The Holiness of God P1

Intro

Today we start a 4 week journey that hopefully will cause us to meditate deeply on the holiness of God. Hopefully we will get some glimpse into what it means for God to be Holy, what it says about his character, what it says about us, and how we can even come close to a Holy God.

When we think of the word holy, we get images of one who is morally pure and this is true but when it comes to God it is much more than this

Rocks / plants / Animals / man / angels / God

The difference between rocks and man is molecular structures. The difference between man and animals can even be reduced to DNA coding that differs by less than 1%. This is even proof of a intelligent designer… (Richard Smallwood).

God as the ultimate creator of everything and yet distinct from all that He created is what what we refer to as Holy. He is altogether unique, set apart. The primary meaning of the word Holy is

Holy = separate

transcendent, superior, completely different and apart from anything else.

We could use as an example the sun. It is uniquely powerful, the source of life and light in our planet. And so we could say that the sun is holy… and then also the area around the sun is also holy since the closer you get to the sun the more intense it gets. So the very power and generates life and light is very dangerous to anything and everything that does not share its nature.

Likewise if you are impure, and you are, His presence is dangerous. Not because He is bad but because He is so good… too good.

We see this idea of the danger associated with holiness when Moses encounters God within the burning bush.

Effects of God’s Holiness

Exodus 3:1–10 (NIV)

1 Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. 3 So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.” 5 “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” 6 Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God. 7 The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8 So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 9 And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. 10 So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

Two things Moses is told: stop approaching, in fact, God calls him twice. Anytime my mother mentioned or called my name twice I froze.

The second thing was for him to take off his shoes. It is not like in my house or others where you take of your shoes and then you can come in. It was stay right there, but that was not enough.

The shoes themselves did not mean anything, however, the attitude of understanding where you are and who you are with was imperative if Moses was going to survive this encounter.

Exodus 15:11 (NIV)

11 Who among the gods is like you, Lord? Who is like you— majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?

This awesome glory and holiness is not beautiful cuteness like fireworks. Handling this matter carelessly will kill you.

Two worship leaders Nadad and Abihu lost their lives for messing around with God’s holiness in Leviticus 10. Uzzah dies because he touched that which was holy in 2 Samuel 6.

In fact, God plants himself in the middle of his people within the Ark of the Covenant which is housed in a tent in the dessert, and God says,

Numbers 18:22 (NASB95)

22 “The sons of Israel shall not come near the tent of meeting again, or they will bear sin and die.

For this reason and countless other examples, people who know better have a different reaction to the presence of God.

Isaiah 6:1–5 (NIV)

1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” 4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. 5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

The true character of God is frightening. His holiness is traumatic for sinful man.

God normally reveals our sinfulness to us a bit at a time. We experience a gradual recognition of our own corruption. God showed Isaiah his corruption all at once. No wonder he was ruined.

R. C. Sproul

The common human response when confronted with the presence of God in His holiness is absolute dread. The more righteous the person, the more traumatic the effect. Why? Because the more righteous you are, the more truly aware of your unrighteousness state you become.

The prophet Habakkuk said: that he heard his heart pound and his lips quivered at the sound of God as decay crept into his bones and his legs trembled.

Job’s reaction to His presence: “my ears heard you, now my eyes see you and I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.

Isaiah exclaims, “woe is me I am undone,” and Moses covers his face, do you see the pattern.

Upon encountering God, Jacob said “how awesome is this place.” (Gen 28:16) the problem is that as the word “yarre” translated into awesome does not mean the same thing to us. In the Hebrew, awesome is more like dreadful. It is awe, frightening awe.

The Parker Solar Probe now holds the record for closest approach to the Sun by a human-made object. The spacecraft passed the current record of 26.55 million miles from the Sun’s surface on Oct. 29, 2018, at about 1:04 p.m. EDT, as calculated by the Parker Solar Probe team.

Stay over there, and take off your shoes.

How Holy is Holy?

There is a literary tool used in the Bible where something is mention again in succession to elevate it to the superlative degree. It means that the emphasis is super-important. Moses, Moses as God calls twice before Moses kills himself inadvertently. Although every thing Jesus said was important he recognized and signaled when what he was about to say was super-important: Verily, verily / truly, truly.

We have all of the attributes of God… he is love, merciful, just… however, He is not love, love, or mercy mercy, or just just

Revelation 4:8 (NIV)

8 Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying: “ ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ who was, and is, and is to come.”

God is not just holy, he is not even just holy, holy, but he is holy to the third power.

Martin Luther……

The great reformer to which we owe our separation from the church of Rome had an interesting beginning. Studying to be a lawyer.. his father sacrificed to make this a reality

Got caught in a frightful storm that he was convinced was going to kill him. He vowed to become a monk if God spared him.

He was devout in his studies and encountered the holiness of God. At the completion of his studies he was to officiate his first mass and he froze unable to finish. Luther was suppose to utter the following words:

“We offer unto thee, the living, the true, the eternal God.”

But he was rendered unable to utter them. Later he explained why. Consider his words carefully:

The Holiness of God (Chapter 5: The Insanity of Luther)

At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, “With what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The angels surround him. At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say ‘I want this, I ask for that’? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal and the true God.”

Martin Luther

But Luther was just learning. He would later learn that it is not at all about us approaching God but about God approaching us.

God calling Moses through the burning bush is a wonderful way of understanding how we gain access to the living God. It is not by any merit or decision of our own, but through the self-existence of God who invites, accepts, and enables us to stand in his presence.