THE FIVE SOLAS: SOLI DEO GLORIA

You may be a little familiar with George Frideric Handel’s musical masterpiece “Messiah” (1741).  Most people are familiar with the following excerpt from the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

While these words may be very familiar to us, what is even less known about Handel is that he would sign the end of his cantatas with the letters “SDG.”  That was shorthand for Soli Deo Gloria—the overarching principle of the Protestant Reformation.

Soli Deo Gloria is Latin for “to God alone be the glory.”  Glory is one of the words that has a forgotten meaning.  People sling it around in their Christianese vocabulary without giving thought to what it actually means.  There is a well-knowing TV preacher that says, “Glory to God” all the time like verbal pauses. Some people will used this phrase jokingly or as an exclamation for just about anything.  People will use the phrase like this, “We ate ‘til we were ready to burst…glory to God."  The casual use of this phrase just shows that people don’t understand what they’re saying.  Few people may be able to explain what the word actually means.  So at this point, a definition may be in order to help you understand what SDG means.

The English word “glory” comes from the Greek word “doxa.”  It is often translated into English as: glorious, honor, praise, dignity or worship.  Other ways to express this might be by saying that God has splendor, brightness, majesty or excellence.  This is intrinsic to God.  It is who God is.  He is glorious.  In every way God is perfect, beautiful, radiant, marvelous, splendid, majestic and bright.  He is wonderful to behold because He is glorious.  We do not make Him glorious--He just is glorious. So one way that we use this word is to describe what God is inherently.  And God, being who He is, displays His glory in the way that He interacts with mankind.  Regardless of what attribute is being displayed, it is glorious.

To be clear, there is nothing we can do to add to God’s glory or to take away from God’s glory.  Our sin does not take away from God what has always been, what is now, and what will always be His.  He is glorious no matter what.  Yet at the same time we are called to give God glory, to glorify Him, to live for His glory, to do all things for His glory and to be the visible display of God’s glory.  What is the world do these things means?

When we say that we are “giving God glory” it does not actually mean that we are giving God something that He is lacking or in need of.  What it means is this: we are called to use our thoughts, words and actions to tell of God’s greatness.  To glorify God is to magnify God.  Pastor John Piper has a very helpful illustration in bringing this lofty thought down to the bottom shelf.  He says that Christians are called to magnify God like a telescope, not like a microscope.  A microscope takes what is small and makes it appear to be larger than it is.  A telescope takes something that is enormously big, but appears small to the eye, and makes it bigger than the way the eye naturally sees it.

So it is with mankind.  We have naturally small thoughts of God.  We don’t see God as He really is.  He is a tiny speck of light in the night sky so to speak, not like the blazing sun.  We need to look at Him through the lens of Scripture so that we can see Him for as He really is.  God reveals Himself through His Word so that we can see His glory.  Our duty as Christians is to declare the glory of God for what it is.  Our duty is to think and live in a way that is consistent with a glorious God.  This is what we mean when we say that we are to live to the glory of God.

We eat and drink to the glory of God.  It is His splendor as Provider that ensures we have food in our bellies.  So we eat and say, “Thank You, Lord, for giving me this food.  And Lord, You sure have made some tasty stuff.  You are wonderful.  You could have make all food to taste like Nyquil, but you didn’t.”

We sleep to the glory of God.  “Thank You, Lord, that the world doesn’t depend on me to keep in going.  The fact that the world still spins while I sleep means that You are in control.  Thank You that I can lay down in peace tonight and be rested for the next day!  Some will be in pain through the night, but you have shown me goodness.”

We use money to the glory of God.  “Lord, help me to use my money to promote and spread Your Word across this planet so that others can hear of Your glory and come to Christ for salvation.  In giving away the money You gave me, the world will see that You are more glorious than the world’s goods that I can buy with this money.  You are my Treasure and this money will go towards helping others know of my Treasure.” 

We raise our children to the glory of God.  We teach them the Scriptures.  We discipline them when they sin knowing that this will help them see God’s hate for sin.  We are gracious to them when they sin knowing this will let them know of God’s grace to sinners.  We are called to think about, talk about and show God’s glory in our actions to our children.  When you rightly represent God in this world, You are giving God glory.

We sing in church to the glory of God.  This is why our songs must be declarations of the greatness of God, not just expressions of our feelings towards God.  God is glorious regardless of our feelings.  I don’t want to in anyway minimize our “feelings” for God—they are important.  But they are not often the first indicator of whether or not we are really giving God glory.  They are part of giving God glory, but the truth of God’s greatness must be declared first if our feelings are going to be anchored to His marvelous reality. 

Giving God glory is what the Christian life is about.  This is what it means to live a life of worship.  Worship is not something you do ONLY on Sunday mornings.  Giving God “doxa”, worship, or glory is to happen all the time.   Scripture tells us that we are to do ALL things to the glory of God.  We are to “make much” of God.  Pastor Mark Dever says that the church is to be the “visible display of God’s glory.”  We are to show God’s glory by not only declaring God’s glory but by representing it in our lives. 

Now when we refer to Soli Deo Gloria, we mean that God alone gets the glory (the worship, the praise, the honor) for everything that pertains to our salvation.  The Pope does not receive glory for our salvation.  Neither does Mary or any angel.  And we certainly cannot give credit to ourselves for any part of our salvation (not for the new birth, not for repentance, not for faith, not for justification, not for sanctification, not for glorification, not for election, not for adoption, not for predestination, not for anything).  To declare yourself wonderful for any part of your salvation would mean that salvation is a co-operation between God and man—which is synergism.  We believe that all of salvation is a work of God alone—monergism.  Consequently, God alone gets all the glory.  He alone is marvelous, splendid, majestic and wonderful for the salvation we receive.  We thank Him alone and not any other, for God will not share His glory with another.

When we examine the saving work of God, we see that from beginning to end, God does it all.  Notice the emphasis on what GOD does and notice the emphasis of His glory.  Follow me here:

God sends His Word to tell us who He is and how we fall short of His glory by sinning and breaking His Law.  His wrath abides on all who do not perfectly display His glory--that is us.  Then God’s Word tells us that His plan all along was to send His Son to be the perfect display of His glory.  Jesus proved that He was God and full of glory by perfectly adhering to the Law of God—He sinned not.  The Son dies in the place of all whom God has called to salvation.  Since we are all born dead in sin and could never respond to the message of Scripture, God sends His Holy Spirit to awaken us from our spiritually dead state so that we can believe in Christ with the gift of faith that God gives.  God saves us and then slowly but surely He transforms us to look more like Christ—who is the perfect glory of God.  This process is called sanctification and means that we are being transformed from one degree of GLORY to the next degree of GLORY.  In others words, God saved us in order to transform us to look more and more like Christ who perfectly displays the glory of God.  God’s goal in saving us means that this WILL happen to us.  This is a process that is not finalized until we either die or meet the Lord Jesus when He comes back.  This final transformation is called GLORIFICATION.  God will one day remove all our desire to sin and ability to sin.  Only then we will look like God originally intended us to look like.  We will finally be restored to His image in order to display His glory.  We will have a glory that comes from God’s glory.  Think about that for a second.

Do you see how much God has done for you in salvation and that you have done nothing?  He alone is declared glorious, marvelous, spectacular and wonderful for our salvation.

You must understand that God’s GLORY is what salvation is ultimately about!  In Genesis, we see that God created man to display His image---His glory.  Sin ruined that image—that glory.  That enrages God.  He hates when His glory is not displayed.  That is why sinners are punished.  Yet in God’s kindness He rescues those who do not display His glory through the saving work of Christ.  That work includes being restored to people who bear the image of God.  

Those of us that are saved are now to declare how great God has been to us in saving us and restoring us.  We are to declare all of God’s marvelous attributes as explained in Scripture.  We are to give God glory.  And knowing that His saving work is all because of His goodness to us and not because of anything we’ve done, we have to say that all glory, praise and honor goes to our God.

Soli Deo Gloria!  It’s hard to imagine that we could thank or give glory to anyone other than God for our salvation.  Yet there are those false teachers and religious systems that would love to deflect the glory of God to someone or something else.  Be careful of them.  They are subtle. 

At the heart of Reformation Theology and at the heart of Calvinism is this great belief of Soli Deo Gloria.  When you hear someone say, “Salvation is ultimately up to You and what You decide to do with God,” then you are hearing a jackhammer that is trying to break apart this foundational principle.  Yet this is how the average Christian talks. 

Ultimately, salvation is up to God.  And that is why every Christian, and I mean every Christian, prays like a Calvinist.  “Thank YOU, LORD, for saving me!”  “Thank YOU, LORD, for saving my friend!”  We know that it was all God or else we’d be thanking ourselves and our friends for getting saved.  And I’ve never heard anyone pray like that.

Martin Luther and other Reformers fought hard in their theological battles against the Catholic Church to recover SDG.  The Catholic understanding of salvation leaves all sorts of room for man to boast in himself—to give himself glory.  The Reformers risked their lives to promote Soli Deo Gloria because it is so vital to our love for God and it is what the Scripture teaches.

So the next time you feel like slinging around the phrase, “Glory to God,” or you hear a worship leader say, “Let’s give God glory,” or you sing the song, “To God be the glory,” stop for a moment and reflect on the saints of old that fought to uphold this truth.  Give pause for a moment and think about what it is that you are saying and doing.  Reflect on the word glory and it’s implications and then burst forth in praise that truly does make much of God and Him alone.