I want to turn our thoughts towards the holiness of God…. and in particular, how we as human beings engage a holy God… how we can rediscover a healthy and holy fear of God.
The subject of holiness can be sensitive subject. Our experience may lead us to some confusing ideas about what it means to fear God.
- One is the idea that those who truly fear God will never have much fun in life. I believe those who truly grasp the fear God, will be the freest of all… as they fear little else.
- Another idea is that those who truly fear God will be those who make everyone around them feel guilty with their constant preaching. In truth, those who really understand the holiness of God will be the least self righteous and likely be the slowest to speak to others.
- Perhaps the greatest tension relates to the issue of intimacy…How can we develop intimacy with a holy God? For some, the very word “holiness” represents a rather negative experience of trying to relate to God… perhaps you were raised in a tradition which emphasized the fear of God in such a way that you never felt you could really be close to God… never felt accepted and able to experience intimacy with God. Too often we seem to be drawn to either a fear of God or intimacy with God…two internal dynamics which we find mutually exclusive and have a hard time reconciling with eachother.
> I believe the Lord wants to stir us this morning with this simple premise….that real intimacy begins with the recognition that another is truly different than ourselves… and cannot be reduced down to the comfort of what’s familiar to us.
· Nature of intimacy that we initially project our preconceptions and preferences onto the other..
· Such has always been the tragedy of our pursuit to know God…it’s part of our story…
God is on the mountain bearing revelation of Himself to Moses who is trembling before such an encounter with the living God… and receiving the commandments which begin with… and the people are down below fashioning a golden calf with their own hands. > They refashioned God to fit their expectations… and to serve their desires. Is that not our nature still?
To use the title of Donald McCullough’s book, whose thoughts I’m drawing on…we must face our tendency to trivialize God… for we face the dangerous illusion of a manageable deity.
“Reverence and awe have often been replaced by a yawn of familiarity. The consuming fire has been domesticated into a candle flame, adding a bit of religious atmosphere, perhaps, but no heat, no blinding light, no power for purification.” (p. 13)
> Intimacy with God doesn’t begin with the comfort of familiarity but with the humility of a holy distinction that separates us.
We do well to hear the wisdom of Solomon…for our heritage also includes one whom God gave gifted and lifted up as the wisest of all who lived on earth. He possessed not only the wisdom of men but the knowledge of God.
Solomon concluded that if man lives for himself alone his life is meaningless, and twentieth century philosophers have not improved on this conclusion. Only in relation to God does man have a purpose, and that purpose is: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccles. 12:13).
Proverbs 9:10
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”
To know the “Holy One” means the one who stands fully apart and distinct from ourselves… in such a way that we realize we can make no presumption about Him…. come with a holy fear or humility.
Eccles. 5:1-2
“Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.
Do not be quick with your mouth,
do not be hasty in your heart
to utter anything before God.
God is in heaven
and you are on earth,
so let your words be few.”
> God is in heaven… and we on earth… that reality sets the course for any true hope of knowing God…We must not become as foolish as clay trying to shape the potter… or ants trying to fathom the universe.
> True intimacy with God begins with a holy fear of God…humility.
How can we rediscover a healthy and holy fear of God?
I. Recognizing the ‘spirits of our age’ that have slipped into our souls like a Trojan horse…
1. The pride of knowledge
Taking my son to his Science Fair… explaining that science is simply…learning about our world. I was reminded of how such an endeavor was originally inspired by God… but now we have redirected the awe from God to ourselves… as we have become enamored with our own sense of control and explanation. We ‘flatten the transcendent into the measurable data of immanence.” Control and explanation has defined our new world. Discovery that once produced inspiration now just produces information. The ‘awe’ of life has been lost to a trivial aha.
We exchange the sacred for the stimulating…. and our souls are left in a sea of noise… further adrift from the source of everything.
Albert Einstein (quoted in Bits and Pieces, Aug 89) - “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Rarely do the two seem related… for science has often exchanged a sense of mystery for mastery. > But both are meant to be windows into the mystery of life and God.
> The enemy is neither science nor knowledge… it’s the pride which we have attached to our knowledge. We become the center of reality… no longer creatures we’ve begun acting like the central character.
2. Exaltation of the Individual
It has long been in our American culture… and shaped the spirituality of our culture.
Thomas Jefferson said, “I am a sect myself,”…. and Thomas Paine, “My mind is my church.”
> We’ve become a culture proud to have a personal religion…proud to fashion a god of our own preferences.
“Those who have been suckled at the breast of American culture will not easily be weaned from the milk of individualism. A god who in any way threatens to lead us beyond our personal autonomy will likely be reduced to a more manageable size.” (D. McCullough, p. 23)
Remember… Unity Church… mirror – “Behold your god.”
When we are no longer bound by God who outside of us…. then we are no longer bound with others in community… the common life and connection is reduced to fleeting causes, mere conformity, or corporate deification (i.e. we are all God).
Both of these influences have made it difficult to stand together in humility and awe as creatures before our creator.
Such influences lead to popular deities…gods in our image…
1. The god of my cause
It’s only natural that as we face bigger problems and need bigger help… we turn to God. The subtle shift lies in whether we are serving God by working for a just cause or serving a just cause by using God. >Whenever God becomes a means… even to social righteousness… we have trivialized God.
Abraham Lincoln – “The question is not whether God is on our side (north), but are we on His side.”
2. The god of my understanding
If we can imagine a child making a digging holes by the ocean… transferring water in their little bucket in hopes of emptying the ocean… we can begin to imagine the limitations of containing God within our understanding…our words… our formulations.
- Only in Jesus Christ has there ever been an exact correspondence between God and humanity.
This isn’t to imply that we shouldn’t be thoughtful about what we believe about God… but that we should never get too comfortable with it… as if we’ve ‘got it down’ and are ready for the exam.
Thomas Aquinas… Summa Theologica… one of the greatest intellectual achievements of western civilization… abruptly quit his work on December 6th, 1273. He had a profound experience while celebrating Mass… and told his secretary he couldn’t write any more , “for such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems to me as so much straw.”
And in our century… Karl Barth… whose writings were almost twice as long as Thomas’ Summa, imagined entering heaven with a pushcart full of books and hearing the angels laugh at him.
We all can develop strong ideas about God…and if drawn from what God has said, they will likely be good representations… but we must never think our minds ideas allow us to have fully contained or conceived or controlled who God fully is.
“We should speak of God like a high school sophomore about vectors to a Nobel prize winning physicist.”
3. The god of my experience
We all have our own experience in relating to God. God is a living God whose presence dwells among us… He moves among us and is manifest in our experience of Him. What is critical is that we never confuse our experience with the full truth of who God is; that we never reduce God to our perceptions.
“How easy it is to define authentic spirituality according to my particular experience and expression of it. And when I do I end up with a very different god from the one revealed in Christ, a god whose transcendent objectivity has been pared down to the contours of my subjectivity, a god, consequently, too trivial to lift me out of my self and beyond the distortions of my flawed experience.” (D. McCullough P 37)
4. The god of my desires
Many desires are good and lead to God… but many are misguided and darkened.
“Any god who promises to fulfill all our desires is the devil in disguise.” (D. McCullough)
Rather, ‘seek the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”
Our ideas, causes, experiences can all be good… “they can be lenses through which we see important aspects of the being of God. The problem arises when we forget the vast difference between our view of God and the reality of God, when we equate the picture in the lens with the whole of divine truth.”
“Any god who fits the contours of me will never really transcend me, never really be God.” (D. McCullough p. 38)
So how is it that we can know God?
> Left to our own we may craft trivial gods but as Donald McCullough says, God doesn’t leave us on our own, “The Lion of Judah jumps over our carefully constructed walls of certainty and rubs whiskers across our startled ears.” In fear we jump back and realize our arrogance…we are filled with a holy fear… but then we hear the words, ‘Come near…and touch me.’”
II. Experiencing Christ as the revelation of God, which both confronts us in our separation from God and unites us with God.
“The paradox…is that the very moment God puts us in our place becomes the moment in which God meets us in that place; the Lion who frightens says, ‘Touch me”; the separation becomes a profound uniting.” (D. McCullough)
Many of us may have a tendency to think of God in general as distant and holy …but not Jesus. We often think of Jesus only in terms of how intimately he has come to relate to us. But he was sent from the God of Israel, the God who said through Hosea, “I am the God o no mortal, the holy one in your midst.” He was born through the power of the Holy Spirit. The angelic messenger said to Mary, “The child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God.” Began his ministry…demon powers manifest, with screams of “Let us alone…you are the Holy One of God.”
The demons fell at his feet…but so did the humble crying out for mercy… and in response came the mercy and touch of God.
He has come into our world as the Holy One who confronts us… even as he confronted the arrogance of the self-centered religious leaders of Israel…. But also to embrace the humble who call out for mercy.
So is there a holy God and a loving / merciful Christ? No - God is One…reigning around us and incarnate among us, God is holy and merciful. In Christ such mercy is simply fully manifest in such a way that we can once again be united with God.
How are we to relate to a holy God who has created a meeting place in His mercy?
Luke 12:4-5
"I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.”
Acts 9:31 (Msg)
“All over the country…the church grew. They were permeated with a deep sense of reverence for God. The Holy Spirit was with them, strengthening them. They prospered wonderfully.”
Philip. 2:12 (NIV)
Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed--not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence--continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,..”
Hebrews 12:28 (NLT)
“Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be destroyed, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe.”
> The mercy of God never removed the holiness of God; part of God’s holiness…part of the holy distinction… is that God is merciful beyond anything we as humans can fully grasp. And such mercy should only fill us with even greater awe and reverence.
As such, rediscovering a holy fear of God involves…
III. Learning to love with holy fear.
Difficult to reconcile love and fear… Difficult for some of us to emotionally engage the idea of fearing God because we can only think of fear in terms of the fear of another who seeks to do us harm… fear of those who are angry and uncontrolled.
> We fear what is bad… and must learn to fear what is good.
Consider what nature itself offers us …
The ocean has always drawn me… as a kid I would go every day and sit over the water…I loved the ocean… my soul found peace and perspective… but I knew that ocean spread out to cover seven tenths of the earth… I feared it’s vastness in comparison to myself … I had been tossed around enough completely at it’s mercy to fear it’s power in comparison to myself.
> I am drawn to the ocean as a source of deep pleasure, perspective, and peace… not merely in spite of it’s power that transcends me, but because of it.
The same lies in the mountains… fire…. We are drawn… but those who are the most intimate are the most respectful.
> So it is with God. I invite you to shake free of the sense that you are the subject at the center of this encounter… and God merely the object to be considered. Let us come as the objects of His mercy… and worship Him with reverence and awe.
