“To grasp all that God is trying to tell us in Scripture, we need to undo the Christianese.
Consider (the word) glory… Although we can be misled by our Christianese to think glory is purely about heavenly splendor (or power), glory in the Bible is bound up with reputation, regard, honor”
Matthew Bates (Why the Gospel)
Bates goes on to unpack this by touching on why glory matters in this way. So often God’s glory is used in certain subsets of Christianity to establish necessary distance between the creator and the creation and to evoke Gods ultimate control or power over the creation. It’s used to say that God can do what God wants and that our role is not to question but to give Him the deserved “glory”.
And yet, we cannot read through scripture and miss the fact that people questioned God left and right. What makes these same segments uneasy is the idea that such questions could actually influence God. Which is precisely where a proper understanding of the word glory in its world can help.
For glory to be bound up in Gods reputation is for Gods name to be bound to the way God acts in and for the world. The uncomfortableness with the idea of our questions influencing God is often attached to the idea that God is unknowable, or that we cannot know the hidden ways of God. Accusations are often made of those who protest, saying that God is knowable and in fact revealed His true name by way of His action in and for the world. In other words, Gods reputation is tied to God acting in the way that He said He would act. To act contrary to His revealed name makes God untrustworthy. And we see this all over the scriptures where people come to God and say, wait a minute, you said you were this, so if you do this you are going to show yourself as someone who cannot be trusted. Your reputation will be maligned. And we also see God changing His action in line with these protests.
Some scholars believe that this belongs to the motif of “testing”. For example, Richard Middleton makes a solid argument in his book Abraham’s Silence that God did not desire the sacrifice, He desired the pushback. He desired Abraham to learn that even though this is how the other gods act, his expectations of Yahweh should be different.
The ultimate point of concern for Gods reputation then is Jesus. As it says in 2 Tim 2:10, “Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in the Christ, Jesus (or Jesus the Christ), with eternal glory.” Another way to translate the phrase eternal glory would be “established reputation”. God revealed His true name, which is attached to the way God acts in and for the world. Jesus becomes the true fulfillment of what God said He would do, the measure of His faithfulness or reputation.
Notice too that salvation in this verse is not attached to individuals but to Jesus. One doesn’t obtain their salvation through some means of faithfulness. Rather salvation is already there to obtain. It is a work that has already been done. And if you read more closely, that work is not individual salvation. That would be collapsing this verse in on itself. Rather, in line with the whole story of scripture, it is the establishing of a king and a kingdom. It is God doing what God said He would do.
The Stories of my Life 