At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“It is not good to eat much honey: So for men to search their own glory is not glory” (Proverbs 25:27).
When glory bends back in upon itself, it thereby ceases to be glory. Solomon compares it to taking a good thing—the sweetness of honey—and then gorging yourself on it. The sweetness ceases to be sweet. So also glory, taken in the wrong way, ceases to be glorious.
What is that wrong way? The man who is doing it wrong is “searching” it out, and what he is searching out is his “own” glory. He wants the applause to be directed toward him. He wants his name to be up in lights. He desires to be standing above the others at the awards ceremony.
But there really is a mystery here. Paul instructs Christians to run so as to receive the prize, doesn’t he?
“Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain” (1 Corinthians 9:24).
The key to understanding this is to italicize the word own in the proverb. The man doing it wrong is seeking out his own glory. The man doing it right is striving for glory, but it is because he wants his performance to be and become the glory of another.
God created us as glory-seeking creatures. We gravitate toward glory, and we can no more switch that off than we can stop wanting oxygen for our lungs. What the fall did was make us want to substitute other forms of glory for the glory that God intended for us to have. Those substitutions will either be vainglory, or they will be a dark glory. Vainglory traffics in trinkets. Dark glory gravitates toward perversions. Both of them are forms of seeking out their own glory.
But real Christians are distinguished by their pursuit of glory. What is sin itself? It is to fall short of glory (Rom. 3:23), that glory being the glory of God. And what are we instructed to pursue? Glory. “To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life” (Romans 2:7).
