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Feb 01, 2025 06:00am

Magnifying Glass

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“Make His name great.”

I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with this phrase, yet I don’t think it’s wrong. Let me explain.

God’s name is already great by virtue of His character. In fact, He is the greatest being in all existence. We can’t add anything to Him to make Him greater than He already is.

If we can’t increase God’s greatness, then why do we say, “Make His name great”?

During the Christmas season, our family read and heard all the familiar Christmas passages in the Bible. One of those is the Magnificat—or the song Mary bursts into after the angel announces the incarnation of Christ. She begins:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. (Luke 1:46–49)

Mary says her soul magnifies the Lord. This reminded me of my recent experience at the eye doctor.

I have made it to the ripe old age of forty-one without ever needing glasses or contacts. I don’t have any trouble reading books up close or seeing the signs I need to see when I’m driving. Nothing looks blurry to me.

Then one day, I was at my son’s sports physical. Part of the exam was an eye test. I was standing right by him when they asked him to read the bottom line of the eye chart. I naturally attempted to read it to myself, and suddenly I realized—I couldn’t make out the letters!

This prompted me to go back to the eye doctor (it had been a couple years) and get a checkup.

I didn’t really feel like the bottom lines of the eye chart at his office were all that difficult—I could squint my way through them. After a few tests, the doctor then showed me what those bottom letters looked like with a vision prescription.

Amazingly, the letters were sharper and bigger! They were the same letters I had seen before, but this time they were magnified! Now I could read them freely and easily, without scrunched up face and furrowed brow.

The letters hadn’t changed. They just appeared bigger and clearer to me.

This is what it’s like when we magnify God, or make His name great.

We don’t change Him or make Him better than He is. When we magnify God, we are helping ourselves and others (by the enabling power of the Holy Spirit) to see Him more clearly, for who He really is.

Making God’s name great enlarges His character before the eyes of our heart so that we exclaim like a person with new glasses, “Aha! I can see!”

When we look at something under a magnifying glass, suddenly we can see details we never noticed before, and we are in awe at the intricacies of the object we are viewing. This is the same with making God’s name great—when we magnify Him, we see characteristics such as His love, power, or mercy in ways we never noticed before. This causes us, like Mary, to worship Him with increased amazement and gratitude and to share the knowledge of His greatness with others.

“Oh, magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together!” (Psalms 34:3). Let us make God’s name great in our lives and among the nations.