Majesty, in particular, is emotive, or affective. It indicates greatness in sight or sound that is also wonderful. Bigness that is beautiful. Imposing size that is viewed with delight, imposing power received as attractive. While having significant overlap with divine dominion or lordship, majesty does more. Dominion and lordship are more technical and prosaic; majesty rings more poetic, with the awe of worship.

In 1977, California pastor Jack Hayford and his wife visited England during the Silver Jubilee (25th anniversary) of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne (1952). They were struck by the grandeur of the celebration, and the manifest joy of the people in their monarch. While there, they visited Blenheim Palace, birthplace of Winston Churchill, and famous for the magnitude and stateliness many Americans today know through watching Downton Abbey.

Driving away from the palace, overcome with awe, Hayford found himself reaching for words — language that would transpose the weight of the earthly experience into the key of heaven. As he stretched, the word that seemed most fitting, both to describe the stunning magnificence of the palace, and how it pointed to the superiority of the reigning Christ, was majesty. According to a California newspaper’s retelling of the story,

As the Hayfords pulled themselves from that regal palace and drove away, Dr. Hayford asked his wife to take a notebook and write down some thoughts that were coming to him. He then began to dictate the lyrics, the key, and the timing to a song now being sung by Christians worldwide. (“Story Behind the Song: ‘Majesty,’” St. Augustine Record, August 13, 2015)

Hayford’s impulse to reach for the word majesty, however much he knew it at the time, was profoundly biblical. Majesty is indeed a frequent, and carefully chosen, attribute in Scripture of the living God — a trait often overlooked in studies of the divine attributes, but an important witness of both the prophets and apostles, one that sheds brilliant light on other well-rehearsed attributes, and one that is truly, deeply, wonderfully fit for worship, as Hayford at least intuited:

Majesty! Worship his majesty!
Unto Jesus be all glory, honor, and praise.
Majesty! Kingdom authority,
Flow from his throne, unto his own;
His anthem raise!

Purple Mountain Majesties

Those, like Hayford, who reach for the word majesty often find themselves standing before, or remembering, some natural or manmade wonder that is both imposing and, at the same time, attractive. In our language, as in biblical terms, the word captures not only greatness but also goodness, both bigness and beauty, awesome power together with pleasant admiration.

Mountains might be the quintessentially majestic natural feature. Psalm 76:4 declares in praise to God, “Glorious are you,” and then adds, “more majestic than the mountains.” Alongside the illustrious plain of Sharon, which had its own peculiar glory, Isaiah’s hope-filled prophecy of future flourishing for God’s people hails “the majesty of [Mount] Carmel” (Isaiah 35:2). Yet alongside mountains, we also might attribute majesty to gold, or some precious material or gem, fit for a king, that dazzles the eye with its beauty, as Job 37:22 links God’s “awesome majesty” with “golden splendor.”

Not only natural phenomena, but also the work of human hands, when on a grand scale, might have us reaching for majestic. Lamentations 1:6 mourns the loss of such civic majesty after the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon, and not long after, Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon’s king, professes to have built his city “by [his] mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of [his] majesty” (Daniel 4:30) — this, just before his great humbling.

How, then, does the common use of majesty for mountains and mansions, gold and cities, relate to attributing majesty to God?

What is Divine Majesty?

In bringing together both greatness and goodness, both strength and beauty (Psalm 96:6), majesty is not only a fitting term for mountain majesties but a particularly appropriate descriptor of God, who is, above all, “the Majestic One” (Isaiah 10:34).

At a critical juncture in the history of God’s first-covenant people, as they assemble under the leadership of Solomon, to dedicate the temple, the king prays, in his great wisdom, “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty.” Consider those first three — greatness, power, and glory — often associated with majesty elsewhere, as revealing angles into the attribute of divine majesty.

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