I am to speak tonight on the Holiness
of God, and I want to read some
passages.
Exodus 15, Who is like unto thee, O
Lord, among the gods?
Who is like unto thee, glorious in holiness?
Job 15, Behold, he putteth no trust in
his saints, yea, the heavens are not clean
in his sight.
Job 25, Behold even to the moon, and
it shineth not, yea, the stars are not
pure in his sight.
How much less man that is a worm,
and the son of man which is a
worm.
Psalm 22, Of thou art holy, O thou
that inhabitest the praises of Israel.
Proverbs 9, 10, The fear of the Lord
is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge
of the holy is understanding.
Isaiah 6, 3, One cried unto another and
said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of
hosts, and the whole earth is full of
his glory.
They say that when Leonardo da Vinci painted
his famous Last Supper, that he had little
difficulty with any of it except the faces.
Then he painted the faces in without too
much trouble, except one.
He did not feel himself worthy to paint
the face of Jesus.
He held off and kept holding off, unwilling
to approach it, but knowing he must.
And then in the impulsive carelessness of despair,
he just painted it quickly and let it
go.
There's no use, he said, I can't paint
it.
In speaking on the holiness of God, I
feel very much the same way.
This last week, I rather suffered through this,
and wondered why today and tonight I was
able to get around it all.
But I think that same sense of despair
is on my heart.
There isn't any use for anybody to try.
If it's an orator, he can play his
oratorical harp, but it sounds tinny and unreal,
and when he's through, you've listened to music
that you haven't seen, God.
I suppose that the hardest thing about God
to comprehend is his infinitude.
I know that intellectually that's the hardest thing
to grasp, but you can talk about the
infinitude of God and not feel yourself a
worm.
But when you talk about the holiness of
God, you have not only the problem of
an intellectual grasp, but you have a sense
of personal vileness which is almost too much
to bear.
Now, the reason for this is that we
are fallen beings.
We are fallen spiritually, morally, mentally, and physically.
We are fallen in all the ways that
men can fall, being what they are.
And we are all, and each of us,
born into a tainted world.
We're born into a tainted world.
And we learn impurity from our cradles.
We nurse it in with our mother's milk,
we breathe it in the very air.
Our education deepens it, and our experience confirms
it.
Evil impurities everywhere.
And everything is dirty.
Even our whitest white is dingy gray.
And our noblest heroes are soiled heroes, all
of them.
So we learn to excuse and to overlook,
and not to expect too much.
We don't expect all truth from our teachers,
and we don't expect all faithfulness from our
politicians, and we quickly forgive them when they
lie to us and vote for them again.
And we don't expect honesty from the merchants,
and we don't expect complete trustworthiness from anybody.
And we manage to get along in the
world only by passing laws to protect ourselves
from not only the criminal element, but from
the best people there are, who might in
the moment of temptation take advantage of us.
So fallen man, being born in this kind
of world, living here, breathing it in, it
gets into his pores, it gets into his
lungs, into his nerves, into his cells, until
he has lost the ability to conceive of
the holy.
But I would speak of the holiness of
God, or of the holy, or of the
holy one, and we cannot comprehend this, and
we certainly cannot define it, because holiness means
purity, but that isn't enough.
Purity merely means that it's unmixed, there's nothing
else in it.
But that isn't enough.
We talk of moral excellency, but that is
inadequate, for we say to be morally excellent
is to excel somebody else in moral character.
But about whom are we speaking?
When we say that God is morally excellent,
he excels somebody.
Who is it that he excels?
The angels, the seraphim, I suppose, but that
isn't still enough.
We mean rectitude, we mean honor, we mean
truth and righteousness, and we mean all of
these uncreated and eternal.
God is not now any holier than he
ever was, for he, being unchanging and unchangeable,
can never become holier than he is, and
he never was holier than he is, and
he'll never be any holier than now.
And it means self-existent, for he did
not get his holiness from anyone, nor from
anywhere.
He did not go off into some vast,
infinitely distant realm and there absorb his holiness,
but he is himself the holiness.
He is the holy.
He is the all-holy.
He is the holy one.
He is holiness itself, beyond the power of
thought to grasp or of word to express,
beyond the power of all praise.
Now, language can't express the holy, so God
resorts to association and suggestion.
He cannot say it outright, because he would
have to use words that we don't know
the meaning of.
And we would then, of course, take the
words he used and translate them downward into
our terms.
If he were to use a word describing
his own holiness, we could not understand that
word as he uttered it.
He would have to translate it down into
our unholiness.
If he were to tell us how white
he is, we would translate it into terms
of dingy gray.
So God cannot tell us by language.
So I say he uses association and suggestion
by showing how it affects the unholy.
Moses at the burning bush, there before the
holy fiery presence, knelt down, took his shoes
from off his feet, hid his face, for
he was afraid to look upon God.
Then here is this 19th chapter of Exodus
later, where Moses, the Lord said unto him,
Lo, I come unto thee in a thick
cloud, that the people may hear when I
speak with thee, and believe thee forever.
And the Lord said to Moses, Go unto
the people and sanctify them and let them
wash their clothes, and be ready against the
third day.
For the third day the Lord will come
down in the sight of the people, and
thou shalt set bounds unto the people, round
about saying, Take heed to yourselves, that ye
go not up into the mount, or touch
the border of it.
Whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put
to death.
There shall not a hand touch it, but
he shall surely be stoned or shot through.
For there will be a beast of man
that shall not live.
When the trumpet soundeth long, they shall come
up to the mount.
Moses went down, sanctified the people.
You see, he did the best he could.
He went down and tried to whiten up
a little their dingy gray.
And it came to pass on the third
day in the morning that there were thunders
and lightnings and a thick cloud upon the
mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding
loud, so that all the people trembled.
Moses brought forth the people out of the
camp to meet with God, and they stood
at the nether part of the mount.
Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because
the Lord descended upon it in fire, and
the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of
a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.
And the voice of the trumpet soundeth long
and marcheth louder and louder, Moses answered God
speaking.
God answered him by voice, and the Lord
came down upon Mount Sinai on the top
of the mount.
And the Lord called Moses up to the
top of the mount, and Moses went up,
and the Lord said unto Moses, Go down,
charge the people, lest they break through unto
the Lord's gaze, and many of them perish.
Now, there was an effort on the part
of God.
All this trumpet, the sound of the trumpet,
and the voice of words, and the fire
and the smoke and the shaking of the
mount, it was an effort for God to
say by suggestion and association what he couldn't
say in words.
Now, there are two words for holy.
There are more than two, but there are
particularly two words for holy in the Hebrew
Bible, and one word is used almost exclusively
of God the Holy One.
Rarely used ever of anything or person except
God the Holy One.
In that passage in Proverbs 9.10, the
knowledge of the holy that I read in
your hearing, where it says, The fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and
the knowledge of the holy is understanding.
This intrigued me.
In fact, the book that I'm going to
write on the attributes of God devotionally considered
is to be called The Knowledge of the
Holy.
Well, I have been greatly fascinated by this,
that it should occur in our Bible that
this word, that we should have it in
the abstract, the holy, rather than the holy
one.
And yet, the Jewish Bible says, The knowledge
of the holy one, and in 33 of
Proverbs, that is, 33, where it uses also
the knowledge of the holy, it says, The
knowledge of the holy one, or the all
-holy.
And though the King James translators called this
the knowledge of the holy, they used exactly
the same word more than forty times and
translated it the holy one, the holy one
of Israel.
So obviously this is God, and yet there
is a vagueness enough about it that the
translators felt free to put this into an
abstraction, to make it abstract and call it
the holy.
Now, there's another word, and that's not used
of God very often.
I think it is not his high word.
It is used of created things often.
It is something that, so to speak, is
holy by contact or association with this other
holy.
That is, we hear of the holy ground,
and when it says this is holy ground,
or holy sabbath, or holy city, or holy
habitation, or holy people, or holy works, or
holy arm, it's not the same awesome, awful
word that he uses when he says the
holy, or the holy one.
Now, in the New Testament, and I have
not read from the New Testament tonight, but
in the New Testament we have a word,
of course, the Greek word, and we talk
there about God being holy, be ye holy
for I am holy, and I notice one
thing about that Greek word.
It is that a definition of it is
awful thing.
Now, think of that.
Take and set that word thing in capital
letters, the awful thing.
That's one meaning of the word holy, the
holy one.
Now, let's talk a little about the holy
one and his creatures.