Glory and Holiness
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Introduction: Last October I went to visit my brother for his birthday in Indianapolis. It was for his surprise birthday party and so when we got there my brother obviously wasn’t home. In waiting for him to arrive (so we could jump out from behind a corner and scare him to death) my nephew put on a superhero costume (I don’t remember which superhero, but it was DC) and ran around the house wanting me to catch him. I would pretend for a while that he was so fast that I couldn’t catch him but inevitably I caught him (because come on he’s four). Once I caught him, wrestled him to the ground, and then released him he would inevitably scream, “Again!” and run away. How many of you have had an experience similar to this?
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” G.K. Chesterton
As we get older, about the time we become teens to the time we reach our elderly years, we seem to lose a tase for the ordinary wonders of the world. Clyde Kilby put it this way, “One of the greatest tragedies of the fall is that we get tired of familiar glories.” We get tired of the glory of the sun rising and setting, or the sound of crickets in the summer, the deepness of the Grand Canyon, the brightness of the night sky, or the vastness of the universe. We live in a world full of glorious wonder and yet we often yawn, look at our phones, and tune it all out.
The terrifying thought of this is that it is also true that it is possible to have had access to the Word of God and by having access to the Word of God also have access to a window where we can see with awe and wonder the glory of God, and yet because our access to it is so easy it also becomes stale and boring to us. Sin has left us so dysfunctional that we can get to a place where we can behold the glory of God which as one preacher put it, “is wildly untamable, explosively uncontainable, and electrically future creating.” and then go on seeking the worship of our own selves as if God were not glorious at all.
My goal in this series is to draw our attention back to the glory of God and to behold Him as worthy to receive all power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing.
What is the Glory of God?
What is the Glory of God?
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple. Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one cried to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
The whole earth is full of His glory!”
Why did they not say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his holiness!”? In the Bible there is a very close connection between the holiness and the glory of God.
Well, what is that close connection? We can see the Biblical answer through this text in Isaiah as well as in other texts where God is glorified among men.
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told them.
So we know, based on these texts as well as many others we could mention, that in order to glorify God something must be seen.
Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance; but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, “Be holy, for I am holy.”
The connection between God’s glory and holiness is that God’s glory is God’s holiness put on display. Christians are called to be holy so that God’s glory can be seen among men.
Well then, what is holiness? The root idea of being holy is being separate. God’s holiness is His separateness from all this is not God. And if we have learned anything from gold and diamonds we realize that the more holy something is the more valuable it is. In other words, the more rare something is the more valuable it is.
There are two Old Testament examples of how we are to treat or not treat God’s holiness.
Then the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not believe Me, to hallow Me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them.”
“Do not say, ‘A conspiracy,’
Concerning all that this people call a conspiracy,
Nor be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled.
The Lord of hosts, Him you shall hallow;
Let Him be your fear,
And let Him be your dread.
God is so far above and separate from everything else that is not God that He is the only one who is self-existent, self-sufficient, and self-sustaining. In the beginning was God. No one and nothing brought God into existence. Without God there is no existence and everything that was made without God would not have been made. He upholds the world with the word of his power. He put it this way to Moses:
And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ”
The most basic fact is that God IS. God is complete and perfect. Since his holiness is His rareness, how rare must be the one without whom nothing exists? And since rareness determines value, how valuable must be the One who is not one of many, but is reality? He is all that was and because of Him everything is. Being the only true one of a kind, God is of infinite value.
But we cannot leave the holiness of God there because we are commanded to be holy so that God would be glorified among men, but we cannot be holy in the sense that God IS. All of us are dependent on God which means that all of us are secondary beings. God alone is primary. We cannot be holy in that sense. So, in what sense can we be holy?
The Bible does not only portray God’s holiness as transcendence in His being, but also in His transcendence of purity and goodness. Since God is the creator, the primary being of the universe, or the great uncaused cause, He is also the absolute measure for moral standards. Before creation, God was all there was. So, when there is only God, how do you define good? God!
So, holiness is not just the measure of the value of God’s being, but also the expression of his holiness through his actions.
This brings us back to the glory of God. When God’s holiness is being put on display it is his glory. God’s glory is when his holiness is seen shining brighter than the sun. God’s glory is without comparison, without words, and without origin. God’s glory is the standard which cannot be judged or measured. God’s glory is the original worth of all greatness and beauty. As C.S. Lewis put it: all other beauties or mere echoes of that original beauty which point back to it but never reproduce it.
Conclusion: The staggering reality is this: we were made in the image of God. We were made for this purpose. We were made to glorify God. In other words, it is this supreme holiness of God that we are to put on display and glorify Him. We were made to admire the glory of God and find our deepest happiness there. We were made to come and drink from this fountain. In sinning, man marred the image of God and by doing that man defaced the image of the all-holy One.
The great hope of the universe is Christ who has made it possible for us to be re-born. We were born dead in sin and in Christ we can be born again as a new creature. In Christ we can be transformed from one degree of glory to the next. In Christ it is possible to be the window through which the world and look and Behold their God!
The question then is how can we do this? How do we glorify God? Don’t you hunger and thirst to know? Don’t you hunger and thirst for righteousness? Come back next week as we continue this series and we will find out!