God Stories – Attributes of God
The Holiness of God April 27, 2003
The Moving of the Ark
Back, before Saul was king in Israel, Israel is defeated in battle by the Philistines. The Israelites had carried the Ark of the covenant into battle with them, and the Ark of the Covenant is captured.
The Philistine bring it home like capturing an opposing team’s mascot, and place it in their god’s temple. They really have no idea what they have – the Ark which is a sign of the presence and power of God destroys the idol of their god Dagon, and the Philistines become ill with tumors, So they put the Ark on a cart and send it back to the Israelites. The Ark ends up in a town called Kiriath-Jearim where it stays through Saul’s reign and into David’s.
After David has captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites, and made it his capital city, he decides that it is time to bring the Ark to the capital.
He gathers people from the whole nation to Kiriath-jearim, they set the Ark up on a brand new ox cart and start on the road to Jerusalem dancing and singing. Two guys, Uzzah and Ahio were guiding the cart. Everything was going great until they got to the threshing floor at Kidon. There, the oxen stumbled and it looked like the Ark was going to fall off the cart, so Uzzah reached out to steady it. It says that the Lord’s anger blazed out against Uzzah and he struck him dead because he had laid his hand on the Ark.
Dasvid was angry because the Lord’s anger had blazed out against Uzzah. He was so angry that he even renamed the place Perez-uzzah (outbreak against Uzzah)
David becomes afraid to move the Ark any further, so they take it to the house of Obed-edom where it stays until they try again.
You might feel the same as David – angry with God: “Why would he do such a thing – the poor guy was just trying to help out!”
And you might be afraid as well: “if God kills Uzzah for touching the Ark with good intentions, what might I do that’ll get the ol’ lightning bolt?”
What happens here at Kidon is actually consistent with who God is and his holiness. The Ark, as a symbol and a sign of God’s presence with the nation was a sacred object – God had told the people that as sinful people if they touched it, they would die, because their corrupted being could not stand contact with even a symbol of God. He gave specific instructions on how the Ark was to be moved and carried – these instructions did not involve an ox cart – there were poles that could be inserted into rings in the side, and priests, and only priests, could transport the Ark in this way. To have the Ark moved using an Ox cart was like playing with a loaded gun – sooner or later someone is going to get hurt.
The story of what happens at the threshing floor of Kidon speaks to us of God’s holiness. The word that we translate “holy” in the Bible could also be translated as separate.
To say that God is holy is to say that he is something completely other than we are, and he is to be treated completely other. Another way to say this is by using the word sacred.
Liturgical churches will often mark certain objects as sacred – they are consecrated, separated out for use in worship and ministry to God.
In the more free-wheeling churches, we often don’t have a sense of the sacred. As in society, we might say nothing is sacred anymore. This is why we might have a hard time getting this attribute of God – he is holy, separated, sacred, wholly other. We talk about God as if he is our older brother, “the big guy in the sky” We are his buddy, and he is ours.
I don’t have a great sense for the sacred in the rest of society – I don’t like things that are separated out for special use – I want every day dishes, not good dishes that are too precious to use, when the queen comes to town, and I hear about all the special ways that you are supposed to treat here, I want to say, “Who does she think she is?”
But God is different. God’s holiness speaks of his being completely different that us – we are made in his image, but he is not like us.
Romans 11:33-36
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
"Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?"
"Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay him?"
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.
Who is you favorite Baseball player of all time? Say you have a ball signed by ___________________. Say that that ball was the last ball he ever hit in a game. You have it on a pedestal, in a glass cabinet in your den – your room. You come home one day and the ball is gone. You calmly ask your wife, “honey, do you know where my ball is?” She says “Oh, the boys lost theirs, so I gave it to them to play with.” You look out the front window and there they are playing stickball in the street with your _____________ ball. Your 11 year old has just hit a grounder to left field – the gutter. And your ______________ ball is heading toward the sewer. Your wife sees the look of terror on your face and says “It’s just a base ball!”
It’s not just a baseball it’s a ______________ baseball!
Take that feeling and multiply it a million times, and that is how separate, sacred, holy God is compared with us.
It takes the death of Uzzah for David to realize that God cannot be handled like a piece of cargo.
Peter catches a glimpse of the holiness of God in Jesus in Luke 5:
Luke 5
Push Out into Deep Water
1Once when he was standing on the shore of Lake Gennesaret, the crowd was pushing in on him to better hear the Word of God. 2He noticed two boats tied up. The fishermen had just left them and were out scrubbing their nets. 3He climbed into the boat that was Simon’s and asked him to put out a little from the shore. Sitting there, using the boat for a pulpit, he taught the crowd.
4When he finished teaching, he said to Simon, "Push out into deep water and let your nets out for a catch."
5Simon said, "Master, we’ve been fishing hard all night and haven’t caught even a minnow. But if you say so, I’ll let out the nets."
6It was no sooner said than done--a huge haul of fish, straining the nets past capacity. 7They waved to their partners in the other boat to come help them. They filled both boats, nearly swamping them with the catch.
8Simon Peter, when he saw it, fell to his knees before Jesus. "Master, leave. I’m a sinner and can’t handle this holiness. Leave me to myself." 9When they pulled in that catch of fish, awe overwhelmed Simon and everyone with him.
Because God is Holy, we cannot be presumptuous – we cannot just storm into his presence like we would a McDonalds and give our order. We need to come into his presence knowing that he is Sacred, Wholly other than we are or could ever be.
There is another side to holiness, and that is purity – Isaiah catches a glimpse of this in Isaiah 6.
Isaiah 6
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:
"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory."
At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
"Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."
Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."
Last summer we took the kids up to the cabin for our holiday. The cabin is a rustic place with no running water, no electricity, but plenty of space for the kids to run and play. On the day that we were to come back home, we got them dressed in the morning, packed up the van, and loaded them in. I took a look at them as I was getting them in the van, and thought they look pretty good – a little grubby, but clean enough. They all slept as I drove until we pulled into a McDonalds to get lunch – I looked back at them, and they were disgusting! What looked clean at the cabin, now in the light of civilization looked disgusting!
Isaiah had the same experience – he looked pretty good – good enough to walk into the temple, but in the gleaming light of the presence of a holy God in whom there is no shadow or turning, he was dirty enough to die! “I’m going to die!” he says. He is a prophet of the most high, out of his mouth come the very words of God – and he says “I am a man of unclean lips, and I come from a people of unclean lips.
God is so pure, so perfect, so holy, that the slightest hint of a sin is enough to kill us in his presence. Even the most holy thing that we do is completely impure in comparison with his holiness. One great old preacher used to say “even our repenting needs repentance.”
Nicky Gumbal tells the story of his pastor Sandy Miller. Who had a man in his office and he was trying to describe how good we need to be to come into God’s presence. He asked him who is the worst person you could ever imagine? And the fellow said Hitler or someone. Sandy asked who is the best person you could ever imagine? And the fellow said Mother Theresa. Say that Hitler is at the bottom of the scale on the floor, and mother Theresa is at the top where I can reach. Now I’d probably be somewhere in the middle, and you’d be somewhere just below Mother Theresa eh? Right.
The problem is that the standard is the sky.
God’s holiness is something far and above even what we could imagine for personal holiness.
God’s Holiness is a primary attribute. This is why I’ve started with this attribute – God is Holy above all things.
Pastor and author Tony Evans says this about God: “Holiness is the centerpiece of God’s attributes. Of all the things God is, at the center of His being, God is holy. Never in the Bible is God called, ‘love, love, love,’ or ‘eternal, eternal, eternal,’ or ‘truth, truth, truth.’ On this aspect of His character, God has laid the most stress.”
For the Hebrews, the number three was a perfect number – so to repeat an attribute three times was a way to express perfection in that attribute – “you are perfect in your holiness” is what they are saying.
I remember one speaker – it may have been Tommy Tenny – who took a new tact on the phrase holy, holy, holy. It is like there are three dots after the words holy, holy, holy… so that the elders are saying “holy” eternally And he was seeing the elders impacted in a similar way that many of us have been impacted during the renewal so that they are so blown away by God’s holiness, that that is all they can say, not repetively, but with ever greater emotion and meaning each time they say it.
Holy, holy, holy….
The scandal is that the God whose holiness goes beyond our imagination, the God whose holiness would kill us if we came into contact with us, this God became a human being – Jesus Christ. When we hear the stories of Uzzah and Isaiah, and catch a glimpse of the awesomeness of God’s holiness, we should be blown away that he would come and cover himself with the same flesh that we are.
And then, when he came he didn’t go and sit in the temple so that only the holiest of people could come and gaze on his glory! No he came and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory. He was known as a friend of sinners. There is something about his perfect love and perfect holiness that attracts the worst people rather than repelling them.
What a contradiction! – the holy God came to earth and went to the people who were cast off by society because they weren’t good enough to be the friends of proper people!
He does this because he loves us and he wants to make us holy.
Isaiah say I’m doomed, and God, in love sends an angel with a coal from the holy fire and touches his lips, purifying his whole being and making holy so that he can stand in the presence of God and not be destroyed by the sheer enormity of God’s holiness.
Jesus, in his death and resurrection becomes that coal for us – when he touches the impure areas of our life, he seers them off and purifies them so that we can come into God’s presence. We can come into his presence here and now, and we can live in his holy presence for the rest of eternity.
Whereas to come into a holy God’s presence should have scared us that all would be left of us is a little heap of ash, now, in the light of God’s love and Christ sacrifice, “he is able,” as Jude says, “to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy!”
God’s love for us is perfect, and his holiness is perfect, but we are far from perfect. – he has two ways he could have chosen to reconcile these two aspects he could destroy us in his holiness, or he could purify us and make us holy. He chose to come to earth – show us the model for holy living in Jesus Christ, and then die for us as a perfect and holy God so that we might be cleansed by him and live in his presence forever.
Our Response
Come be made holy – let the angel touch your lips with the coal – let God take away you sin through the death of Jesus.
Be holy as God is holy – our inability to reach the standard, Jesus sacrifice is not a license to stay wallowing in our sin and imperfection – it is a call to perfection. Paul is forever telling us “You are saved, now act like it!” You have been made holy, now act like it!
