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God’s Holiness
I’m working the one-two punch of writing the devotional and helping pastor Daniel with this week’s sermon on Isaiah 6 and came across an interesting tidbit from RC Sproul in his book The Holiness of God. He’s writing about how, in Hebrew, magnitude is often conveyed with repetition. A Hebrew writer says something twice and you know they really mean it. So in Isaiah, when the seraphim call out, ‘Holy, Holy Holy is the Lord Almighty,’ you know they mean holiest of all holy holiness. Sproul says this:
Only once in sacred Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree… 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, the whole earth is full of His glory.
I find this really challenging and at the same time really encouraging. More than being thankful for God’s love or fearful of God’s wrath, we ought to be dumbstruck by God’s holiness. I’d be interested to know what kinds of thoughts this stirs up in you. What does this say about left vs. right Christians? What does mean to you as you live your daily life?
About Michael Morgan
I love this! God’s holiness is amazing and too often I am focused on other attributes of God that are amazing, but often forget about how Grand and Fabulous God’s holiness is! Thanks for the quotes and I always love reading about what is to come Sunday in the sermon. The website along with the devotionals prepare me for the feast that I always get on a Sunday morning! Looking forward to learning more about God’s holiness on sunday! Thanks for all you and everyone on staff does at Sojourn! You all are anointed and we are all the blessed for it!
This is interesting. The encouragement to emphasize God’s holiness over God’s love or God’s wrath seems to contradict the Doctrine of Unity.
I’ve been working my way through Grudem’s Systematic Theology with some other ladies here at Sojourn and in his chapter on God’s Incommunicable acctributes, Grudem talks about how the doctrine of Unity means that God is no more one of His attribute than another – rather He is always, equally all of his attributes. (He concedes that some of His actions more clearly display one of His attributes rather than another, but that in fact, all of His attributes are in some way displayed in His every action.)
I don’t think Sproul was saying that God being ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ means that he’s more holy than love or wrath, only that his holiness is uniquely deserving of praise. His holiness is the one attribute I cannot aspire to emulate. I can seek to be loving, I can hate sin, etc. But I can’t be holy. I can’t be other than a man – I have to be a man. My highest call to praise God is found in God’s highest exceeding of my created ability.
Also, I kind of see God’s Holiness as encompassing all aspects of God’s character in a way that to praise his Holiness is to praise all of his attributes. His holiness informs his love by setting his love apart from human love, likewise with wrath, justice, etc. So I praise God’s holiness and I’m praising the quality that helps define all his other qualities as being better, more full, more perfect that I can imagine.
Leaving the classification of God’s attributes aside (that’s probably a discussion better had in person), I have to disagree with your statement that “His holiness is the one attribute I cannot aspire to emulate”. It seems pretty clear scripturally that we *are* called to emulate this – ‘As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”‘ (1 Peter 1:14-16 )
It is one thing to strive to be holy and another thing altogether to actually BE holy. The scripture calls us to live life in such a way as to always be making the journey towards holiness, but at the same time we recognize that we will never on this side of the grave be able to stand before God and declare, “I am holy.”
It seems to me that God likes to sum things up in one easy-to-remember statement. When the Pharisees asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was, he said to love God and to love others. All the law and prophets hang on these two commands. So, I think if we were to ask God, “Who are you?” He might answer something like, “I am holy. Everything about me is encompassed in my holiness.” God could not be as loving as He is nor justified in his wrath without His holiness. So if love and wrath are in the word “holy” then to fully understand who God is, we must only remember that He is holy.