I Was Just Thinking … About Opposing God’s Glory

Isaiah 3:8 uses a figurative expression to describe disobedience to God which has greatly helped me in understanding what sin is; and, more importantly, just what we can do to maintain fellowship with God. Isaiah says, “Jerusalem has stumbled, and Judah has fallen because their speech and their deeds are against the Lord to defy his glorious presence.” the literal translation of that last phrase, “to defy his glorious presence,” is “to oppose the eyes of [God’s] glory.”

Let’s think about it this way: So often the look in someone’s eyes indicates more expressively than words how that person feels about something. While Peter no doubt had forgotten many of the things Jesus had said during the three years he had been under his teaching, he never forgot that look Jesus gave him after he had denied Jesus for the third time (Luke 22:61). More eloquently than any words, that look told Peter how keenly he had hurt Jesus with his repeated denials.

Peter’s denial inflicted such hurt because it called Jesus’ reputation in question and implied that he really had done something deserving of arrest and interrogation by the high priest. As with all people, so with Jesus: nothing was of more value to him than his good name. According to Proverbs 22:1, “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches.” Riches and power by themselves are no gauge of a person’s worth. Instead, people have a good reputation to the extent that they use whatever they have to meet the needs of others as well as their own. Just having a good reputation brings the greatest happiness, so the loss of it brings the greatest sorrow.

The eyes of a person express the sorrow of a lost reputation better than any words. That’s why Jesus’ look smote Peter’s heart with such remorse that he went off alone and wept bitterly. And that’s why Isaiah 3:8 links “eyes” so closely with “glory” in the phrase the “eyes of glory.” Isaiah’s use of this expression was a most forceful way of saying that our sins consist primarily in downgrading God’s reputation by opposing the expression of great joy he experiences as he seeks our welfare.

It is well for us to remember that every time our hearts sink with despair we are, like Peter, “opposing the eyes of God’s glory.” A despairing thought affirms that evil, rather than good, will have the last word in our lives. And this denies God’s glory, his reputation, which consists in his desire to rejoice over us to do us good with his whole heart and soul (Jeremiah 32:41). Sin is unbelief, a vote of “no confidence” in God’s promise that he will “work all things together for good,” and that “in all these [tribulations] we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:28, 37). All sins consist in some shameful self-serving measure of an attempt to get a little happiness by taking matters into our own hands.

We naturally try to hide our sins, because their tendency to help ourselves by jeopardizing the welfare of others would ruin our reputations. But it is impossible to hide them from God, before whom “no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Hebrews 4:13). Thus, in order to stay in the sunshine of God’s love, we must calm and quiet our souls with the confidence that God will keep his promises. In this way we will walk in the fear of the Lord, for our greatest concern will be to avoid an attitude of heart that would “oppose the eyes of God’s glory,” and draw a look from God like that which Peter drew when he denied Christ.

When we have sinned we can return to the sunshine of God’s love and enjoy fellowship with him by confessing the sin by which we have opposed him. A failure to believe the Bible’s many promises that God will forgive our sins as we confess them to him would surely be even more opposition to his glorious gaze, because that would say, in effect, that the suffering and loss involved in Jesus’ death is inadequate to repair the injury our sins have inflicted on God’s reputation.

Daniel P. Fuller
January 1978