I've just come back from a ladies weekend at a wonderful place called Capenwray. It's a really nice place, and there were about 180 of us ladies, there to hear from God, and fellowship with each other.

I really enjoyed hearing various people speak on the subject of "Whatever the weather". However one particular phrase that was used by one of the preaches stuck in my mind. "I will share my glory with no-one". It jarred within me, and I couldn't work out why.

The story which this phrase went with was one which quite a few christians could understand. A person, let's call her Mary, spent some time at the bible school at Capenwray, and really found it a great experience. She met with God every day, and learned so much. Then she left, and started working at a boarding school. The school was so different from the Bible school environment. She described it as a dard place. She found it hard to find God there. She lived the first year there on the memories of her time at bible school. Then she got into her second year, and found it harder and harder to cope. She felt that she could not cope with another year, and started to put in place another job. It was all going well, when suddenly God closed the door on her. He told her he wanted her to stay there another year. She said "I can't do it Lord. If I have to stay here another year you are going to have to do it." And he did. It was at this point she brought in the "I will share my glory with no-one". It seemed to be that God was not going to allow her to do anything in her own strength, but would only get glory if it was done through his strength alone.

I felt that this was not quite right, there was something wrong about it, so I decided to sit down, and write this piece about it to try and work it out in my mind: both what was happening with Mary in this time above, and also what the bible says about God's glory.

The verse that this quote comes from is Isaiah 42:8. And it is only part of the verse. The entire verse, according to my preferred New King James Version, is "I am the LORD, that is My name; And My glory I will not give to another, Nor My praise to carved images." As you can see, it is the middle third of the verse. There is a saying which you may have heard. A verse taken out of context is a pretext. This means that if you take a single verse, and don't look at the scripture surrounding it, you can fail to see what the verse actually means. You can find verses in the bible which allow, or even encourage, any particular belief system you wish to hold. However, if you look at those verses in the actual context, the surrounding passage, then you will find out what God intended it to mean. In fact, the chapter and verse separation did not occur until the 13th century. Before that time you had to read an entire book at once, there was no possibility to take a particular verse and look only at that one.

Just a quick aside. I am not saying that there are not a lot of really great verse in the bible, which can themselves encapsulate the meaning of entire books, or indeed the entire gospel. John 3:16 is a great verse. But it is not the entire bible, nor even the entire chapther of John 3. It doesn't say anything about the requirement for a christian to be born again. Nor does it mention that the church is the bride of Christ. Nor that the Holy Spirit is sent by God. However if you read John 3 you can see all these things are mentioned in it. In fact, John 3:16 could be taken to mean that all the world was saved, and there was nothing we need to do to enter into this salvation, we don't even need to believe in it for it to have effect. Of course that is not what it means, but by taking it out of the context of the chapter, you have lost the connection to being born of the Spirit to enter the kingdom of God.

So, what happens if you take a portion of a verse out of context. Well, that is just as bad, and can be much worse. Hebrew poetry, which this verse is part of, is not like the poetry you may have read at school. To begin with it doesn't rhyme. You might have often wondered why the Psalms don't appear to have a rhyming scheme to them, that is because the Hebrew poetry (or wisdom) writing used a different way of expressing what the writer wanted to say. They used something like a stanza (a set of lines together) to show their entire thought. There were two sorts of stanza but both of them were comparative. Both of them tended to have two parts to it, in the first type the two parts were saying the same thing but in different ways, in the second one the two parts were opposites.

For an example of the second sort, see Proverbs 2:21-22.

21 For the upright will dwell in the land,
And the blameless will remain in it;
22 But the wicked will be cut off from the earth,
And the unfaithful will be uprooted from it.

Here there are two different thoughts, but they represent a comparative. In fact, it consists of two different stanzas, both of which can stand on their own, but they link together as well. Looking at v21 we see two different statements about the same thing: the upright will dwell in the land and the blameless will remain in it. These statements are connected by the word "and". It talks about two sorts of people, the upright and the blameless, and two different results, dwelling in the land and remaining in it. It is obvious to us that the two results are the same, what might not be so obvious is that the sorts of people are the same. This is waht Hebrew poetry does, gives you two different images and says either that they are the same, or that they are different.  I'll get onto the difference bit shortly.

Looking at v22 we again see two statements about two kinds of people and two consequences, again connected by an "and". The wicked and the unfaithful; and being cut off from the earth and being uprooted form it. If we use the same system as we did for v21 this means that the wicked and the unfaithful are the same people, and being cut off from the earth is the same thing as being uprooted from it. If you uproot a plant, you do indeed cut it off from the earth, you remove it from the soil and it can no longer grow. This is what the consequences boil down to, so the wicked and the unfaithful are the same thing - if you are unfaithful to God, you are wicked.

You have a very important word at the start of v22. "But". It is this word which says that the two verses should be compared to each other to see the difference between them. These verses say that being upright and blameless are the same thing, being unfaithful and wicked are the same thing, and that being upright and blameless is different from being wicked and unfaithful; just as the consequences of each type of behaviour are different: remaining in the land and being uprooted  from it. 

This is a very quick introduction to Hebrew poetry, but I hope you get the picture - that you can't take a single line from it, you have to look at the lines surrounding it, and that if you are confused by one part, the second part might show you what the first part means.

So, let's jump back to Isaiah 42:8 and separate it into lines so we can then seen what they are saying and how they should be compared to each other.

8 I am the LORD, that is My name;
And My glory I will not give to another,
Nor My praise to carved images.

Here we have three lines. The first is an introduction to who is speaking - this is the LORD. The fact that LORD is in capital letters means that here God uses his actual name, which is represented in the old testament by the form , which transliterates to yhwh. Some people translate this as Jehovah, and others as Yahweh (or Yahveh, depending on your pronounciation of one letter). I prefer the second, and I'm not going into why, as that is just too long. So, the first line is an introduction, it's God, himself, who is saying this.

The second line is the line we are looking at "My glory I will not give to another". The God will not share his own gory with another. Seems quite clear - we don't have a look in, it's his and his alone. But hold on, what does the third line say - can it shed any light on the second.

"Nor My praise to carved images." Ok, so we have two sorts of things regarding God, and two sorts of things which God is comparing himself to. My glory verses My praise, that's quite obvious, glory and praise are similar sorts of things. What are the things God is comparing himself to: "another" - seems ok, or "carved images". It's this second bit, carved images, which tells us what sort of thing 'another' is. God is not saying he won't share his glory with anyone other than himself, but he won't share it with idols. He won't let anything which we would worship instead of him get any glory. (I'll probably write something about idols in a bit, so check back here later.)

So, it is possible that this verse is actually only talking about idols. Let's have a look at what the rest of the bible says about God's glory. Romans 8:16-17 says "The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together". The last part of that, "glorified together" is translated in the NIV as "we may share in his glory". 2 Thessalonians 2:13-14 says "But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth, to which He called you by our gospel, for the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ." The obtaining of the glory of Jesus. John 17:22 says "And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one" Jesus himself gave us his glory, the glory which had been given to him by God the Father. So other portions of scripture speak of God sharing with us his glory.

Ok, back to Mary - what was going on there. There are times when we struggle in life, when we are trying to do things our way. They may even be the things which God wants us to do, but we want do to them ourselves. We don't want to rely on anything - we are going to do it ourself, so we can get the praise for it. Well, that's not what God wants. When he asks us to do something, he expects us to ask for his help in doing it. It's a co-operative effort. Even Jesus didn't do anything on his own. John 5:19 says "Then Jesus answered and said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner". We can't do anything on our own. If we try, then we will fail, and our works will come to nothing (it might not do so immediately, but it will do so in the long term, as God has declared that all works of man shall be destroyed, so that only the work of God may remain.) However, if we look to the Father, see what he is doing, and do it, relying on him, not doing it ourselves, then we will get somewhere. Mary was trying to do it herself in the second year, it was only when she began to rely on God for help that she found out that God gives us the resources to do what he calls us to do. And it is also only when we are in that place, when we are relying totally on God, that we actually start to share in his Glory, because at that point he rests on us, and his glory is around us. So perhaps she wasn't as far off base as I thought at first.