Heavenly glory refers to the divine radiance and perfection believers will experience in God's presence, reflecting their transformation into spiritual beings. Preaching on this subject often uses imagery of light, splendor, and eternal joy to highlight the hope of eternal life with God (2 Corinthians 3:18, Revelation 21:23). It emphasizes the believer's future glorification and intimate fellowship with the Creator.
Spending time with God transforms believers into heavenly, spiritual beings.
As when Moses had conversed with God forty days upon the mount, coming down, his face shone with heavenly glory; so will it be with us. When we have been in heaven twenty or thirty years, we shall become heavenly and spiritual, both in word and deed. Caudray.
Many have never seen the beauty of the Christmas Star, symbolizing Christ's coming.
There once lived a family in the South whose rigid rule sent the children to bed at sundown and made them rise after daylight. One of the boys grew to the age of seven years before he ever saw the stars, and when he was carried out one dark night and caught his first glimpse of the glorious constellations, he exclaimed rapturously to his mother: “Look! Look! Did you ever see anything so beautiful?”
The return of Christmas brings into view the Star of Bethlehem. How many human eyes have never yet seen this Star!
In the new heaven, earthly discords will be softened and harmonized by God's Spirit.
The dome of the Baptistry at Pisa has this wonderful quality, that it is so fashioned that no matter how discordant the sounds received may be they are returned softened and harmonized.
So shall it yet be with the discords of earth in the new heaven when all shall have been baptized into the same spirit.
The harp symbolizes heavenly music, representing the noblest tones of celestial worship.
The harp is by common consent supposed to be the musical instrument of the angels, and many a clerical metaphor has been made regarding “the celestial harps,” “the golden harps,” etc. The metaphor is probably taken by very few as a fixt truth, but is nevertheless to the musician an interesting and also a reverential one. At the time that the Scriptures were written the harp was the finest instrument possest by man, and in ascribing it to the angels an effort was made to represent the music of heaven by the noblest tones of earth. Were we to imagine celestial music to-day it would be the roll of heavenly orchestras, and some of the old Italian painters scarcely made a musical error in depicting their angels as playing on violins. The violin is the noblest earthly instrument, and is far beyond the harp in its representation of bliss. Meanwhile, Schumann and Berlioz (in Faust) have used the harp to picture celestial joys, while Wagner has used the violins in a soft tremolo in highest positions, combined in sweet tones of wood wind. Nevertheless, association of ideas is much in music, and the harp must always call up the idea of heaven in the minds of many. (Text.)--Boston _Musical Herald_.
Heaven's light surpasses earthly illumination, symbolizing God's presence and glory.
The traveler to the heavenly country will often set in contrast to the conditions described below, the time and scene in which “they need no candle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord God giveth them light” and “the Lamb is the light thereof.”
In any large city the small hours of the night, while most people are asleep, is the time when the bread is made and baked, the great newspapers printed, the food products, such as milk and vegetables, prepared and brought into the city. If we were obliged to dispense with our modern systems of illumination the world would be set back in its civilization beyond our power to imagine.
Man is the true object of worth in the universe, crowned with God's glory and purpose.
When you approach a great city at night and see only its tens of thousands of lights, you do not for a moment attach importance to those mechanical contrivances, the lights. The unseen inhabitants in the tens of thousands of lighted homes are the real objects of interest and worth. So the worlds, and not the suns, are the objects of true worth and interest in the universe; the worlds, the lighted and glowing houses of God’s children, not the mechanical contrivances for making them comfortable. Upon these must center our thought and interest. What is the fire which warms the man and cooks his dinner, compared with the man himself? What is the light and fire, compared with the home? What is the sun, compared with the world? Just here we begin to get some breath of assurance. While the worlds in our system differ very greatly in size and glory, while some of the great suns doubtless have correspondingly great worlds circling about them, yet we may reasonably suppose that among the worlds of the universe our earth is somewhere near the middle of the scale. And we earth-dwellers, intelligent children of the Father, are no mean citizens in the kingdom of our God. If He has built such a mansion of light for us, and kindled such a hearth-fire as our sun, and made us lords and masters of such a world as this, why may we not lift up our heads in love and triumph? (Text.)
— JAMES H. ECOB
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