The Glorious Return

LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel… has endowed you with splendor.
–Isaiah 55:5

God seems obsessed with this for his people, this notion that we will become glorious and full of splendor. It’s riddled throughout Scripture, and in fact the entire story of redemption is one in which we will come back to God, not just as a people ransomed from death and set back into right relationship with him, but as those who have seen hell and been dead and so coming back alive becomes even more amazing than having been alive the first time. In other words, our ransom and redemption is more amazing than our original stature. We are glorious ruins being restored.

I think it was George MacDonald that said that our spiritual journey is not of coming to God, but one of returning back to God.

Remember the story of the prodigal son? Why is he called prodigal, by the way, or lost, as some Bible translations have it? Would it be better to simply call him the younger son, or the found son? Or why not Henry or Jeff or Jake or whatever his name might have been? It is because we will forever remember him as the one who had come from squander and hunger, as the one who had left and come back. And as the son, we will forever remember his father, seeing him looking, looking, waiting, longing for his son to return home, and running helter-skelter after him when he was a long way off. And do you remember what happened next? A party. An extravagant celebration in honor of his return. Wrapped in his father’s robe, his father’s ring on his finger, sandals on his feet, his dirty and bony face now shining with relief and bewildered joy, the son was no doubt more glorious for having been found and restored back into the family than for having ever left to begin with. That’s what we understand by the inability of the older son to even enter in on the party of redemption thrown for the younger.

And if Jesus’ words are any indication, not only are we radiant now, but we are becoming so radiant that even nations will be summoned to us. That’s at least what the Lord says just earlier in verse 5 of Isaiah 55: “Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations that do not know you will hasten to you…” He is actually talking to us there, not about Himself. Surely this is what Jesus meant when he said that we are the light of the world, a city on a hill that cannot be hidden. The picture makes sense in light of Isaiah’s passage. Weary travelers would be drawn to the hope and promise of the city’s shelter and provisions. They would come to it on their way to wherever else they were headed.

Just a bit further into chapter 55, God says to us that we will go out in joy and be led forth in peace. “The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

There again is the splendor. The mountains and the hills will burst into song before us? The trees will clap their hands? It sounds almost as if they are rooting for us, celebrating our journey, pulling for our arrival. They are in on some great conspiracy, some great drama, more aware of it than we are. (How’s that for humbling! Ha!) The rocks are in on it, too.

Loy Mershimer explains that our lives of distraction are actually a result of this refusal to embrace who we really are, or at least who we are really intended to be. "The human condition is a paradox of despair: We cannot cope with what we are intended to be, and so despair. Yet we cannot cope with despair, so we desperately try to convince the self that we are not really in despair. So we lead lives of distraction, luxury and success…"

I think we are more than we have come to believe about ourselves. I think our role now in this world and with our God is greater than we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine. Why have we shrunk back? Maybe because if we were to acknowledge who we were intended to be, it would require either a great God who could restore us to that place, or we would dive into despair. We have imagined God to be less than He is. We are his sons and daughters. We are his works, his collaborators, his co-laborers in this amazing story he is telling (Romans 8:17). Humility is not in making yourself small. “The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself,” notes Phillips Brooks, “but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.”

If we are endowed with splendor, imagine how majestic is the Endower. If we are his workmanship, imagine the Artist. If we have this treasure in jars of clay, imagine the Potter. If we are on the journey of faith, imagine the Author of that story. We are the prodigal sons, “prodigal” that we may remember where we came from, “sons” that we may recognize the extravagant grace of our Father.

And it’s not an easy journey, or an immediate transformation. We are being transformed “into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18). But the veil has been torn, our faces now radiant with the reflected renown of our King and Friend. The journey from here is a constant burgeoning of that radiance, “from glory to glory, until we all appear before the Lord in Zion” (Psalm 84:7).

Ready your hearts, my friends.