“…they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

As a kid I had always wondered about them, every time I’d see one.  Beautiful, majestic, colorful, amazing.  Kids storybooks are filled with them.  And it was this that the theme song for The Wizard of Oz focused on.  So naturally, rainbows fill the imagination with all kinds of wonderful thoughts, including a pot of gold at the end of one.  Thing is, I never figured out which end.  So here we were driving home from a summer vacation across the flat Florida terrain, and off to our left side we see a very low rainbow, maybe a couple of miles away, perched in front of a misty gray backdrop.  The sun was at the 2 o’clock position (as clocks go) to our right, and a mist of spray hovered over the road as we moved along at interstate speed.  The road then took us left, coming closer to the rainbow.  Within a few minutes we noticed it was just to our left, and we paralleled it for about a minute before finally driving right into it.  Suddenly the car, inside and out, took on a multi-colored sparkly hue that only Tinkerbell could appreciate.  It seemed as if we had entered the rarefied refracting light world of an immense prism.  However, we never saw the pot of gold!

As cheesy as it may sound, that’s a very small sense of what I think glory will be like when I read the text describing Jesus as the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8).  Paul, as he did in many of his corrective epistles, was making a strong point, namely, that man’s wisdom was so far short of God’s, that they may as well pack their bags and go home.  The contest was more than over long before it began.

We can trace his use of the word glory beginning in chapter 1.  Building his case, he says in verses 28-29, “He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.”  The word boast here is glory.  God will not tolerate his creatures boasting or glorying about anything as if it were their own, when in fact everything they are and have comes from their Creator.  God is intolerant like that.  He “will not give [his] glory to another” (Isaiah 48:11).  In the context, God told Isaiah that he would not allow others to take credit for God’s work.  That is how he would not give his glory.  So when we come to John 17, where Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see him tell the Father that he had “given [his disciples] the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one” (v. 22).  Wow!  He only shared or extended — not given — his glory to us because doing so glorified him.  What privileges await us in God’s “rainbow”!

Paul says he is “Lord of glory.”  When I think of the title, Lord, I think of ruler, authority, master, one who is in charge, one who commands.  He has this title because of his ministry on earth.  Earlier in his prayer (vs. 4-5), looking beyond the cross, Jesus said, “I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.  And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.”  Who else lived God’s glory, brought God’s glory to earth, demonstrated with simple but majestic power, and glorified the Father, as did he?  The answer is obvious.

Back in 1 Corinthians the next mention of glory comes in 2:7, “No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.”  Here is confirmation of Christ’s prayer: God planned our glory “before time began.”  So Christ’s prayer is a declaration of “mission accomplished!”  Lord of glory indeed!

Now we move to verse 8: “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”  It is God’s wisdom they didn’t understand.  And what kind of wisdom does God have?  Look at this universe.  Think of the still untold billions of galaxies out there.  And all those uncountable stars he knows by name.  Think of what he has created here just on planet Earth: the incredible variety of creations from minerals to mountains, from fish to ferrets, from roses to robins, to eyes and teeth and vital organs to the chemistry and DNA of it all!  And think of the power.  From physics we learn that the force field around the nucleus of the atom is so powerful that it acts like solid matter, when in fact there are gaps between it and the circling electrons.  Yet so powerful is this energy that splitting one atom can release enough energy to power up a large city for weeks.

Can we really understand this Lord and his glory? No. Never. But we can savor it in him. Do you?