The Holiness of God

I have simply tried to capture what I think is the main point/statement from each chapter.

The one concept, the central idea I kept meeting in Scripture, was the idea that God is holy. The word was foreign to me. I wasn't sure what it meant. I made the question a matter of diligent and persistent search. Today I am still absorbed with the question of the holiness of God. I am convinced that it is one of the most important ideas that a Christian can ever grapple with. It is basic to our whole understanding of God and of Christianity (p.14-15).

How we understand the person and character of God the Father affects every aspect of our lives. It affects far more than what we normally call the "religious" aspects of our lives. If God is the Creator of the entire universe, then it must follow that He is the Lord of the whole universe. No part of the world is outside of His lordship. That means that no part of my life must be outside of His lordship. His holy character has something to say about economics, politics, athletics, romance - everything with which we are involved.

God is inescapable. There is no place we can side from Him. Not only does He penetrate every aspect of our lives, but He penetrates it in His majestic holiness. Therefore we must seek to understand what the holy is. We dare not seek to avoid it. There can be no worship, no spiritual growth, no true obedience without it. It defines our goal as Christians. God has declared, "Be holy, because I am holy" (Lev.11:44). To reach that goal, we must understand what holiness is (p.16).

Only once in sacred Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree. Only once is a characteristic of God mentioned three times in succession. The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy. Not that He is merely holy, or even holy, holy. He is holy, holy, holy. The Bible never says that God is love, love, love; or mercy, mercy, mercy; or wrath, wrath, wrath; or justice, justice, justice. It does say that He is holy, holy, holy, that the whole earth is full of His glory (p.32).

Isaiah explained it this way: "My eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty" (Isaiah 6:5). He saw the holiness of God. For the first time in his life Isaiah really understood who God was. At the same instant, for the first time Isaiah really understood who Isaiah was (p.37).

There is a pattern here, a pattern repeated in history. God appears, people quake in terror, God forgives and heals, God sends. From brokenness to mission is the human pattern (p.39-40).

It is dangerous to assume that because a person is drawn to holiness in his study that he is thereby a holy man. There is irony here. I am sure that the reason I have a deep hunger to learn of the holiness of God is precisely because I am not holy. I am a profane man - a man who spends more time out of the temple than in it. But I have had just enough of a taste of the majesty of God to want more. I know what it means to be a forgiven man and what it means to be sent on a mission . My soul cries for more. My soul needs more (p.41-42).

Here we are, already in the third chapter of this book, and I still have not defines what it means to be holy... The difficulties involved in defining holiness are vast (p.45).

Early in the twentieth century a German scholar made an unusual and interesting study of the holy. The man's name way Rudolph Otto. Otto attempted to study the holy in a scientific way. He examined how people from different cultures and nations behave when they encounter something they regard as holy. He explored the human feelings people have when they meet the holy... Otto coined a special term for the holy. He called it the mysterium tremendum. A simple translation of the concept is the "awful mystery" (p.50-51).

In Otto's study of the human experience of the holy, he discovered that the clearest sensation that human beings have when they experience the holy is an overpowering and overwhelming sense of creatureliness. That is, when we are aware of the presence of God, we become most aware of ourselves as creatures. When we meet the Absolute, we know immediately that we are not absolute. When we meet the Infinite, we become acutely conscious that we are finite. When we meet the Eternal, we know we are temporal. To meet God is a powerful study in contrasts (p.54).

We fear God because He is holy. Our fear is not the healthy fear that the Bible encourages us to have. Our fear is a servile fear, a fear born of dread. God is too great for us; He is too awesome. He makes difficult demands on us. He is the Mysterious Stranger who threatens our security. In His presence we quake and tremble. Meeting Him personally may be our greatest trauma (p.56).

It was a dark and stormy night... Notice how [Mark] begins telling of Jesus calming the storm: "That day when evening came, He said to His disciples, 'Let us go over to the other side'" (Mark 4:35)... (p.59).

What is significant about this scriptural story is that the disciples' fear increased after the threat of the storm was removed. The storm had made them afraid. Jesus' action to still the tempest made them more afraid. In the power of Christ they met something more frightening than they had ever met in nature. They were in the presence of the holy... We can understand it if people invented an unholy god, a god who brought only comfort. Why why a god more scary than the earthquake, flood, or disease? It is one thing to fall victim to the flood or to fall prey to cancer; it is another thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

The words that the disciples spoke after Jesus calmed the sea are very revealing. They cried out, "Who is this?" The King James Version expresses the question life this: "What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?" They were asking a question of kind. They were looking for a category to put Jesus in...

Jesus was different. He possessed an awesome otherness. He was the supreme mysterious stranger. He made people uncomfortable (p.63-65)

It has been said that nothing dispels a lie faster than the truth: nothing exposes the counterfeit faster than the genuine... The presence of Jesus represented the presence of the genuine in the midst of the bogus. Here authentic holiness appeared; the counterfeiters of holiness were not pleased...

The resentment of the Pharisees and Sadducees toward Jesus began as a petty annoyance, moved to the level of a smoldering rage, and finally exploded in vehement demands for His death. They simply could not tolerate Him. On the Sea of Galilee the disciples were unable to find a category fitting for Christ; they could not answer their own question, "What manner of man is this?" The Pharisees and the Sadducees had a ready answer. They created categories for Jesus: He was a "blasphemer" and a "devil". He had to go. The super-competent had to be destroyed (p.78-79).

Holiness provokes hatred. The greater the holiness, the greater the human hostility toward it. It seems insane. No man was ever more loving that Jesus Christ. Yet even His love made people angry. His love was a perfect love, a transcendent and holy love, but His very love brought trauma to people. This kind of love is so majestic we can't stand it (p.82-83).

The world could tolerate Jesus; they could love Him, but only at a distance. Christ is safe for us if securely bound by space and time. But a present Christ could not survive in a world of hostile men. It was the judgment of Caiaphas that, for the good of the nation, Jesus must die (p.87-88).

If we fix our minds on the holiness of God, the result might be disturbing (p.91).

The genius of Luther ran up against a legal dilemma that he could not solve. There seemed to be no solution possible. The question that nagged him day and night was how a just God could accept an unjust man. He knew that his eternal destiny rode on the answer. But he could not find the answer. Lesser minds went merrily along their way, enjoying the bliss of ignorance. They were satisfied to think that God would compromise His own excellence and let them into heaven. After all, heaven would not be the marvelous place it was cracked up to be if they were excluded from it. God must grade on a curve. Boys will be boys, and God is big enough not to get all excited about a few moral blemishes.

Two things separated Luther from the rest of men: First, he knew who God was. Second, he understood the demands of God's law. He had mastered the law. Unless he came to understand the gospel, he would die in torment.

Then it happened: Luther's ultimate religious experience. There were no lightning bolts, no flying inkwells. It took place in quietness, in the solitude of his study. Luther's so-called "tower experience" changed the course of world history. It was an experience that involved a new understanding of God, a new understanding of His divine justice. It was an understanding of hos God can be merciful without compromising His justice. It was a new understanding of how a holy God expresses a holy love:

Like Isaiah before him, Luther felt the burning coal on his lips. He knew what it meant to be undone. He was shattered by the mirror of a holy God. He said later that before he could get a taste of heaven, God had to dangle him first over the pit of hell. God did not drop His servant into the pit; He saved his life from the pit. He proved that He was a God who was both just and the justifier. When Luther understood the gospel for the first time, the doors of paradise swung open, and he walked through.

"The just shall live by faith." This was the battle cry of the Protestant Reformation. The idea that justification is by faith alone, by the merits of Christ alone, was so central to the gospel that Luther called it "an article upon which the church stands or falls." Luther knew that it was the article by which he would stand or fall.

Once Luther grasped Paul's teaching in Romans, he was reborn. The burden of his guilt was lifted. The crazed torment was ended. This meant so much to the man that he was able to stand against pope and council, prince and emperor, and, if necessary, the whole world. he has walked through the gates of paradise, and no one was going to drag him back. Luther was a Protestant who knew what he was protesting.

Was Luther crazy? Perhaps. But if he was, our prayer is that God would send to this earth an epidemic of such insanity that we too may taste of the righteousness that is by faith alone (p.113-116).

In this chapter I want to stare the Old Testament God right in the eye. I want to look at the most difficult, most offensive passages we can find in the Old Testament and see if we can make any sense of them (p.120).

There is a reason why we are offended, indeed angered, by the story of Uzzah and the story of Nadab and Abihu. We find these things difficult to stomach because we do not understand four vitally important biblical concepts: holiness, justice, sin and grace. We do not understand what it means to be holy. We do not understand what justice is. We do not understand what sin is. We do not understand what grace is (p.131).

God's justice is never divorced from His righteousness. He never condemns the innocent. He never clears the guilty. He never punishes with undue severity. He never fails to reward righteousness. His justice is perfect justice (p.135).

Was it unjust for God to say to Adam and Eve that they would die when they sinned? Think about it. Was it evil for God to impose the death penalty for all sin? If you say yes, be careful. If you say yes, you are saying it as an expression of the very fallen, sinful nature that exposes you to the death penalty in the first place. If you say yes, you slander the character of God. If you say yes, you do violence to His holiness. If you say yes, you assail the righteous Judge of all the earth. If you say yes, you have never come to grips with what sin is. We must not say yes. We must say no and with conviction (p.139).

Sin is cosmic treason. Sin is treason against a perfectly pure Sovereign. If is an act of supreme ingratitude toward the One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself... When we sin, we not only commit treason against God, but we also do violence to each other... When I dishonor God, I dishonor all people who bear His image. Is it any wonder, then, that God takes sin so seriously? (p.140-141).

The Cross was at once the most horrible and the most beautiful example of God's wrath. It was the most just and the most gracious act in history. God would have been more than unjust, He would have been diabolical to punish Jesus if Jesus had not first willingly taken on Himself the sins of the world. Once Christ had done that, once He volunteered to be the Lamb of God, laden with our sin, then He became the most grotesque and vile thing on this planet. With the concentrated load of sin He carried, He became utterly repugnant to the Father. God poured out His wrath on this obscene thing. God made Christ accursed for the sin He bore. Herein was God's holy justice perfectly manifest. Yet is was done for us. He took what justice demanded from us. This "for us" aspect of the Cross is what displays the majesty of its grace. At the same time justice and grace, wrath and mercy. It is too astonishing to fathom (p.147).

In this chapter we will look at examples of people who have gone to the mat with God and come away at peace. We will look at Jacob, Job, Habakkuk, and Saul of Tarsus. Then we will examine what it means to make peace with God (p.161).

["How awesome is this place!" This was Jacob's response to being in the house of God. People do not normally feel that way in church. There is no sense of awe, no sense of being in the presence of One who makes us tremble. People in awe never complain that church is boring (p.166).]

• I captured this comment not because it illustrates the main point of the chapter, but because I think it illustrates a major problem in the church today. There is a lack of awe and reverence before a holy God. See also Sproul's comment in chapter 9, "The failure of modern evangelicalism is the failure to understand the holiness of God" (p.220).

Indeed, for the transforming power of God to change our lives, we must wrestle with Him. We must know what it means to fight with God all night if we are also to know what it means to experience the sweetness of the soul's surrender (p.168).

Jacob, Job and Habakkuk all declared war on God. They all stormed the battlements of heaven. They were all defeated, yet they all came away from the struggle with uplifted souls. They paid a price in pain. God allowed the debate, but the battle was fierce before peace was established (p.174-175).

One of the names by which God is revealed in the Old Testament is the name El Shaddai. The name means "the thunderer" or "the overpowerer." It was by the name El Shaddai that God appeared to Job. What Job experienced was the awesome power of a sovereign God who overpowers all people and is Himself overpowered by no one. Saul met the Overpowerer on the road to Damascus (p.176).

In this experience Saul became Paul just as Jacob had become Israel. The battle was over. Saul struggled with God and lost (p.179).

The struggle we have with a holy God is rooted in the conflict between God's righteousness and our unrighteousness. He is just, and we are unjust. This tension creates fear, hostility, and anger within us toward God. The unjust person does not desire the company of a just judge. We become fugitives, fleeing from the presence of One whose glory can blind us and whose justice can condemn us. We are at war with Him unless or until we are justified. Only the justified person can be comfortable in the presence of a holy God (p.180).

When our holy war with God ceases; when we, like Luther, walk through the doors of paradise, when we are justified by faith, the war ends forever. With the cleansing from sin and the declaration of divine forgiveness we enter into an eternal peace treaty with God. The firstfruit of our justification is peace with God. This peace is a holy peace, a peace unblemished and transcendent. It is a peace that cannot be destroyed (p.183).

For the Christian the holy war is over; the peace has been established. Access to the Father is ours. But we still must tremble before our God. He is still holy. Our trembling is the tremor of awe and veneration, bot the trembling of the coward or the pagan frightened by the rustling of a leaf. Luther explained it this way: We are to fear God not with a servile fear like that of a prisoner before his tormentor but as children who do not wish to displease their beloved Father. We come to Him in confidence; we come to Him in boldness we have access. We have a holy peace (p.187).

The saints of Scripture were called saints not because they were already pure but because they were people who were set apart and called to purity (p.191).

My sins have not brought me happiness. But my sins have brought be pleasure. I like pleasure. I am still very much attracted to pleasure. Pleasure can be great fun. And not all pleasures are sins. There is much pleasure to be found in righteousness. But the difference is still there. Sin can be pleasurable, but it never brings happiness.

Now if I understand all this, why would I ever be tempted to sin? It seems silly that anyone who knows the difference between happiness and pleasure would continue to trade happiness for pleasure. It seems utterly stupid for a person to do something the he knows will rob him of his happiness. Yet we do it. The mystery of sin is not only that it is wicked and destructive but also that it is so downright stupid (p.193-194).

Our problem is that we have been called to be holy, and we are not holy. Yet again the question arises, If we are not holy, why does the Bible call us saints?

The Bible calls us "holy ones." We are holy because we have been consecrated to God. We have been set apart. We have been called to a life that is different. The Christian life is a life of nonconformity (p.195).

A superficial style of nonconformity is the classical pharisaical trap. The kingdom of God is not about buttons, movies, or dancing. The concern of God is not focused on what we eat or what we drink. The call of nonconformity is a call to a deeper level of righteousness that goes beyond externals. When piety is defined exclusively in terms of externals, the whole point of the apostle's teaching has been lost. Somehow we have failed to hear Jesus' words that it is not what goes into a person's mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of that mouth. We still want to make the kingdom a matter of eating and drinking (p.197).

The prefix trans means "across" or "beyond." When we are called to be transformed, it means that we are to rise above the forma and the structures of this world. We are not to follow the world's lead but to cut across it and rise above it to a higher calling and style. This is a call to transcendent excellence, bot a call to sloppy "out-of-it-ness." Christians who give themselves as living sacrifices and offer their worship in this way are people with a high standard of discipline. They are not satisfied with superficial forms of righteousness. The "saints" are called to a rigorous pursuit of the kingdom of God. They are called to depth in their spiritual understanding.

They key method Paul underscores is the means to the transformed life is by the "renewal of the mind." This means nothing more and nothing less that education. Serious education. In-depth education. Disciplined education in the things of God. It calls for a mastery of the Word of God. We need to be people whose lives have changed because our minds have changed.

True transformation comes by gaining a new understanding of God, ourselves, and the world. What we are after ultimately is to be conformed to the image of Christ. We are to be like Jesus, though not in the sense that we can every gain deity. We are not god-men. But our humanity is to mirror and reflect the perfect humanity of Jesus. A tall order!

To be conformed to Jesus, we must first begin to think as Jesus did. We need the "mind of Christ." We need to value the things He values and despise the things He despises. We need to have the same priorities He has. We need to consider weighty the things that He considers weighty.

That cannot not happen without a mastery of His Word. The key to spiritual growth is in-depth Christian education that requires a serious level of sacrifice.

• Major ministry implications in this statement.

That is the call to excellence we have received. We are not to be like the rest of the world, content to live our lives with a superficial understanding of God. We are to grow dissatisfied with spiritual milk and hunger after spiritual meat (p.199-200).

"Almost every natural man that hears of hell, flatters himself that he shall escape it."

- Jonathan Edwards

Gone are the Gothic arches; gone are the stained-glass windows; gone are the sermons that stir the soul to moral anguish. Ours is an upbeat generation with the accent on self-improvement and a broad-minded view of sin.

Our thinking goes like this: If there is a God at all, He is certainly not holy. If He is perchance holy, He is not just. Even if He is both holy and just, we need not fear because His love and mercy override His holy justice. If we can stomach His holy and just character, we can rest in one thing: He cannot possess wrath.

If we think soberly for five seconds, we must see our error. If God is holy at all, if God has an ounce of justice in His character, indeed if God exists as God, how could He possible be anything else but angry with us? We violate His holiness; we insult His justice; we make light of His grace. These things can hardly please Him (p.211-212).

If we had any compassion for other people, we would wail at the thought of a single one of them falling into the pit of hell (p.215).

The tragedy for us is that in spite of the clear warnings of Scripture and of Jesus' sober teaching on this subject, we continue to be at ease about the future punishment of the wicked. If God is to be believed at all, we must face the awful truth that someday His furious wrath will be poured out... If we hate the wrath of God, it is because we hate God Himself (p.216).

If we are unconverted, one thing is absolutely certain: We hate God. The Bible is unambiguous about this point. We are God's enemies. We are inwardly sworn to His ultimate destruction. It is as natural for us to hate God as it is for rain to moisten the earth when it falls (p.217).

As Edwards noted, it is not enough to say that the natural human mind views God as an enemy. We must be more precise. God is our mortal enemy. He represents the highest possible threat to our sinful desires. His repugnance to us is absolute, knowing no lesser degrees. No amount of persuasion from philosophers of theologians can induce us to love God. We despise His very existence and would do anything in our power to rid the universe of His holy presence.

If God were to expose His life to our hands, He would not be safe for a second. We would not ignore Him; we would destroy Him. This charge may seem extravagant and irresponsible until we examine once more the record of what happened when God did appear in Christ. Christ was not simply killed. He was murdered by malicious people. The crowds howled for His blood. It was not enough merely to do away with Him, but it had to be done with the accompaniment of scorn and humiliation (p.218-219).

The failure of modern evangelicalism is the failure to understand the holiness of God (p.220).

How can we love a holy God? The simplest answer I can give to this vital question is that we can't. Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are horn of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him. He is the One who takes the initiative to restore our souls. Without Him we can do nothing of righteousness. Without Him we would be doomed to everlasting alienation from His holiness. We can love Him only because He first loved us. To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund (in terminal decline) souls (p.221-222).

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul wrote of the revelation that God makes of Himself in and through nature... What Paul says here is startling. He acknowledges the invisibility of God. Yet he speaks of the invisible things of God as being seen... What he means is this: What cannot be seen directly can be seen indirectly. In the realm of theology, what Paul is describing is called mediate revelation. Mediate revelation involves a communication or unveiling that takes place through some medium (p.227).

Paul makes it clear that everybody sees this manifestation of God's majesty. This revelation gets through to all people so that all people see it clearly. The force of Paul's assertion is that every person who has ever lived knows that there is a God and is aware of His transcendent majesty and holiness. The medium God has selected to reveal Himself universally is so clear and so potent that it leaves no one with an excuse (p.228-229).

Though all people receive this knowledge of God, they will not all readily acknowledge it... the problem is that in the case of God, we distort our knowledge of Him by replacing Him with an image that we create ourselves. This is the essence of idolatry: replacing the reality with a counterfeit. We distort the truth of God and reshape our understanding of Him according to our own preferences, leaving us with a God who is anything but holy (p.229-230).

We are creatures who prefer life in the cave to the full light of the blazing sun. The glory of God is all around us. We cannot miss it. However, we not only fail to stop and smell the flowers, but we also fail to notice the glory of the flowers' Maker.

Indeed the featured presentation in the theater of divine majesty in which we walk daily is God's glory. The psalmist declares that the sky and all of nature sing out God's glory and majesty.

We see the inseparable link between God's holiness and His glory. His glory is the outward manifestation of His most perfect being. It is His heaviness or weightiness that is displayed (p.234-235).

The Old Testament frequently refers to the beauty of God's holiness... These references indicate a significant relationship between the holy and the beautiful. We are accustomed to thinking in terms of an inherent relationship between goodness and holiness and between truth and holiness. But truth and goodness are merely two legs of a three-legged stool. The third leg is the element of beauty. In biblical categories, there is a triad of virtues, all of which point beyond themselves to the holiness of God. This triad is composed of the good, the true, and the beautiful (p.238-239).

Just as truth and goodness are rooted in God's character, so is beauty. God Himself is the ground of all unity and diversity, of simplicity and complexity. His very being is internally consistent and harmonious and proportionate. In Him there are no distortions, no disorder, no ugliness. His voice admits to no noise or cacophony. The works of His hands are cosmos, not chaos. Chaos is marked by disorder and confusion; it is manifest irrationality. The beauty of God is a sane and rational beauty in that His being is one of perfect sanity and order. Insofar as the beautiful bears witness to these qualities, they bear witness to Him (p.240-241).

God's perfection applies to all of His attributes... There was never a time when God was less that perfect, and there is no possibility that in the future He may slip into any kind of imperfection. What has been with God will be so forever. His perfection is immutable. It cannot change.

Shadows in a cave are given to change. They dance and flicker with ever-changing shape and brightness. To contemplate the truly holy and to go beyond the surface of creaturely things, we need to get out of our self-made cave and walk in the glorious light of God's holiness (p.242).

We are a generation of people who feel trapped in the here and now. We sense no access to the heavenly or to the realm of the transcendent. There seems to be an unbridgeable chasm that cuts us off from the arena of the holy. We are doomed, it seems, to live out our days chained to the profane (p.247).

Ours is a profane existence, with no sense of the presence of the holy. But people have always looked for a window or door to the transcendent. We seek a threshold that will lead us over the border from the profane to the sacred. It is a quest for sacred space, for ground that is holy ground (p.249).

These passages (stories of Moses, Jacob and Noah) illustrate instances in which an altar marks sacred space, a crucial passage. Each passage demonstrates a bridge from the merely profane to the holy, either through God's appearance to people or through significant decisions that set the people apart as holy.

Our contact with the holy is not merely an encounter with a different dimension of reality; it is the meeting with Absolute Reality. Christianity is not about involvement with religious experience as a tangent. It involves a meeting with a holy God, who forms the center, or core of human existence. The Christian faith is theocentric. God is not at the edge of Christians' lives but at the very center. God defines our entire life and worldview (p.255).

[Sproul describes the Christian experience of holy space in the sanctuary of the church building, and the experience of holy time in the observance of the Sabbath and the Lord's Supper. These things remind us of the ultimate intrusion of the holy into the profane - the incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ.]

In sacred space and sacred time Christians find the presence of the holy. The bars that seek to shut out the transcendent are shattered, and the present time becomes defined by the intrusion of the holy. When we erect barriers to these intrusions, dikes to keep them from flooding our souls, we exchange the holy for the profane and rob both God of His glory and ourselves of His grace (p.264-265).