What It Means to Witness the Kabod of God
“We have seen His glory / We have seen His glory / The one and only Son.”
Acappella, “We Have Seen His Glory”
There is a phrase in this song that the singers repeat eleven times across two verses, a bridge, and an extended chorus. Eleven times. Not by accident.
“We have seen His glory.”
That repetition is not a stylistic choice. It is a theological insistence. It is the song refusing to let you move on. It is the songwriter saying: stay here for a moment. Don’t treat this as background music. Don’t let these words become familiar. Do you understand what you are saying when you say this?
We. Have. Seen. His. Glory.
The glory of God is one of the most frequently mentioned concepts in the entire Bible, and one of the least understood in the average Christian’s working vocabulary of faith. We sing about it. We use it at the end of prayers. We invoke it in sermons. And yet if you stopped most believers and asked them to explain, precisely and clearly, what the glory of God actually is, what it means, why it matters, and what it has to do with real life on an ordinary Tuesday, most would struggle to offer more than a vague sense of brightness or greatness or importance.
This blog post is an attempt to fix that. Because the song knows something the Church has largely forgotten: the glory of God is not a devotional abstraction. It is the weight of who God is. And the people who have genuinely seen it are never the same afterwards.
Part One: What Is “Glory”, Really?
Before we can appreciate what the song is proclaiming, we need to understand what the word actually means, not as a vague religious synonym for brightness, but as the specific, concrete, weighty concept that the original biblical languages carry.
In Hebrew, the word is kabod. And kabod does not primarily mean light or dazzle or impressiveness. It means weight. Heaviness. Substance. The root of the word, kabad, means to be heavy, to carry mass, to have consequence. When you apply kabod to God, you are talking about the sheer, overwhelming substance and reality of who He is, in contrast to everything that is light and vaporous in the created order. His glory is His presence as a force that has mass. That changes everything it touches. That cannot be treated casually.
In Greek, the word is doxa. In classical Greek it meant reputation, or what people think of you, something fragile and contingent on the opinions of others. But when the translators of the Septuagint reached for a Greek word to capture the Hebrew kabod, they chose doxa and transformed it. In the New Testament, doxa means the objective, inherent worth and radiant reality of God, not what people think of Him, but what He actually is. His glory is not a performance for an audience. It is the radiation of what He is, existing whether or not any creature is present to observe it.
Putting the two together, the glory of God has three inseparable dimensions. First, it is the intrinsic weight and substance of who God is, His holiness, His love, His justice, His power, His wisdom, His faithfulness, all of these not as separate qualities He possesses but as expressions of a single infinite Being. Second, it is the visible manifestation of that reality, the radiance, the Shekinah presence, the blazing light that appears when God makes Himself perceptible in the created order. Third, it is the honour, praise, and acknowledgment that God’s intrinsic worth rightfully evokes from everything He has made.
Glory is not a religious word for a special kind of brightness. It is the word for the weight of who God is, His substantial, infinite, self-existing reality, radiating through His acts, and demanding acknowledgment from everything He has made.
Part Two: “He Fed the Thousands”, Glory in the Miracles
The song opens with a catalogue of miracles witnessed by the narrator. And it is worth pausing on this, because the song is not simply listing impressive events. It is presenting evidence. It is building a legal case for the declaration that follows: we have seen His glory.
“He fed the thousands who did not have bread I saw him bringing people back from the dead He drove out demons from the demon-bound And taught us how to walk on holy ground He made the leper’s skin like new The storm dissipated when he told it to Took jars of water, turned it into wine The Savior even healed this heart of mine.”
This is a first-century eyewitness account. And every miracle in this list is doing something specific. Every one of them is a display of the divine kabod breaking through into the created order through a human body.
When Jesus fed the five thousand, He was not simply solving a logistical problem. He was displaying the creative power of the One through whom all things were made, the One who spoke food into existence on the third day of creation, now holding bread in human hands and multiplying it in the presence of hungry people. The miracle reveals something about who He is. Not just what He can do, who He is.
When He stilled the storm, He was displaying the sovereignty of the One of whom Psalm 65:7 says: “Which stilleth the noise of the seas, the noise of their waves, and the tumult of the people.” The God who set the boundaries of the oceans in creation simply spoke to the wind and waves He had made, and they obeyed. The disciples asked the right question: “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41). That is the question miracles are designed to produce. That is the question that leads to the chorus.
When He raised the dead, Lazarus, the widow’s son at Nain, Jairus’ daughter, He was displaying the glory that John 1:4 describes: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Life is not merely something He can restore; it is something He is. He is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25). The miracle is not a performance; it is a self-revelation.
But notice where the first verse ends. After all those external, public, historically documented miracles, bread multiplied, storms stilled, lepers cleansed, dead raised, the final line is deeply personal: “The Savior even healed this heart of mine.” The most intimate miracle is listed last. And the word “even” is doing real work there. As if the narrator is saying: all of those were extraordinary. But this, this broken, private, interior thing that no one else could see, this is the one I cannot get over.
Part Three: Glory in the Kabod, What Isaiah and Moses Saw
To understand what the disciples were witnessing in those miracles, we need to go back further, to the moments in the Old Testament when the divine glory appeared most directly and what happened to the people who encountered it.
When Moses asked God to show him His glory, God responded with something unexpected. He did not primarily promise a light show or a dramatic visual experience. He said: “I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy” (Exodus 33:19). The glory of God, in its most essential form, is His character. His goodness. His name. His sovereign freedom in grace and mercy.
And then God added: “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exodus 33:20). Not because God is being withholding or theatrical. But because the full, unmediated weight of the divine kabod would annihilate a finite creature. What Moses received instead, the back of God as He passed by, while Moses was hidden in the cleft of the rock, while God covered him with His hand, was filtered, protected, mediated glory. And even that experience left Moses’ face shining so intensely that Aaron and the people were afraid to come near him (Exodus 34:30).
When Isaiah saw the Lord sitting on His throne in Isaiah 6, the seraphim, the highest-order angelic beings, covered their own faces with two of their wings. They could not look at the unveiled divine presence. They cried to one another: “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” And the foundations of the thresholds shook. And the house was filled with smoke. And Isaiah said: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.” Not a warm feeling of spiritual uplift. Not a pleasant devotional experience. The shattering awareness of a sinful creature in the presence of infinite holiness.
All of this is the backdrop for what the disciples were experiencing when they walked with Jesus. When the kabod of God, the weight of divine reality that could not be looked at directly, that shook the foundations of the temple, that left Moses’ face shining for days, was walking around in sandals, touching lepers with human hands, inviting children to sit on His lap, and eating fish by the Sea of Galilee. John puts it plainly: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory” (John 1:14). The verb John uses for “dwelt”, eskēnōsen, literally means “tabernacled.” The kabod that filled the tabernacle in the wilderness has now taken up residence in a human body.
Part Four: “I Was There”, The Scandal of a Suffering God
The second verse of the song moves from the miracles to the Passion, and the shift is jarring in exactly the right way.
“I was there the day when the dove came down Saw soldiers with thorns to make His crown Felt the whole earth quake, darkness on the land After he was dead, he came to life again.”
The dove at the baptism. The crown of thorns. The earthquake. The darkness. The resurrection. The song does not skip the suffering to get to the triumph. It holds them together. And this is one of the most theologically important things the song does.
The cross is where the glory of God shone most brilliantly. Not despite its horror. Because of it.
Jesus Himself said so. In John 12, just before the events of Holy Week begin in earnest, He declares: “The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.” And then He describes this glorification as a grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying. He prays: “Father, glorify thy name.” And the voice from heaven responds: “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.” The glorification of the divine name happens at the cross.
This is because at the cross, every attribute of God is displayed simultaneously and at maximum intensity. His holiness, sin is fully punished, not overlooked, not managed, not deferred any further. His love, the Son gives Himself for His enemies, while we were still sinners, at the furthest extreme of sacrifice for the completely undeserving. His justice, the record of debt that stood against all of humanity is cancelled because it is paid in full, not waived. His power, death is turned into the very mechanism of resurrection; the enemy’s greatest weapon becomes the means of his own defeat. His faithfulness, every covenant promise God ever made finds its yes and amen in the cross.
The darkness at the crucifixion was not the absence of glory. It was the weight of it pressing in. The earthquake was not chaos. It was the creation reacting to the most significant event in its history. The torn veil was not destruction. It was the removal of the final barrier between sinful humanity and the holy presence of God.
The soldiers who put thorns on His head thought they were mocking a defeated king. They were, without knowing it, crowning the One whose glory the seraphim cannot look at directly. The crown of thorns is one of the most paradoxical images in human history: the greatest glory wearing the most degrading symbol of suffering. This is what the incarnate kabod looks like in a fallen world.
Part Five: “I Was There Watching Him Fly Away”, The Ascension and the Spirit
“I was there when he said that he couldn’t stay Was on the Mount of Olives watching Him fly away In the upper room with power, the Spirit came To give us guidance as we declare His name.”
The song does something theologically careful here that is easy to miss. It connects three events that must be understood together: the ascension, the coming of the Spirit, and the declaration of the name. These are not separate episodes; they are one continuous movement of the divine glory.
The ascension is not the departure of the glory. It is the installation of the glorified King at the right hand of the Father, the position of supreme governing authority over the entire created order. Romans 1:4 tells us Jesus was “declared to be the Son of God with power… by the resurrection from the dead.” The ascension is the completion of that declaration: the risen, victorious Son taking His seat at the right hand of the Majesty on high (Hebrews 1:3). He did not leave so that something lesser could begin. He ascended so that what He had accomplished could be applied to the whole earth through the Spirit.
The Spirit who came at Pentecost is the Spirit of glory. Paul makes this explicit in a stunning passage in 2 Corinthians 3:18: “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” The Spirit’s work is a glory work: a progressive transformation of believers into the image of the glorified Christ, from one degree of glory to the next, without end.
And then Paul writes, in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, the most extraordinary statement about where the kabod now resides: “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God?” The temple. The specific, designated location where the kabod dwelt. The place that was so full of the divine presence that the priests could not even stand to minister. That is now your body. Every believer is a walking temple, carrying the indwelling presence of the God whose glory filled the tabernacle in the wilderness.
The song’s narrator was on the Mount of Olives watching Him fly away. But the glory did not fly away. It was poured out in the upper room, in tongues of fire, into the bodies of ordinary Galilean men and women. And from that moment forward, the declaration of the divine name was carried not in a cloud or a pillar of fire or a building made of cedar and gold, but in the fragile, mortal, Spirit-filled bodies of those who had seen His glory.
Part Six: Why Does God Act for His Own Glory?
Before we reach the third verse, it is worth pausing on a question that the song implicitly raises. If the entire universe is oriented toward the glory of God, if creation was made for it, if the cross achieved it, if the Spirit advances it, if the whole of redemptive history is building toward the earth being filled with the knowledge of it as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14), does that not make God a kind of cosmic narcissist?
This is a serious question that deserves a direct answer. And the answer begins with understanding that God is not a being among beings. He is not one impressive entity among others who might be tempted toward vain self-promotion at the expense of those around Him. He is Being itself, the self-existent, uncaused ground of all existence, from whom, through whom, and for whom all things exist (Romans 11:36). Every genuine good that exists in the created order, every beauty, every truth, every justice, every love, every joy, is a participation in and reflection of God’s own goodness, beauty, truth, and love.
This means that when God directs all things toward His own glory, He is directing them toward the highest, most real, most genuinely good reality in existence. The human being who seeks their own glory at the expense of others is directing attention away from what is genuinely best (God) toward what is genuinely lesser (themselves). When God seeks His own glory, He is directing everything toward what is objectively, ultimately best. These actions wear the same grammatical clothing. They are not the same thing at all.
The eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards put it most clearly: because God is infinite and all other goods are derived from Him, the highest possible happiness for any creature is the enjoyment of God Himself. Therefore, when God acts for His own glory, He is simultaneously acting for the creature’s highest possible good. The two aims cannot be separated. Psalm 16:11, “in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”, is not describing the experience of admiring God from a respectful distance. It is describing the experience of being in the divine presence, filled with what God Himself is full of.
God’s pursuit of His own glory is not cosmic narcissism. It is the most generous act in the universe. Because His glory is the address of the greatest joy His creatures can ever know, and pursuing His glory is pursuing their highest good.
Part Seven: “I See How He Works in Our Lives Today”
“I see how he works in our lives today Through the things not explained any other way I have known his guidance and I understand The contentment shown by His loving hand I can see Him working in His family Who are clearly following their destiny I can feel His power in their unending love An awesome power coming from above.”
The third verse is the most quietly powerful moment in the song, and it is easy to rush past it. The first verse deals with public miracles. The second verse deals with the defining events of salvation history. And then the third verse moves into the present. Into Tuesday. Into ordinary life. Into the things not explained any other way.
This is not a lesser form of glory-witness. It may be the most demanding form.
It is one thing to say you have seen His glory in a miracle, in bread multiplied, in a storm stilled, in a body raised from the grave. Those events have a kind of self-announcing quality. It is another thing entirely to say: I see His glory in the contentment a friend has in their suffering that has no earthly explanation. I see it in the unending love a community maintains that should, by any human standard, have run dry by now. I see it in the lives of people who are clearly following a destiny they did not choose for themselves.
Paul describes this in 2 Corinthians 3:18, the Spirit transforming believers from one degree of glory to another. The glory that is being displayed in the life of a genuinely changed person is not a lesser glory than the glory in the miracles. It is the same kabod, working through the same Spirit, in the same direction. The transformed life is a glory event. The inexplicable forgiveness extended to an enemy is a glory display. The peace that passes understanding in the middle of circumstances that should produce despair is a fragment of the divine kabod breaking through into ordinary life.
The song says: “Through the things not explained any other way.” This is the epistemological key to seeing God’s glory in the present. The glory is visible to those who are paying attention to what has no adequate natural explanation, to the surplus of grace that exceeds what human love is capable of producing, to the peace that exceeds what human strength can manufacture, to the love that outlasts what human affection can sustain.
The heavens declare His glory (Psalm 19:1). So does the transformed face of someone who has genuinely encountered Him.
Part Eight: The Whole Earth Is Full of His Glory
Isaiah 6:3, the declaration of the seraphim before the divine throne, says something that should stop us: “The whole earth is full of his glory.” Not just the sacred spaces. Not just the mountaintop experiences and the Pentecostal upper rooms and the moments of undeniable divine encounter. The whole earth. Full.
This means the glory is not primarily found by going somewhere special or achieving a particular spiritual state. It is found by learning to see what is already there. When Moses encountered the burning bush, God said: “Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). Not special ground. Not ground that had been designated sacred in advance. The ground where Moses happened to be standing was holy because God was present there. Every place, rightly perceived, is holy ground.
The Psalmist in Psalm 19 says the heavens “declare the glory of God” using a Hebrew participle, ongoing, continuous, present-tense action. The heavens are not merely evidence for a creator. They are continually, actively, without pause, declaring the divine kabod. Day after day pours out speech. Night after night reveals knowledge. The universe has been preaching this sermon since the first moment of the first day of creation, and it has not stopped for a single second.
And this transforms everything. The commute is not secular time between spiritual activities; it is time lived in the presence of a God whose glory fills the earth. The meal is not a pause between more important things; it is a participation in the goodness of a Creator who designed bodies to need food and people to need each other. The moment of genuine justice, the wrong made right, the truth upheld at cost, is a fragment of the divine character breaking through into human affairs. Every experience of genuine beauty, truth, goodness, or love is an echo of the One who is, in His own person, the source of all of these things.
Paul puts it most comprehensively in 1 Corinthians 10:31: “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” Whether you eat or drink. The most ordinary, unavoidable, mundane activities of physical existence. These can be done to the glory of God. Because the glory of God is not confined to the extraordinary. It is the weight of who He is, pressing through the ordinary fabric of every moment.
Part Nine: “We Should Not Be Ashamed”
Buried in the extended chorus of the song is a line that many listeners pass over. In the midst of the repeated declaration “we have seen His glory,” the background vocals sing something pointed: “We should not be ashamed. We should not be ashamed.”
This is not a throwaway lyric. It is an exhortation aimed at a very specific temptation. Because the glory of God is, in the fallen world, a stumbling block. The cross is foolishness to those who are perishing (1 Corinthians 1:18). The claim that this particular Jewish carpenter, executed by Roman authority, was the visible manifestation of the divine kabod through whom all things were made, this claim invites ridicule in every generation.
And yet the song insists: we have seen His glory. We were there. We cannot un-see it. And therefore we should not be ashamed. Paul says the same thing in Romans 1:16: “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” The Greek word for “power” here is dynamis, the same word used for the miraculous power that accompanied the ministry of Jesus. The gospel is not merely a set of propositions to be believed. It is the kabod of God in verbal form, carrying the weight of the divine character into the ears and hearts of those who receive it.
The invitation of the song, and the invitation of the gospel, is to witness and then to declare. “I will lift up my hands. I will praise Him. We should not be ashamed.” Because the One whose glory we have seen is the One and Only Son, the One in whose face the full light of the knowledge of the glory of God shines (2 Corinthians 4:6). To be ashamed of Him would be to be ashamed of the most glorious reality in existence.
Part Ten: The Destination, Face to Face
The song ends with a slight but significant change. For most of the piece, the declaration has been “we have seen His glory.” In the final line, it shifts: “We have seen the glory of the Son.”
This is not simply a variation for musical reasons. It is a theological precision. What we have seen in the miracles, in the cross and resurrection, in the transformed lives of believers, in the Spirit’s work in the Church, is not merely an attribute of God in the abstract. It is the glory of the Son, the glory of the One who is “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3). The glory is personal. It has a face.
And the destination of the entire biblical story, the destination toward which all creation, all redemption, and all sanctification is moving, is described in Revelation 22:4 in four words: “They shall see his face.”
In the Old Testament, seeing the face of God was synonymous with death. Moses could only see the back of God as He passed. The seraphim covered their faces before the divine throne. The veil was always there, for the creature’s protection. In the new creation, it is removed permanently. The redeemed, in their glorified bodies, will see the face of God, will encounter the full, unmediated, unveiled weight of who He is, and will not be destroyed by it but sustained and fulfilled by it, because the glorification that precedes the vision has made them capable of what no fallen creature could survive.
Habakkuk 2:14 describes the destination: “For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.” As the waters cover the sea, completely, to every depth, from every direction, leaving no inch of the sea floor exposed. The whole earth. The full knowledge. The complete revelation of the kabod that creation has been declaring since the first day, that the tabernacle housed in the wilderness, that John and Peter and James saw on the Mount of Transfiguration, that the disciples witnessed in the miracles, that the cross displayed at maximum intensity, that the Spirit is advancing in the Church.
The song says: we have seen His glory. That is not the end of the sentence. That is the beginning of a vision that stretches from the burning bush all the way to the face of God, unveiled, forever. The glory we have seen is the down payment. The face we will see is the fullness.
Conclusion: We Were Made for This
Augustine wrote, in the opening lines of his Confessions, one of the most honest sentences in the history of human reflection: “Thou madest us for thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in thee.”
The restlessness every human being carries, the persistent, unshakeable sense that something is missing, that no achievement fully satisfies, that no beauty is quite enough, that every joy has an aftertaste of longing for something more, is not a malfunction. It is the accurate perception of a soul that was made for an infinite God encountering only finite substitutes. Isaiah 43:7 says it plainly: God created humanity “for my glory.” Not primarily for our own fulfilment, not primarily for each other, not primarily for the management of the earth, but primarily for the display and enjoyment of the divine kabod.
This means the deepest longing of your heart is a longing that was designed to be met. The glimpses of glory in a mountain range, in a piece of music, in a moment of genuine love, in an act of costly justice, these are what C.S. Lewis called the arrows of Joy: not the target, but pointing at it. Every genuine good is an echo of the One who is Good in His own person. Every beauty is a fragment of the One who is Beauty itself. Every moment of true love is a reflection of the One who is, at the deepest level of His being, love.
The song “We Have Seen His Glory” is a testimony. It is the account of people who were there, there for the bread and the dead raised and the lepers cleansed, there for the dove and the thorns and the earthquake and the empty tomb, there on the Mount of Olives watching Him ascend, there in the upper room when the Spirit came. And then it moves, quietly and powerfully, into the present tense: “I see how he works in our lives today.”
That move from past to present is the invitation. You may not have been on the hillside when He fed the thousands. You may not have stood at the empty tomb. But the same Spirit who descended on the disciples in tongues of fire indwells every believer today. The same kabod that filled the tabernacle dwells in your body. The same glory that the disciples witnessed in three years of shared life with Jesus is the glory that is transforming you, from one degree to another, into His image.
We have seen His glory. And we are not ashamed.
“For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.”
Habakkuk 2:14
Soli Deo Gloria
Based on “The Glory of God: What It Means, Why It Matters, and Why Everything Exists for It” and the song “We Have Seen His Glory” by Acappella.
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