Pastor and author John MacArthur remembers a conversation that he once had with a well-known charismatic pastor who told MacArthur that Jesus sometimes comes into his bathroom while he’s shaving in the morning and puts his arms around him and they talk together. I love MacArthur’s incredulous reply … “And you keep shaving?”
I think we’ve become a bit flippant and shallow in our knowledge and respect for God these days. We talk about God without any fear of the awesomeness of His absolute holiness. Surprising … given the fact that every time someone in the Bibles gets a mere glimpse of God or Christ in His resurrected glory, the person falls on their face!
Holiness … it is at the heart and core of who God is. It is one of His preeminent attributes. “As I read the Bible,” evangelist Billy Graham once said, “I seem to find holiness to be His supreme attribute.”
Philadelphia pastor James Montgomery Boice once spoke to a group of Christians about the attributes of God. He began by asking the group to list God’s qualities in order of importance. The group put love first, at the top of the list … followed by wisdom … power … mercy … omniscience … and truthful. Holy was at the very end of the list. “That did surprise me,” Boice later wrote, “because the Bible refers to God’s holiness more than any other attribute.”
When the prophet Isaiah was in the Temple beholding the Lord high and lifted up, the angels were singing: “Holy! Holy! Holy is the Lord of hosts … the whole earth is full of His glory” (Isaiah 6:3).
“Holy! Holy! Holy!” … The ancient Hebrew language had no way of emphasizing words like we do today. They didn’t italicize or under line or write in bold print. When they wanted to highlight something, they repeated it. For example when Jesus wanted to emphasize a point or get His followers’ attention, He would say something like: “Truly, truly I say to you.” Very seldom do we see a word repeated three times in the Bible and never when it comes to any of the attributes of God except this one … God’s holiness.
Think of it this way. God is all-loving … but the angels around God’s throne aren’t’ recorded as singing: “Loving! Loving! Loving!” He is all-knowing but there is no record of the heavenly hosts singing: “Omniscient! Omniscient! Omniscient!” His power and might have no limit, but the songs recorded in the Bible don’t sing: “Powerful! Powerful! Powerful!” But the cry of the heavenly hosts … all the angels and saints … is “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
God is called “holy” more than anything else and His holiness leads the list of His many attributes for good reason. He is repeatedly referred to as “the Holy One of Israel” … as “the holy God.” Author Stephen Charnock said that God’s arm of power tells us of His strength … His eye of omniscience tells of His knowledge … His heart of duration tells of His eternity … but it is the beauty of His holiness that captures us when we really see Him as He is. “According to scripture,” Charnock declares, “the holiness of God is His beauty.”
When you read through the Bible from beginning to end, you are constantly reminded … it seems like every other chapter … that we are dealing with a holy God … and that His holiness is stunningly beautiful … so stunning, so breath-taking, so awesome that it inspires those who have seen Him and experienced His holiness to burst out in song. The first song in the Bible and the very last song both sing of the holiness of God.
The first song is found in Exodus 15. After God demolished any notion that Egypt’s false gods were anything other than the projection of the men who worshipped them … after displaying His power and reality through 10 different plagues … when God parted the Red Sea and freed over one million Hebrew slaves from Egypt’s grip … Moses led the whole nation in a song celebrating God’s holiness. One verse, Exodus 15: 11, 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 God gave His Apostle John a glimpse into the future in the Book of Revelation, John saw the moment when the final outpouring of God’s wrath was about is about to take place. Gathered in Heaven were those whose faith and allegiance to God in defiance of the rule of the antichrist had cost them their lives and John tells us they were singing: “Great and awe inspiring are Your works, Lord God Almighty. Righteous and true are Your ways, King of the Nations. Lord, who will not fear and glorify Your name? For You alone are … holy. All nations will come and worship before You, for Your judgments have been revealed” (Revelation 15:3-4).
“Who will fear and glorify Your name? For You alone, God, are holy.” This morning, brothers and sisters, 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 heard of You by the hearing of the ear but now my eye sees you. Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6).
If you turn aside from other distractions and draw near to the common things that God sets on fire by His Presence, you will understand why Moses feared to get too close and took his sandals off as he stood before the bush that burned with God’s Presence (Exodus 3:5), for the place where he was standing was … say it with me … holy! If you look intently at this truth about God, you will join Isaiah … a man of God who studied and thought about and proclaimed God’s holiness for years before having a personal encounter with this holy God .. in saying: “Woe is me, for I am ruined because I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5).
If the word “holy” is used as a prefix to God’s name more than any other adjective … if, as Billy Graham contends, holiness is God’s supreme attribute … then what exactly does the word “holy” mean?
There are basically two strands of meaning for the word “holy.” First, it means to be “distinct” … “separate” … “ The literal sense of the Hebrew word “qodesh” means to “cut away” or “to separate.” R.C. Sproul suggests that this word conveys the same idea that we express when we call a garment or a golf club or some piece of merchandise of superior quality as “a cut above.”
When we say that God is “holy,” we are not talking about one characteristic of many. We are talking about THE character of God Himself! When we say that God is “holy,” we are saying that He is utterly unique … incomparable … matchless … without parallel … without peer. In Isaiah 40;25, the Holy One … God … calls out: “Who will you compare me to or who is my equal?” And our only answer can be “No one! There is no comparison, no one close to You.” God is not some super-sized version of you or me, amen? He is transcendently separate … in a class by Himself. He is not subject to anyone or anything! He answers to no one! This is who our holy God is, Amen?
When God answered an old woman’s prayer and gave her a son, Hannah, the mother of Samson, prayed: “There is no one holy like the Lord … there is no one besides You! And there is no rock like our God” (1st Samuel 2:2).
David’s confidence in God was fortified by considering God’s holiness. “Lord … there is no one like You among the gods,” he wrote in Psalm 86, “and there are no works like Yours. All the nations You have made will come and bow down before you, Lord, and will honor Your name. For you are great and perform wonders. You alone are God” (v. 8-10).
God is above us. God is beyond us. No one in the Bible … no matter how devout or learned … failed to crumble in fear and humility when they caught a mere glimpse of God and His holiness. When Habakkuk the prophet encountered the holy God of Israel, he trembled within … his lips quivered at the sound of God’s voice. “Rottenness entered my bones, “he exclaimed, “and my steps trembled beneath me” (Habakkuk 3:216). He was shattered by what he saw. And guess what? When we encounter the holy God, we … like Habakkuk and Moses and Isaiah and John we will fall to our faces as if dead (Rev. 1:17). And here’s the part I warned you about earlier …
When we stand in the presence of our holy God … when we see Him as He is … we will immediately see ourselves for who we REALLY are. Yikes! The contrast will be … well, for the want of a better word … overwhelming! “Woe to me!”
Brothers and sisters, the dominant trend today is to make you feel comfortable with God at almost every level. We’re made to feel that God is our buddy who comes in and hugs us when we’re shaving or making dinner. We’re made to feel that God is someone you can hang out with … confide in … call upon when the going gets tough regardless of your relationship with Him or what kind of life you’re living. I once heard a preacher on the radio refer to God as “Jesus’ Old Man.” Yeah … Jesus’ Old Man.
Let’s contrast this trivializing, bumper-sticker, next-door neighbor view of God with what God has to say about Himself. “You thought I was just like you but I will rebuke you and lay out the case before you. Understand this, you who forgot God, or I will tear you apart, and there will be no rescuer” (Psalm 50:21-22). It is a dangerous thing to forget that God is holy. We trifle with the Living God to our own peril. He is not our buddy, folks! Our God is a consuming fire, friends. Let the mystery of who He is strike you today! He will not fit into our neat little theological categories. He cannot be defined by our finite minds. That’s part of what it means when we say that God is “holy.”
There is another aspect of dimension of God’s holiness. To be “holy” is to be absolutely “pure.” As the Apostle John says in 1st John 1:5, there is absolutely no darkness in God. The Apostle James tells us that “God is not tempted by evil, and He Himself doesn’t tempt anyone” (James 1:3). Habakkuk 1:3 says that God’s eyes are “too pure to look upon evil … and He cannot tolerate wrong doing.”
In a word … and that word being “holy” … God is perfect, without blemish, without sin … flawless. God’s holiness … His purity … is so bright, so pure, so intense that the seraphim … the angels of fire who serve Him in Heaven … have to cover up their faces with their wings (Isaiah 6:2). When Peter, James, and John caught a glimpse of Jesus’ holiness, the Apostle Matthew said that Jesus’ face “shone like the sun, and His clothes became dazzling white” (Matthew 17:2). “As there is no darkness in His understanding,” say the late theologian Stephen Charnock, “so there is no spot in His will. As His mind is possessed with all truth so there is no deviation in His will from it. He loves all truth and goodness. He hates all falsity and evil,” Charnock concludes.
With the concepts of purpose and purity in God established, how does this relate to us? I warn you … the leap from these heights is terrible to consider. The response of God’s holiness against sin brings me to my final point. Are you ready to make the leap with me? Okay … here we go!
Only holy people can see God! “Pursue peace with everyone,” says Paul, “AND the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). Holy people get to see God … unholy people will never lay eyes on Him. As the Prophet Isaiah explains: “… your iniquities have been barriers between you and your God … and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear” (Isaiah 59:2).
Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord?” David asks. “And who shall stand in His holy place? Those who have clean hands and pure hears, who do not lift up their souls to what is false and do not swear deceitfully” (Psalm 24:3-4). YIKES! If this is true, what hope do I have? Fundamentally, essentially, by nature and by choice … I am a sinner! My hands aren’t clean … and my heart is not pure. Sometimes I offer up my soul to what is false. Sometimes I offer up my time and energy to be entertained by things that I know are based on lies … like talk radio, for example. I will never climb to the holy heights where God dwells. 1st Peter 1:14-16 only deepens my dilemma: “Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as He who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct, for it is written ‘you shall be holy as I am holy’”.
“Be holy as I am holy.” I don’t know about all of you, but my life is not holy. My days are riddled with sin. My heart is attracted to sin. My mind is adapt at justifying and rationalizing sin. I am so bent toward sin and its ways that I often can’t even see it in myself. “The heart is more deceitful than anything else and desperately sick,” Jeremiah laments, “who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
I am a living, breathing contradiction to His holy character. I see that. But there is something far more dangerous and true – God sees it too! As Moses points out in Psalm 90: “You, [God], have set our iniquities before You; our secret sins in the light of Your countenance. For all our days pass away under Your wrath, our years come to an end like a sigh.” The Apostle Paul echoes these same thoughts in Hebrews 4:13: “No creature is hidden from Him but all things are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.”
Translation … I’m caught red-handed … and so are you! Our sin not only makes us totally incompatible with a thrice-holy God, it makes us guilty of treason. We have broken His law … defied His commands … fallen short of His glory … trespassed in forbidden territory … and totally missed the bull’s eye of perfection required by a holy God.
So, with Job’s friend Eliphaz, we ask: “Can mortal man be in the right before God?” (Job 4:17). When we ask how can a holy God who must judge sin keep His integrity while pronouncing sinners guilty, we once again turn to 1st Peter … in this case, 1st Peter 3:18. “For Christ also suffered for sins once and all … the righteous for the unrighteous … that He might bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit.”
Holy! Holy! Holy is the Lord God Almighty, amen? What His holiness demanded, His grace provided in Jesus Christ our Lord. Let me say that again: What God’s holiness demanded, His grace provided in Jesus Christ our Lord! God took on flesh, stepped into this unholy world, took upon Himself the white hot heat of His eternal holy revulsion of sin on the cross at Calvary. My sin … your sin … was put on Christ.
In that moment, when Jesus paid the penalty for our sin, something wonderful happened. He came down from the cross, took all His holiness and wove it into a suit of clothes and gave it to you and me. We walk around today wearing the holiness of Jesus Christ. When God the Father looks at me … though I am a sinner … He doesn’t see my sin. He sees the holiness of the blessed Savior who paid the penalty for my sins. Isaiah said: “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God for He has clothed me with the garments of salvation, He has covered me with the robe righteousness” (Isaiah 60:10). As evangelist and author Leonard Ravenhill so accurately observed: “The greatest miracle that God can do today is to take an unholy person out of this unholy world and make that person holy and put them back into that unholy world and keep them holy in it.” Let me say that again: “The greatest miracle that God can do today is to take an unholy person out of this unholy world and make that person holy and put them back into that unholy world and keep them holy in it,” amen?
Today I may be speaking to some whom God is calling to repent of their sin and put their trust in Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. I may be speaking to others who are faking the Christian life outwardly but inwardly are not living in holiness. I may be speaking to yet others who have fallen outwardly … your life is not right before God even though you profess to know Jesus as your Savior.
The solution is the same for them all. Turn from your sin and turn towards God. Appeal to Him to give you a clean conscience and an obedient heart based on the blood of Jesus Christ that was shed for you.
Listen to what God promises you: “For thus says the high and exulted one who lives forever, whose name is holy. ‘I dwell on a high and holy place, and also with the contrite and lowly of spirit in order to revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the contrite” (Isaiah 57:15). That’s good news, amen? Although God is altogether holy and exalted, He condescends to dwell with those who humble themselves before Him.
Let me close by asking you a few questions. What difference does God’s holiness make in your life? Do you have the holiness of God working for you in Christ … or is His holiness set against you? Have you fled to Christ … deliberately … personally … trusting that what He did on the cross is your only hope of being right with God? Or are you still carrying your sins and an appointment with the fierce wrath of God? What is the evidence on your daily life that the Holy Spirit of God dwells in you? Does your behavior … your choices … your habits … your language … show that your are, in the language of 1st Peter 2:9, “a chose race … a royal priesthood … a holy nation …. A people of His possession … so that you may proclaim the praises of the One who called you out of darkness and into His marvelous light?
Let us pray…
