At our church, like many churches, we have scripture reading before the message. This week, I was asked to recite the portion. The passage: Psalm 29.
I looked at it this morning and read it out loud a few times. I’m familiar with the psalm itself, but I decided to dig a little deeper just to make sure that I was reciting and interpreting the psalm correctly. (As I have been taught in all of poetry classes. Ahem.)
<<Insert rabbit trail in Hebrew.>>
I realized pretty quickly that my English assumptions of the words I was reading did NOT match what the Hebrew words are actually saying.
I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “glory,” I think of light. Radiance. Something shining and ethereal— golden and upward and almost weightless. A synonym of majestic.
But the Hebrew word behind “glory” in the Psalms is kavod— a word that comes from a root that means heavy.
Literally heavy.
Like, density. Mass. And a LOT of it.
Think a presence so substantial that everything else in the room becomes flimsy by comparison. Imagine an old fashioned scale where you have placed something so heavy on the one side of it that no matter what you put on the other side, the scale doesn’t even budge to attempt to balance itself.
When Psalm 29 commands us and the heavenly beings to “ascribe glory to the LORD,” it’s not saying “tell God He’s beautiful and shiny!” It’s saying: treat Him as the heaviest thing in your reality. Because everything else?
Everything else, stacked all together, is nothing compared to Him.
It cannot change the scale.
“Glory” is less about admiration and more about honest proportion— recognizing what, or rather Who, actually has Weight.
But here’s where it gets interesting, because when I think about being with God in heaven, I don’t instinctively think heavy. I’ve thought and read a lot about heaven the past couple of years. And when I think about it, I think the opposite of heaviness. I think of lightness. Freedom. Relief from sin, from this failing body, from the exhausting effort of living in a fallen world. I think of finally being unburdened and the lightness that would come with the delight of being Home with Him.
So which is it? Is God, His glory, His presence, His heaven— is it heavy or light?
Past the psalms and into the New Testament, I think we find Paul stand right in this tension with how he describes the world and what we live with. He calls our present suffering “light” — and then follows with how it produces for us “an eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17). The things we think are heavy right now— the grief, the struggle, the wasting away— are actually the light things. And what we’re heading toward, the thing that will feel like freedom and arrival and rest, is actually the most substantial, most dense reality in existence.
You see, we have it all inverted. The fallen world feels heavy but is actually passing and flimsy. God’s presence will feel like Home— but it’s the weightiest thing there is.
Think of it this way.
We are on ice. A slippery surface. Everything is effort— every muscle tense. Every moment we feel like we must adjust, grab for something to hold, just to try and desperately stay upright, let alone take a step forward.
Isn’t it exhausting?
But the actual problem isn’t our own heaviness. It’s that, in this world, there’s nothing permanent. The ground has no grip, no substance. Our problem isn’t that we are actually burdened too much. The problem is, we can’t find our footing, ruled by the fear of falling. In fact, we can’t focus on anything else.
The moment our feet hit solid ground, everything releases, doesn’t it? We wouldn’t think, “This ground is so heavy.” We think, “Finally.”
The heaviness and security of the immoveable ground is the very thing that makes lightness possible. The solidity is the relief.
I think maybe that’s kavod. God’s weightiness isn’t the thing pressing down on you like a burden. It’s the thing beneath you that finally doesn’t move. It is the rock beneath us and the cleft around us that stands firm.
C.S. Lewis famously explored this same tension in his essay The Weight of Glory, where he described the glory awaiting believers as something almost too staggering to bear— the overwhelming reality of being truly known and delighted in by God. But I think kavod might also work in the other direction. Glory isn’t only the weight that presses down on us with its magnitude. It’s the weight beneath us that finally holds. Lewis asked whether we could bear the weight of being that loved. Maybe the deeper comfort is that we don’t have to bear weight at all— we get to stand on it.
Going back to the roots of these words can’t help but change how I read Psalm 29. All that terrifying power— the voice that shatters cedars, convulses mountains, strips forests bare, forces the wilderness into labor— that’s God demonstrating that everything else you thought was solid ground is actually breakable. Every surface you’ve tried to stand on— your own strength, your own righteousness, other people’s approval, the stability of your circumstances— it’s all ice.
The only surface that never cracks, never shifts, never melts beneath your feet is Him.
And all of the things this world has levied at you— that medical diagnosis, your failing marriage, the fights with your family, that coffin in the ground— the heaviness, the monumental load, the breath-taking burden of it all? Stack them together. Place them on the scale with God’s very existence on the other side.
They will be Nothing when we get to be with Him.
Sit with that. I don’t have to ask you to imagine how very big all of those things feel to you right now in this world. (You don’t have to imagine something that exists, do you?)
What we do have to imagine is the Nothingness those things will feel like in comparison to the Realness and the Bigness of Who God is when we get to see Him with no dark glass in between.
I’ve tried to imagine it, but as overactive as my imagination can be… I can’t.
And I think that’s why the last verse is there. Because we can’t imagine it. We need the very things that are asked for us.
“May the LORD give strength to His people. May the LORD bless His people with peace.”
That word for peace— shalom— means nothing missing, nothing broken. Complete wholeness.
Shalom is not a new gift or blessing being added on top at the end of this psalm. It’s what naturally happens when we get to finally stand on something that holds.
Maybe today, things feel extra hard. Things that you thought were firm… aren’t. Maybe you are grasping and grieving, tense and trembling over footing that feels anything but safe and secure. I know that feeling. And I know, deep in my being, that God is the rock under my feet and the cleft I can hide within even now. I don’t have to wait for heaven for that to be true— But even knowing the truth, my feet slip. My hands flail… and my heart hurts with the weight of this world. Things don’t feel light. Things don’t feel light at all.
I love how the end of the psalm is a prayer for strength. Is a request for shalom. Because that’s what we need, and that’s what we long for—
until we arrive safely in and standing on the Weight of His Glory.
embracing essentialism 