done, it’s wrong. Most people understand that siphoning off the reputation of others or accepting accolades due to someone else is dishonest and dishonorable. For a human being to attempt to take credit for God’s actions is the height of hubris.

King Herod made the mistake of trying to appropriate God’s glory: “Herod, wearing his royal robes, sat on his throne and delivered a public address to the people. They shouted, ‘This is the voice of a god, not of a man.’ Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died” (Acts 12:21–23).

In grasping for glory that belongs only to God, Herod was much like Lucifer, who said, just before his fall, “I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:14).

God will not give His glory to another. He is “the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light. . . . To him be honor and might forever. Amen” (1 Timothy 6:15–16).

The Lord our God is worthy “to receive glory and honor and power” (Revelation 4:11). His glory is such that even heaven’s mightiest angels cannot look fully upon Him (Isaiah 6:1–4). There is no boasting in His presence (1 Corinthians 1:28–29).

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments”
(Exodus 20:4-6).

We don’t typically understand jealousy as a good thing. How, then, can I dare suggest that God is characterized by jealousy? To many, that sounds virtually blasphemous. So let’s take a close look at this oft-neglected attribute of God.

“You shall not go after other gods, any of the gods of the peoples who are around you – for the Lord your God in your midst is a jealous God – lest the anger of the Lord your God be kindled against you, and he destroy you from off the face of the earth”
(Deuteronomy 6:14-15; cf. 29:20)

(1) We need to understand from the start that jealousy can be both good and bad. Jealousy can be driven or motivated both by holy and righteous motives as well as unholy and unrighteous ones. Jealousy can be a sign of both sinful weakness and wounded pride, on the one hand, and genuine love, on the other. Jealously is sometimes the expression of an excessively possessive spirit, and at other times the fruit of care and concern for the welfare of the one who is loved. Jealousy is often the result of deep insecurity in a person’s soul, but also a reflection of commitment and devotion to the person that you love. As we will see, the jealousy that burns within the heart of God is good and godly and holy.

“But Joshua said to the people, ‘You are not able to serve the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God . . .” ” (Joshua 24:19).

(2) God is an emotional being. He experiences within the depths of his being genuine affections. The Bible is replete with references to divine joy, mercy, love, compassion, kindness, hatred, just to mention a few. But what of jealousy? The fact that we balk at the suggestion that God might be truly jealous indicates that we have a weak, insipid view of the divine nature. At the very core of his being, in the center of his personality is an inextinguishable blaze of immeasurable love called jealousy.

To say that God is jealous does not mean he is wrongfully envious of the success of others. Jealousy that is sinful is most often the product of anxiety and bitterness and fear. But surely none of this could be true of God. Sinful jealousy is the sort that longs to possess and control what does not properly belong to oneself; it is demanding and cares little for the supposed object of its love.

God’s jealousy is not a compound of frustration, envy, and spite, as human jealousy so often is, but appears instead as a . . . praiseworthy zeal to preserve something supremely precious” Divine jealousy is thus a zeal to protect a love relationship or to avenge it when it is broken.

So how does this relate to the incarnation of Jesus Christ? What does the jealousy of God have to do with why God stepped into time and became man? Seems like a bit of a paradox – that God in the vindication of his glory would humble himself to such a degree. But when you understand what God accomplished in the flesh it becomes clear why.

God will not give His glory to another, which makes Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer all the more astounding, because in it Jesus prayed, “And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began” (John 17:5). Three things of note here: 1) Jesus prays that the Father would give Him glory; 2) Jesus lays claim to a previous glory that was His before the time of creation; and 3) Jesus asserts that His glory was that of the Father’s. In other words, Jesus asks that the Father would give His glory to another, namely Himself; more than that, Jesus proclaims that He has already shared in that divine glory as the pre-existent Son of God.

What are we to make of Jesus’ prayer, in light of Scripture’s unambiguous decree that God will not give His glory to another? Either Jesus is blaspheming, or He is indeed who He claimed: the eternal Son of God who is worthy to “sit on his glorious throne” (Matthew 25:31). We believe that Jesus is “in very nature God” (Philippians 2:6) and that “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9). He is worthy to be praised.

As Jesus receives glory that God stated he will not give to another this must prove that Jesus is God as Jesus must be God in order to receive the glory that God will not give to anyone else.

To worship anyone else as God or to place alongside God any competitor is the root of wickedness.
Thus even in His acts of grace God is working for his glory, as he makes clear in his mercy toward Israel in the midst of their rebellion.

Therefore, in saving a people for his glory from their sins it was necessary that God structure that salvation in such a way that without mistake he would get all of the glory for that salvation. Not only did his justice have to be met and his law kept, it had to be done in a way in which he received all of the praise for it. Therefore, Ephesians 2:8-9 declares to recipients of that salvation:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Ephesians 2:8-9

Salvation must be by grace because God alone must get all of the glory. This is important for us to see in order for us to understand the “why” of the incarnation. A plan of salvation, if it were even possible, that required 99% God’s grace and 1% the works of man would conflict with God’s righteous demand that he get all of the glory.

Christ, as a man, was completely obedient to God, even to the point of death on the cross for sin that was not his own. What was the result of this? Philippians 2:8-11 tells us:
“And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
(Philippians 2:8-11 ESV)

So when someone here asks me, “Why do you believe God had to become man?”
My first answer is, “Because if God is going to save us, he must get all of the glory.”

SHALOM!

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