WHO IS GOD? HOLY

Holiness of God

Each week this fall we’re looking at another attribute of God, a different characteristic, a different aspect to his nature. Experienced Christians (whatever they are) can make sense of their lives by looking at how God has taught them his name and his attributes. An experienced Christian stands before any event and says, “The main business of this event is for me to know God.” DID YOU SEE THAT? Kind of moment.

You're going to notice something…when people see something…they sing and dance.

DAVID….and the text last week

I love music. It is a gift from God that captures and carries that which cannot be adequately expressed by words alone. "Music," said Plato, "gives wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything." Music sets forth what is important to us, what moves us, what changes us, what we long for. So do you know what the first recorded song in the Bible is about? I will give you a hint: the last song recorded in the Bible is about the same thing.

The first song in Scripture appears in Ex. 15; the last song can be found in Rev. 15. And both have as their shared focus the holiness of God. After God demolished any notion that Egypt's false gods were anything other than the projections of the men who worshipped them; after God delivered over 1 million Israeli slaves from the grip of Egypt through 10 awesome plagues and a parted Red Sea, Moses led the whole nation in a song celebrating God's holiness. One verse captures the gist of the entire song: "Lord, who is like You among the gods? Who is like You, glorious in holiness, revered with praises, performing wonders?"

When the 90-year old Apostle John was granted by God to look into the future, he saw a moment when the final outpouring of the wrath of God was about to take place. Gathered in heaven were those whose faith and allegiance to God in defiance of the rule of AntiChrist had cost them their lives. And John tells us that "they sang the song of God's servant Moses, and the song of the Lamb: Great and awe-inspiring are Your works, Lord God, the Almighty; righteous and true are Your ways, King of the Nations. Lord, who will not fear and glorify Your name? Because You alone are holy, because all the nations will come and worship before You, because Your righteous acts have been revealed." (Rev. 15:3-4)

In between Ex. 15 and Rev. 15, God's holiness comes up over and over again. Holy is used more often as a prefix to God's name than any other adjective. Two men in Scripture who were permitted to see into the throne room of heaven and write about it; both reported hearing one continuous refrain, spoken day and night: "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty." (Isaiah 6:3; Rev. 4:8) This is the only thing said about God in this fashion. No other attribute of His is repeated three times.

JOB

This morning, I come to present to you truths about God that are so mysterious, so disquieting, and so awesome that it makes me tremble. If you dare to come with me in these next few moments, you will understand why righteous Job would say to God, "I had heard rumors about You, but now my eyes have seen You. Therefore I take back [my words] and repent in dust and ashes." (Job 42:5-6)

In other words, a Christian stands and says, “I don’t know the specific reasons for this marriage problem or the loss of my job or this difficult person in my life to love or this goal I have never reached. I don’t know the specific reasons for it, but I know the general, most basic purpose of it is that I know God better.” You go through the Bible and you see God does not just say, “I am Jehovah. I am the Lord.” He tells you various parts and various aspects about who he is.

When Abraham thinks he’s going to have to lose his son, Isaac, God appears and says, “I am Jehovah Jireh. I will always provide.” He appears to the children of Israel when they’re about to die of thirst, and he heals a polluted lake. He says, “I am Jehovah Rapha.

I am the one who heals you.” He appears to the children of Israel when they’re about to fight against an overwhelming force, and he says, “I am Jehovah Nissi. I am your banner. I am your victory.”

An experienced Christian can look back on their life and can say, “In that period of time God was revealing himself to me, showing me another part of his name, helping me apprehend with richness another excellency, another attribute of his being.” You can look back through the attributes of God and make sense out of your life. You can look forward and face anything in front of you through the attributes of God, because real fullness of humanity is to know God for who he is and all the richness of what that is.

TRAJECTORY: KNOW IT…YADA. WORSHIP….. AND THEN PUT IT ON DISPLAY.

1.COMING CLOSE TO HIS HOLINESS….KNOWING IT….is meant to be so off the hook that it overwhelms usThe seraphs were crying, “Holy, holy, holy …” The word holy (qadowsh) means separate. It literally means cut. It means to be separate above, beyond, exalted infinitely above us, other. It’s talking about the otherness of God. It means when you see his holiness you realize he’s beyond the beyond, and he’s above the above. If you want to be really practical, when the holiness of God strikes you, you realize he is so superlative, and he is so perfect, and he is so absent of anything crooked or limited or distorted or broken.

SEE IT OR COME TO KNOW IT….I want you to get a sense of WHO IS GOD…HE IS HOLY….your did you see that kind of moment.

You’re so overwhelmed with his perfection and his purity you realize you cannot trifle with him, you cannot argue with him, you cannot complain to him, you cannot beat him, you cannot avoid him, you cannot ignore him, and you cannot question him. All of those things are things we do naturally until you see the holiness of God. The holiness of God is his superlativeness, his above aboveness and his beyond beyondness. Another way to put it is his threatening superlativeness.

Rudolph Otto, a German scholar in the first part of the twentieth century who wrote the book The Idea of the Holy, in which he was looking at all the different religions to find commonalities, said all people, when they approach God, are torn by ambivalent forces of both fascination and fright. That’s the way it is in the presence of anything that is superlative, even superlative humans. The most gorgeous man or woman at the party, the most brilliant (two, three, four times more brilliant) student than anybody else in the class … How do you approach people like that? There is an attraction, but they’re very threatening.

I was casually talking to a man who was from Pittsburgh. I said, “Where did you go to high school?” He told me and said, “I played football there.” He told me how old he was, so I said, “You would know so and so.” This was a guy who was not only an All-American football player in high school but also in college, and now he’s an All-Pro. I said, “Didn’t he go to that school? Did you play with him?”

The guy said, “Yeah. What an experience! I was a senior, and I was an All-Star in my conference. This guy comes up. He’s a freshman. He’s three years younger than me. He’s twice as big as anybody else on any of the teams. He’s twice as fast as anybody else. I mean, he would embarrass you just running down the field with the special teams because he’d get to the kicker twice as fast as anybody else. I thought I was pretty good. Everybody was excited to have him on our team, and we all hated him. We all despised him.” Even at the human level, superlativeness totally threatens us.

Do you remember the book, The Peter Principle, that said most super-confident people have to go off and start their own businesses? They’ll never make it up in the hierarchy of the big corporation? Why? Because they deeply threaten their superiors. You all live in a modern culture that is absolutely against the idea of a holy God, absolutely against the idea of a God who is threatening, a God who is pure, who is of pure eyes and can behold iniquity, who will absolutely not tolerate evil at all, a God who sends people to hell, a God who descends on Mount Sinai in thunder and lightning so if even an animal touches the mountain they’re put to death.

We decide the whole idea of a threatening God is primitive and unmodern, and yet even in the presence of superlative humanity we’re threatened. It only seems logical if there is a God at all to even approach a real God would be far more threatening and traumatic. Of course, he’s holy. He’d have to be holy or he wouldn’t be God at all. That’s exactly what we see here. Isaiah had never really had an apprehension of God before, and his holiness leads Isaiah to say, “Woe to me. Woe is the curse of the covenant.”

Remember, Jesus says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, because you have broken the covenant.” Here Isaiah is putting the curse on himself: “Woe to me!” When Job saw God in the last part of Job 42, he says, “… now my eye sees you. Therefore I abhor myself …” One of the more hilarious examples of the presence of the holy is in Mark 4 where Jesus is in the boat with his disciples. There is a storm that comes up, and they’re all afraid. He calms the storm, and they’re terrified, because the rescue is more terrifying to them than the peril from which they were rescued.

The storm isn’t anywhere near as terrifying as to realize you’re in the presence of God Almighty. They were terrified. They said, “Who is this?” I don’t know what Ludwig Feuerbach and Freud thought about Mark 4. Those are the guys who tried to explain religion. They said, “Religion grew up because when human beings were primitive we were scared of nature. We were scared of the storms, so we had to invent a God we could go to and get help from. We were afraid of impersonal nature, so we had to invent a God who would enable us to deal with the frightening world we lived in.”

Obviously, Christianity is a real failure if that’s the original genesis impulse of the invention of religion, because we’ve invented a God who is scarier than the nature for which we invented him to help us from. When they realized whose presence they were in (God, Jesus Christ), they were absolutely terrified. You haven’t seen the holiness of God until you see his power and his perfection to the degree that all of your excuse-making and all of your complaining about him and all of your questioning of him falls at your feet, pitiful looking to you, realizing, “I have no right to question a God like this. I have no right to complain about a God like this.”

I was talking to a woman the other day and asked her, “When did you become a Christian?” She said, “Well, that’s hard to say. Do you mean the day I really heard and understood the Christian message for the first time or the day I really came to believe it? Or do you mean the day I realized if God was who he said he is then my entire life was going to be completely changed and turned upside down?” I said, “I’d like to know about that day. I don’t know when you were converted, but that was the day you realized this God was a holy God.”

The doorposts and the thresholds shook at the sound of the voice. They’re not even people, and they’re moved. They’re overwhelmed. What she was saying was, “One day I realized this is a God I can’t ignore, I can’t trifle with, and I can’t back away from. This is a God with whom I must have to do, and if I approach him at all it’s going to mean a radical change in everything I do and think.” What was happening? The doorposts and the thresholds of her life were being moved by the holiness of God.

Has that happened to you? You need it. As frightening as it sounds, you need it. I worry when I forget not just that God is wise but that he has holy wisdom. I worry when I start to forget God’s wisdom must be so far above my wisdom (it’s unassailable) and that he knows what is best. I start to get angry, and I can even be bitter, if I forget God’s justice is holy justice. He certainly has to be more fair-minded than me. He certainly has to be more holy than me. He’s going to put everything right. Everybody is going to get what everybody deserves. All accounts will be squared.

Whenever I am dominated by the idea that somebody has gotten away with something, somebody has done something that is not right … “This world isn’t fair.” Your bitterness comes when you forget his justice is holy justice. Your worry comes when you forget his wisdom is holy wisdom. Until you’re overwhelmed by him, you’re never going to be able to handle the universe that was created and run by a holy God.

2. His holiness…LEADS TO WORSHIP...

When Isaiah hears and sees and grasps the holiness of God, in the old King James Authorized Version he says, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” Why is he talking about his lips? It’s kind of odd. He’s traumatized, yes. He doesn’t come in and see the Lord of hosts and go running out saying, “Hey! Come and look at this!” He doesn’t say, “Man, this is great!”

He says, “I am ruined. I am literally coming apart because my lips are unclean.” Why his lips? What about his ears? What about his feet? They’re uglier than your lips. Why the lips? Here is why: Isaiah is a prophet. Isaiah 6, is not his call to be a prophet. He’s already a prophet. Go back to Isaiah 1 through 5, and you’ll see he is already prophesying. What is a prophet? A preacher. What is a prophet? A pundit. A prophet is a public communicator, an oral communicator, a speaker.

To a prophet, your lips are what to a dancer your legs are, what to a pianist your fingers are, what to a pitcher your arm is. In other words, it’s your pride and joy. The holiness of God does not lead him to think about his sins. It leads him immediately to look at his strengths and find they are not strengths at all. This is not just one of the key principles of biblical religion. This is not just one of the things that sets off real Christians from moral and religious people. This is one of the keys to life.

The holiness of God does not simply lead Isaiah to repent of his sins. Plenty of people repent of their sins who really don’t understand the gospel. The holiness of God leads Isaiah to repent of his righteousness, his best deeds, his pride and joy, the thing he felt he does best. That explains why he feels like he’s coming apart. He’s talking psychologically. Do you know why he feels like he’s coming apart, why he’s ruined, why he’s undone? Because every human being has a glue that holds your personality together.

Every human being has an integrating factor. Every human being has something that makes you feel that you’re okay. Every human being has a basis for the self-image. The holiness of God lays bare the foundation of your soul, reveals the glue (the thing you think makes you okay) is inadequate before God. You feel immediately as your glue is vaporized that you’re coming apart. For Isaiah the integrating glue of his personality was his lips. He said, “The reason I’m okay is I’m a great preacher.”

He began to suddenly see the falsity of that. He began to see the inadequacy of that. Paul had a similar experience. In Romans 7, we’re told how he became a Christian. He was studying the Ten Commandments, of all things, and he got to the place where it says, “Do not covet.” He said, “The Law came, and I died.” Romans 7 is the same as Isaiah 6. What was the glue of Paul’s life? He wasn’t proud of his lips. The integrating factor of his personality wasn’t his lips. That’s not what made him feel okay.

You and I are all different. Some of you, it’s your intelligence. Some of you, it’s your attractiveness. Some of you, you think you’re savvy. Some of you, it’s your children. Some of you, it’s your parents and their approval. Some of you, it’s your professional skill. Everybody has one. Everybody has a glue, something that says, “I’m okay because of this.” For Paul it was his moral rectitude. That happens a lot to religious people. A lot. Paul said, “The thing that makes me feel okay is my moral rectitude.”

One day he was reading the Ten Commandments. He read, “Do not covet,” and suddenly he realized it meant he had to love God so much he could never be discontent in any situation or ungrateful in any condition. He realized what “Thou shalt not covet …” meant, and suddenly the holiness of God flooded him, and he realized the sinfulness of his strength. “My lips! My rectitude! My pride and joy is all evil!” He says, “The minute that happened I died.” That’s what Paul says. It’s the same thing as what Isaiah says when he says, “I am coming undone. My lips!”

Some years ago when I was still trying to figure out what Christianity was really about, I read a 200-year-old sermon I have never forgotten by George Whitefield on Jeremiah 6:14, which says, “Peace, peace; when there is no peace.” The sermon starts out by saying, “How do you know if you really have peace with God?” The first point was you can’t have peace with God unless you have repented of your sins. I read that and said, “Okay. That makes sense.” I figured the second point would be if you have repented of your sins, turn to Jesus and trust him for your forgiveness.

But he didn’t do that in the sermon. Instead, Whitefield said if you want to have peace with God, not only must you repent of your sins, but you can’t trust Christ as Savior, you can’t know the joy of the salvation unless you also repent of your righteousness. Otherwise, when you turn to Jesus, you only use him to save yourself through religion. This is what he says in the sermon, which I underlined, and some of the underlinings look like they have been messed up with the water from tears. This is an amazing statement.

He says when a soul first gets a sight of God, it says, “I will reform. I will be mighty good.” So like Adam and Eve in the garden, the soul, when it first gets a sight of God it tries to patch up a righteousness of its own to hide the nakedness it feels before God, but when a soul gets a full view of God it realizes it never has and never will love God as he deserves to be loved with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength. That even the best deeds, defiled and full of self-centeredness are they, God will condemn you for the best prayer you ever set up, that your repentance needs to be repented of, and that all of your righteousness is a filthy rag.

God must send them and you away if you bring them in to him in order to recommend you to his favor. Therefore, only before the face of God, only a sight of God’s full holiness can bring you out of your self-righteousness which is always the last idol taken out of your heart. Until you see it for what it is, you will not trust in Christ. You may turn to him for help, you may make him your example, but you will not trust in him as Savior until you have repented of your righteousness.

Do you know what he is saying? There’s a big difference between just being moral … A moral person’s repenting of sins is always guilty, always feeling crushed, always feeling like you’re never, ever living up, but if you repent of your righteousness, too, you’ll realize there is no hope, no way you’ll ever be able to live up. Therefore, the only hope is a complete salvation. The only hope is free grace, total forgiveness, complete pardon, and that’s the reason why, in a sense, what the holiness of God shows you is not just the seriousness of your sin but also the sinfulness of your seriousness, of even your best efforts, of even the most moral efforts you can possibly come up with.

Hear this. What I’m trying to show you is there is no end run around the holiness of God to get to his love. What I’m telling you is something absolutely necessary for you to ever really come into the liberation of the full salvation of the grace of God. I know if you’re a thoughtful person it looks to you like this religion must be psychological suicide. You say, “I see the logic of it. In order to approach God I must begin to see he is infinitely greater than me, and I’ll be threatened. My heart will be revealed, and I’ll see even the things I trust in are just little pseudo-salvations, little false gods, things I thought made me good, but before the holiness of God they pale and they become pitiful.”

That sounds like psychological suicide. What do you have when you have that? You have nothing, and nothing is the only thing you can offer God to receive his everything. All you need is need. All you need is nothing, but most people don’t have that when they go to God. They come with all the other things Whitefield talks about. You say, “Look! I’m repentant. That should be enough to get you to love me,” but your repentance needs to be repented of. “Look! I pray,” but God can condemn you for the best prayer you ever sent up. “Look! I’m a preacher. Look at my lips. Oh! My lips!”

Any preacher who gets in the presence of the holiness of God realizes your motives are such mixed things when you preach. It’s easy to say, “Well, I’m preaching for the glory of God. I’m preaching for the love of the people.” Right. In the face of the holiness of God, the sham basis of your soul is revealed. The self-righteousness, the thing you are sure is what is really going to make you acceptable, is shown to be what it is. It strips you. You realize who you are. You realize what you are.

3. The holiness of God heals you

The holiness of God makes grace real. This is the good news. Some of you are saying, “It’s about time.” The good news is you will never find grace and the love of God … something that shakes you to your roots, something that changes you, something that lifts you up and gives you power to spare … until you’ve been brought out of your self-righteousness. Look at what happens to Isaiah. Isaiah is coming apart. Isaiah says, “Woe is me! for I am undone …”

He’s like those people in the book of Revelation 6, who say on the last day to the mountains, “Fall on us,” and to the hills, “Cover us and hide us from the face of the One who sits upon the throne.” That’s how Isaiah felt, but out of the darkness, beyond all hope and reason, here comes a seraph with a coal from the altar. What is the altar? It’s the place where sins are atoned for. It’s the place where the blood is spilled. It’s the place where sins are paid for. You don’t think Isaiah, who was a professional preacher, didn’t know that’s what the altar was for?

Isaiah always knew the altar was for the sacrifice for sins. That was the place of atonement. That was the place of forgiveness. As the coal hits his lips, it’s showing us for the first time the grace of God becomes more than a theory to him. It burns away his guilt like a cold iron burns you. Isaiah had a theoretical view of his sin, and it became practical. As a result, he had a theoretical view of the grace of God, but now and only now does it become something that energizes him and changes him.

Years ago, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones gave the illustration for this in one of his sermons I’ve never forgotten, and some of you have certainly heard it. He says if somebody comes to you and says, “I’ve paid one of your bills,” you have no idea how excited to be. It could be they’ve paid postage due, paid a couple of dollars so a package that had postage due could be received. On the other hand, maybe they paid $40,000 of your back IRS taxes. Until you know the actual amount of the debt, you don’t know how joyful to be. The size of the debt actually determines the magnitude of the joy.

Isaiah really hadn’t seen just how helpless he was before the Father. Isaiah hadn’t ever seen the depths of his creaturehood. He was never radically aware of his sin and as a result of that, when he thought about the love and when he thought about the forgiveness of God, it was a sentimental thing. It was a trivial thing. It never affected him, but now suddenly to know God forgives revolutionizes.

I’ve seen a number of young mothers after they’ve had their first child and they’ve been caring for it for six or seven months. Usually, if they have the guts, they call their mother up and say, “Mom, I always knew how hard it was and how much you did for me as a child, but now I really know. You always told me how much of a sacrifice it was to take care of me, but I had no idea. I’m smitten now, because I always knew you loved me, but I wasn’t able to see just how much you loved me until I saw how difficult this really is.”

In the same way, Isaiah has never been changed by the love because he’s never seen the holiness of God and he’s never really repented of his self-righteousness. This is a simple test. Dear friends, unless you are wounded by the holiness of God you’ll never be healed by the grace of God. If the grace of God is something you shrug about, if you don’t know what in the world has gotten into people who say, “He loves me,” and you see their lives changed and you say, “Well, I’ve always believed he loves me, but my life isn’t changed,” do you know what the difference is?

You don’t understand the holiness of God. There are a lot of people who just participate in modern man’s distaste for the holiness of God, but if you remove the holiness of God from your understanding, you evacuate his love of its power. A real holy God is different than the demanding God many of you were raised with. The demanding God you were raised with says, “You have to obey. You have to do better. You can do it,” and then never, ever seems to be satisfied.

Some of you are crushed by a god like that. That’s not a real holy god. The real Holy God says, “You can’t obey. You’re not even close to obeying. Even your righteousness is as a filthy rag. Don’t you see you’ll never be liberated and understand my grace and mercy until you see how utterly you need it?” The real Holy God never shows you your sin except to heal you with his grace. The real Holy God never rubs your nose in your flaws except to bring a coal and put it on your lips.

If there is anybody in this room who thinks God is just punishing you and just wants you to feel bad by showing you your failures and flaws, it’s a god of your imagination. Yes, it could be some of you right now are going through a difficult time in which God may be showing you your flaws, but a holy God would never do that except to show you his holy love and his holy grace and to change your life with it.

Don’t you see? Of course, God welcomes you into his arms. Of course, God loves you, but until you see he’s a God of holy power, he’s a God infinitely exalted, a God whose ray of his eye is able to just pulverize whole solar systems … Unless you see he’s a God like that who loves you like that, you’re never going to be shaken to the roots by his love.

4. The holiness of God supernaturalizes our character

The holiness of God renovates and changes us. What happens to Isaiah here? As soon as he’s cleansed, as soon as he’s gone through the holiness-grace dynamic and as soon as he’s seen the holiness and been stripped of his self-righteousness and now finally realizes what the grace of God really means, what has happened to him?

God says, “I have a job for a prophet. I need a prophet to go to a group of people who will never, ever listen to him. I need a prophet to go and spend the next 30 years preaching to people who will only despise and only ridicule him. I need a prophet who will go and take a job that will mean the rest of your life you’ll be perceived as a professional failure. Your life will continually be in danger. You’ll receive no support or affirmation of any sort. Do I have any applications?” Isaiah immediately jumps up and says, “Here am I. Send me.” Why?

Don’t you see the liberation? He is no longer afraid of being perceived as a failure. He’s already been perceived as a failure. He knows that God sees him as a failure, and God has received him and has accepted him. He’s not afraid of anything anymore. Do you know how liberated you would be if you understood the holiness of God and the grace of God like that? Do you know what that liberation is called in the Bible? It’s called personal holiness. The holiness of the human heart is a response to the holiness and the grace of God. When you have responded to that, you will, for example, be full of courage.

You’ll say, “Here is the Holy Father in whose presence even the angels burn and smoke, and they have to cover their faces, and yet he loves me. If that God is for me, what am I afraid of?” It brings courage. It brings peace. Do you know why God revealed himself to Isaiah? Because it was the year King Uzziah died. “What is so special about that?” King Uzziah had reigned for 52 years. Everybody was terrified. When you have a king for 52 years and he dies, everybody is terrified about the future. God reveals himself to Isaiah, who is scared about the future, and says, “I want to show you I’m the real King.”

I read an interesting, little article on how to deal with worry. I picked it up out of a popular magazine. It said what you do is put a rubber band around your wrist. When you start to worry, you pull the rubber band and snap it back. Then you say, “Worrying won’t help me at all.” Then relax every muscle in your body and picture yourself in some idyllic setting. (This was an expert on how to cope with life.) Snap the rubber band, tell yourself, “It’s no good to worry,” relax every muscle in your body, and then imagine yourself in an idyllic setting.

The Bible says you don’t need tricks. The Bible says you don’t need gimmicks. Many of you are living in the year King Uzziah died. Many of you are living in situations where something you always counted on has been ripped out from underneath you and you’re scared about your future. You don’t need a rubber band. You don’t need muscle relaxing. You don’t need visualization techniques.

You need a look at the face of the Holy God who says, “If I’m your King and, in spite of my holiness, I have received you through my grace, then you really can have courage. Then you can really have peace. Then you can really have purity.” Don’t you see what you need is God? You don’t need a technique. Don’t you see what you need is repentance before the holiness of God? Don’t you see there are no shortcuts to it?

Some of you say, “I thought Christianity was about a God of love and he just helped you with your self-esteem by showing you how much he loves you.” Friends, you’ll never be able to get to his love unless you go through his holiness. If you go through his holiness, if you go to the altar, if you go to the temple and you see him you’ll come out changed. You’ll come out holy. Let’s pray.

Father, there are some of us in the room who find the whole idea of a holy God repulsive and repugnant. Lord, I pray you would reveal yourself to them, that you would show them it’s not only not repulsive, but it’s logical and sensible that you would have to be a threatening, holy presence. Beyond that, I pray you show them unless they see you as holy your love will mean nothing. Unless they see you as holy they’ll never know themselves. Father, I pray you will change their hearts and draw them to yourself.