The glorious and blessed God
According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust. 1 Tim. 1:11
In this verse, we are reminded that God is both glorious and blessed. Let us briefly meditate upon these two wonderful realities.
God is glorious. In the KJV, “glorious” modifies “gospel.” However, many Biblical scholars are convinced that we should read verse 11 as follows: “According to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God, which is committed to my trust.” In this case, “glory” now modifies “God.” Either way, the meaning comes out about the same, for the gospel can only be glorious because it reflects the glory of God.
“Glory” to a Jew like Paul would carry the meaning of its Hebrew equivalent, kabod. This Hebrew word carried the sense of “heaviness” and thus “importance.”
In my dining room back in Texas, we had a chandelier. It looked fancy. It looked expensive. It looked like silver or something like that. But I tapped on it one morning as I was eating breakfast, and noticed immediately that it was plastic. Not heavy. Not expensive. Not really that important. If it broke, we could have replaced it without too much trouble or expense.
A lot of things in the world are like my chandelier. They look heavy and important, but they are not. They are fake. God is the only being in the universe that is truly glorious. He is the only being in the universe that is of consequence. He is the only being in the universe that is really important. Everything else is as the Preacher put it: vanity of vanities, all is vanity (Eccl. 1:2).
God is blessed. God is not miserable. He is infinitely happy and fulfilled in every way. This is important, because a person who is beset by trouble and misery is in no condition to bring you out of your misery. Another indebted slave cannot pull his fellow out of bondage. But God knows nothing of bondage or misery. He is blessed.
As blessed, God can bless us. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christwho hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ” (Eph. 1:3). And true blessing can only be found in God. We are all seeking blessing, but we miss the true blessing if we miss the God from whom all blessing flows. God is the giver of every good gift. The mistake we make so much of the time is to mistake the gifts for the Giver. On the other hand, a moment’s reflection should convince us that the Giver must be greater than his gifts. Each gift is but a ray from the God in whose light we are truly blessed.