Ye Rocks, Full of Glory

Before reading this, i urge every reader to look up Psalm 139 and reflect on it for a few moments. For sake of ease, here are links to it in the ESV, NKJV, NASB, KJV, and NIV. Now there's no excuse that you couldn't read it because you didn't have a Bible handy.

 It has been upon me to condemn sin much lately, as it seems oft-overlooked because we're afraid of offending people. Of course we should never be malicious, and our intent should always be out of the two greatest commandments; love for God, and love for our neighbor. It's easy to get our motives mixed up, and the best method of correction (of self) is solitude with God. Prayer, reading His Word, and meditation.
 But this post runs a different course.

 Honestly, i'm not into the whole, "God showed me this while i was counting change the other day," thing. Story-telling, especially that of true stories, has never piqued my interest as a person reading or hearing about God. Even C.S. Lewis' story-telling, though his fiction is a thing of beauty and deserving of much respect, his true-to-life reflections make reading seem slow at times (in this far-from-connoisseur's opinion). But nevertheless, he had learned something, and felt the original medium in which it was originally revealed to be the most obvious approach when it came time to relay it. And so true-to-life story-telling of the mundane is not without purpose.
 So here's an attempt at relaying a lesson taught to me.

 This past Tuesday while on our way home from running some errands, my dad and i were stopped at a light, and across the street in the ditch was some tall coastal grass (about waist-high, depending on how tall you are - i guess it could've been about calf-high to Goliath or about chest-high to Nicodemus). The sun was setting, the wind was blowing softly, and the waves in the stalks were some of the most beautiful i've ever seen. If you've ever watched The Count of Monte Cristo, during the fight between Edmond and Fernand in the barley field; that's how this looked save the budding sorghums. With ripples reflecting in the distance had that fake-looking sheen to it that's often seen in cloud-filled, copper sunsets. My dad and i concurred that it was a beautiful sight, and we exchanged similar and generalized, "God is good," kind of statements.
 But as plain as it is -just grass- it's something glorious. It's something holding onto that original design of God. Though it's been several thousand years since He created the first blades of grass, it still retains the same makeup as the original design. It reaches Heavenward and, like the Seraphim, cries out, "Holy, holy holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!"

 From the grassy lawns to the baby still being knitted together in the womb, the earth speaks -screams even- of His glory. In verse sixteen of Psalm 139 (did you read it??), it says that He saw our unformed substance. All the glory we may give to God was presumably hidden in the earth, yet nevertheless it was there, in the earth in those ages from whence (this is the result of reading English literature; please pardon) we came to be. When He spoke the earth into being along with the quadrillions of stars in the universe, He saw the dirt He would form us with. And He designated a portion of glory to it that we might give back to Him. That glory is in you, crying out to be released back to Him.
 There is glory in the very carbon atoms of those blades of grass, and He designed it to give glory back to Himself. And if we won't return it, yea, even the rocks will cry out. He will be glorified.

 Truly, the earth is full of His glory, and it cannot be contained.
 We may try to withhold it, but our bones, dry and dusty as they may be by the time of His magnificent return, will be helpless but to shake and rattle and shout in chorus with the rocks, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!"
 There is no better place to start this exudation than by seeking the light of His glory, Jesus Christ. Only when He resounds within can He resonate without.

The Rocks Cry Out

Surely, should mankind cease to give praise unto the Lord God Almighty, even the rocks would cry out. Yes, the trees already reach for Him, the birds sing for Him, the oceans torrent for Him, the wind rushes, the mountains tremble, the clouds dance; all things are made for the glory of God, and give glory they shall. It is not reliant solely upon mankind to glorify God.

Often, we think we are the sole proprietors of praise, practicing worship of Him in exclusivity of ourselves, but we are vain.

God wants our praise, of course, and He desires our love. He craves us more than we crave water in a desert, air under water. He craves intimacy with us. His relationship with each person is like that of a Father to a child who can't even grasp what “I love you” fully means.
But we are not the sole shareholders when it comes to giving Him glory.

When asked by the Pharisees to rebuke His disciples for praising Him as coming “In the name of the Lord,” Jesus said “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
The stones would cry out.
The rocks along the road, the foundations of buildings, the markers for graves; these things would cry out to God, giving Him praise.
And since the dawn of creation, we have not been able to bring enough glory to Him to keep the universe silent.

We were made for fellowship. When God made Adam, He made Eve as well because He saw that it was not good for man to be alone. He made a companion. In everything, we should have fellowship with others.
Where two or three gather in His name, He's there.
To bring confession to fulfillment, it requires a person to confess to.
Even Solomon said it's not good for a person to be on their own because when they fall, they have no one to help them up.

Teams work together in ways that don't make a whole lot of logical sense; the result is greater that the sum of the whole. Three people can get a job done in less than a third of the time it takes one person. It's why we have assembly lines.
So with this thought of a fellowship working together to amass or exude greater glory than the sum of its parts, we should turn our thoughts heavenward. Not necessarily to the place of Heaven, but to the sky, the heavens above.

Suns burn, planets form and circle, and the cosmic ballet ensues.
More than this, they are things crying out for the unquenchable fire of God's glory.
Dust in space sticks together, and with the fellowship that follows, an infinitesimal amount of gravity is displayed, which draws more dust. It piles and combines and grows until it reaches a mass sufficient enough to ignite—and thus a new star is born. A process that, according to physicists, should take billions of years.
But God said “Let there be light,” and there was. It doesn't say over the course of billions of years the sky grew speckled with the light of stars. No, the stars appeared then. At that moment.
The glory of God is so demanding that physics bends to suit it. His voice created the physics in which the dust even exists—it is not a far-fetched thought that certain rules are note so certain when He requires them to take a measure of malleability.

The universe is already crying out for the glory of God, it's a sad fact that we're seldom observant enough to notice.
But this negligibility was spawned at the moment of creation; not by God's negligence, but by the inability of things limited to these few dimensions to quench all that He demands.
The physical realm, this universe, cannot contain Him sufficiently to not be in a constant state of radiance on His behalf.

A prime example would be Moses after receiving the Ten Commandments; his face was glowing with blinding intensity.
Elijah, Moses, and Jesus, at the Transfiguration, were all radiating His glory in the visible spectrum.

Being close enough to someone (as in a level of intimacy), mankind starts to take on certain physical attributes of others (I think there's another post about this).
But being close to God alters the physics of our being. We don't know what He is like, but we know that we'll be like Him (a paraphrase of a verse in 1 John, I think chapter one). We will emanate the same light as they did, because we will be that close to Him, and it will be for His glory, not ours.

Truly, the universe, nature, and all of creation for that matter, already is brimming because there is not sufficient glory to be given to Him in this realm to sate that which His very presence demands, therefore it all burns for His glory.