Joyful glory

Psalm 104:31 says that Yahweh’s glory endures forever, and then immediately adds, as a parallel, “Yahweh rejoices in His works.” The Psalm as a whole is about Yahweh’s care of His creation, which represents the “manifold” works of God (v. 24). The glory of Yahweh is manifest in the sea that clothes the earth (v. 6), the water flowing from mountains to give drink to the beasts (vv. 10-11), grass growing for livestock to graze (v. 14), sap-filled cedars (v. 16), nesting birds (v. 17), and prowling lions (v. 21).

All this displays God’s glory, and Yahweh rejoices in all these things. More strongly, somewhat in the vein of Hobbes’s notion that laughter is “sudden glory,” glory and the joy are all but identified in verse 31. To say that God’s glory displayed is to say that the world brings joy to the Creator. The world will reach its consummation when it is thoroughly permeated with divine joy, when divine laughter rings from one corner of heaven to the other.