Sermon Tone Analysis

I think I’ve mentioned before that I gave Annette a cat for her birthday in November.

Well, the other night, as Annette was getting ready for bed, I noticed

There’s an old story about a man who had been promoted to vice president of his company.

He was so proud of the promotion that he talked about it to everyone he knew.

He would tell people at dinner parties, he told family members at the family reunion, he put it on Facebook.

In fact, he found a way to work his promotion into nearly every conversation he had.

When Annette and I got married 50 years ago — wait, it’s only been 18 years, it just seems like so much longer — on

This went on for weeks, and finally his wife, who by now was completely mortified by his bragging, turned to him and said, “Listen, Bob: It’s not that big a deal.

These days, everyone is a vice president.

They even have a vice president of peas down at the supermarket.”

Sometimes we need our wives to cut us down to size, and that what had happened to Bob.

He was deflated, but he wasn’t sure he believed her, so the next day, he called the supermarket to find out if it was true.

“May I speak to the vice president of peas, please?”

“Of course,” came the reply.

“Fresh or frozen?”

Sometimes we need our wives to cut us down to size, and that what had happened to Bob.

Now, I want you to remember poor Bob as we continue our study today on the attributes of God.

Today, we’re going to talk about two contrasting attributes.

We’re going to look at God’s transcendence and God’s immanence.

Those are a couple of seminary words, so let’s take them one at a time, and let me give you the definitions as we go along.

We’ll start by looking at God’s transcendence.

Transcendence comes from the word transcend, which means “to be or go beyond the range or limits of something.”

To be transcendent is to go beyond the normal or physical human experience.

Webster’s Thesaurus gives a variety of synonyms that help us get a handle on this superlative: supreme, incomparable, preeminent, surpassing, ultimate, unmatchable, unsurpassable.

When we think of the transcendence of God, though, we have to remember that each of His attributes is colored by His holiness, his “set apart-ness.”

Therefore, God isn’t simply incomparable, and He is not just supreme.

He is both of those things to a degree that cannot be measured.

Turn with me to Isaiah, Chapter 6, and we’ll dig into this matter of transcendence.

I think that the commissioning of this prophet gives us one of the best pictures in Scripture of this attribute of God.

Isaiah describes the vision he had in which God called him to his ministry to the people of Judah.

In the New American Standard Bible, the throne is described as “lofty and exalted.”

Who can sit on a throne that is lofty and exalted?

Only a king who is Himself lofty and exalted.

Isaiah continues his description of the scene in verse 2.

Even the angels in heaven dare not gaze on the glory of God.

And they make His status perfectly clear in their words:

Holy.

Holy.

Holy.

The three-fold repetition here suggests a completeness of the holiness of God.

God is completely and utterly holy.

As I suggested earlier, his holiness pervades all of his other attributes.

The picture the prophet gives us here is of a God who is completely apart from human understanding.

Either way, the picture the prophet gives us here is of a God who is completely apart from human experience and understanding.

This was an experience that frightened Isaiah to his core.

I think it is not a coincidence that the prophet, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, ordered his book the way that he did.

Most of Israel’s writing prophets wrote about their commissioning into the ministry at the beginning of their books.

But Isaiah’s call is found here, six chapters into this book.

He spends the first five chapters laying out a sort of court case that God is bringing against the nation of Judah, an indictment for their sins.

And then, near the end of Chapter 5, Isaiah pronounces six woes upon the wicked people of Judah.

These are known as woe oracles, and they lament the approaching death of someone.

Isaiah, who loved his countrymen, was mourning the judgment that God had shown him was coming on the nation because of its sins.

And then we move to Chapter 6, where the prophet tells us about his encounter with God.

We see him describe God with word pictures that are hard for us to fathom — and that’s probably because the sight was hard for Isaiah to fathom.

“The whole earth is full of His glory,” the seraphim called out.

But

Confronted by this God — so great that the simple train of his robe filled the temple — so awesome in power that the voice of His angels caused the temple to quake — so beautiful that those very angels had to keep their faces covered — and so full of glory that heaven could not contain it — confronted by this God, Isaiah pronounced a woe oracle for himself.

In the NASB, that last verse reads, “Woe is me, for I am ruined.

I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”

Confronted with this holiness, this greatness, this transcendence, Isaiah immediately recognized that he was in a dangerous position.

Standing before the perfectly holy God, Isaiah recognized just who and what he was.

And he was terrified.

The prophet Ezekiel, taken by the Holy Spirit into the presence of God, had a similarly frightening experience.

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None of what Ezekiel had seen or heard until this point had frozen him with fear.

Not the four living beings, each with four faces and four wings and feet like bronze.

Not the fire and lightning that accompanied them.

Not even the wheels within wheels whose rims were full of eyes.

What made Ezekiel fall on his face in fear was the voice of God.

This should not surprise us.

Remember that it was the very voice of God that brought light into the universe.

“Let there be light,” He said, and billions upon billions of entire galaxies broke through the darkness.

This God is truly incomparable.

He stands outside of His creation.

He is something completely different than it.

He is apart from it.

He is OVER it all.

He has authority over it all, and it was that authority, I think, that both Isaiah and Ezekiel were recognizing when they came into His presence.

“When Scripture speaks of God as ‘high,’ ‘exalted,’ ‘lifted up,’ it is not saying that he lives far away from us so that we can’t know him.

Rather, it’s saying that God is King, that he is Lord.

In other words, biblical transcendence is God’s lordship attributes of control and authority.

[John M. Frame, Salvation Belongs to the Lord: An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2006), 13.]

1 John M. Frame, Salvation Belongs to the Lord: An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2006), 13.

And yet.

And yet He is also immanent.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “immanent” as “existing or operating within.”

When used to describe God, the term tells of how God’s presence permanently pervades the universe.

It’s much in the line of omnipresence.

But there is a fine difference between omnipresence and immanence.

Omnipresence tends to describe a passive presence.

Immanence tends to describe an active one.

We see the immanence of God at play in His creation of man.

This is God present within His creation in an active manner.

Look how God describes this immanence to Moses:

From the very beginning, this high and lifted up, exalted and transcendent God desired to be WITHIN the people He had made in His own image.

He breathed His very Spirit into Adam and Eve.

He chose to dwell in a tent among the people of Israel.

He sent His very Son to live among us as a man.

And those who follow Jesus Christ in faith receive His Spirit within them to fulfill the comforting words of Christ to His disciples:

Transcendence speaks of a God who is “up there.”

Immanence speaks of a God who is Immanuel, “God with us.”