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THE HOLINESS OF GOD #8

BAD NEWS EITHER WAY

Many an agnostic has concluded: If there's not a holy God out there, then this world is doomed. And if there IS a holy God out there, then, boy, we're REALLY doomed! Every day that passes, our rap sheet on His bulletin board just gets longer and longer.

In his inspiring book, Searching For a God to Love, Chris Blake begins each chapter with some "Quotable Quotes" on the topic he's chosen. And one kid in Sunday School doesn't seem to have a very well-formed theology about the deep things of heaven. In fact, he admits: "I don't know who God is. We're not up to that yet." That really should be the confession we all make — wouldn't you agree? Can we get an A on a test about God? No, we're not up to that. We can't explain or even digest and understand this thing called the holiness of God.

Another boy sitting in that same class, named Paul, has the same sense of inadequacy, because when he grows up to be an apostle, he writes in his letter to the Romans:

"Oh, the depth and richness of the unsearchable wisdom and knowledge of God! How far beyond our human understanding are His gracious decisions and His ways of carrying them out!" He goes on to quote the prophet Isaiah: "Who can explain the way God thinks? Or, who dares to advise Him how to do things?"

"How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!" says the King James Version. King David writes in the 36th Psalm:

"Thy judgments are a great deep."

Having said that, would we concede that we're also prone to some Monday-morning quarterbacking when it comes to the track record of God? No, we don't understand the plans and agendas of God, but that doesn't stop us from commenting about them and second-guessing Him. His judgments are unsearchable, Paul writes, but we do enjoy getting a flashlight and poking around in the caverns of His kingdom, trying to figure out why He does what He does. Now friend, that is not necessarily a futile thing to do — after all, God invites us to test Him and sit down and reason with Him. But what do we do when we come to the edge of our knowledge, and discover that there is more to God than we can fathom? What then? What do we do when world events spin out of control, and someone we love is destroyed in a terrorist attack . . . and we don't know why God let that happen? Do we begin to doubt His holiness then?

We've drawn from some of the writings of A. W. Tozer in this series, and also from C. S. Lewis, who went from atheism to Christianity over the course of several tumultuous years. Tumultuous in the sense that he often looked up scornfully at the sky, and said, "How can there possibly be a God . . . with all this mess going on?" But he poses a veritable Catch-22 for us to think about with regard to the so-called holiness of God.

"If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness," he writes, "then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless."

Back after the World Trade Center tragedy, Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheist, which is the largest organization in the United States "for nonbelievers," said to a reporter for the L.A. Times:

"If this wasn't a wake-up call to a religious nation, I don't know what is. That said to me, ‘There is no God.' Where was He, on a coffee break?"

Another atheist named Randi Mendelsohn lived right near the war zone, in Staten Island.

"Getting home and hearing the President recite the 23rd Psalm angered me," she asserted. "During the national day of prayer, what was I supposed to do? Is praying the answer? To what? Has it helped? Are we better now?"

And yes, we who still believe can understand those frustrations. Although we don't deny the existence of God, we join that kid in Sunday School in admitting, "I don't know who God is. I'm not up to that yet. I don't know why prayers didn't seem to work on 9-11-01."

But let's get back to that essay by C. S. Lewis. "If the universe isn't governed by an absolute goodness," he writes, "then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless." And you know, friend, with all due respect to these atheists and their sincerely held principles, let's point this out: What if there were no God and all this world could look forward to was more terrorism, more anthrax, more covert operations and buildings tumbling down and more mass funerals? If there isn't an "absolute goodness" out there named God, and with an address called heaven, then the Osama bin Ladens of the future are going to have their way forever. We could only meet their bombs with bombs of our own, tit for tat, "mutually assured destruction," you kill my wife, I'll kill yours. We mentioned last week that all of us, as we see the crookedness of recent events, feel in our hearts that there is a straight line somewhere, a moral compass that these headlines of late do not live up to. There is a GOOD out there someplace, and the 19 men who steered those planes into the buildings didn't live up to that good.

So here is the Catch-22 Lewis describes about the holiness of God.

"If the universe is NOT governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it IS, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

This is the great conundrum regarding the holiness of God, isn't it? If God isn't holy, then the universe is sunk. And if He IS holy, then we're sunk . . . because our daily lives are anything but holy, and each hour that passes, we're building up a longer and ever-longer list of ways where we are in arrears under the jurisprudence of that holiness. You know it, and I know it. Because our topic isn't just God's holiness, but OUR holiness which God's holiness demands. An unknown writer once suggested: "Holiness is living that pleases God" — and how well are we doing that? "Who can stand," the book of Revelation asks, "in the great day of God's wrath?"

According to the wisdom of some of the world's great religions, this dilemma of God's holiness would be devastating reality. Some faiths believe in karma, where all of your evil deeds must be balanced out and paid for through countless dreary lives. The mountain of our trespasses against the holiness of God just keeps growing, and the debt must be worked off the next time you pass through this lonely vale of tears . . . and the next time . . . and the next time . . . and for five billion more next times.

But friend, the message of the Christian faith is that, because of Calvary, God's holiness is a friendly force working in our behalf. I appreciate the small, extra nuance Pastor Jack Blanco added to his Clear Word paraphrase for Paul's statement in Romans 11:33:

"How far beyond our human understanding are [God's] GRACIOUS decisions and His ways of carrying them out."

We mentioned yesterday that divine holiness was not simply the kind of G-rated purity that comes from never encountering dirt. Friend, God has heard every nasty word in the universe, encountered every despicable desire, watched from the sidelines the fomenting of every rebellion. You and I didn't personally see Mohamed Atta get money from an ATM, pack his suitcase, write his goodbye suicide notes, hide his box-cutter knife, fly from Maine down to Boston and then transfer onto the plane bound for its fiery end. But God saw the entire thing develop and transpire, in painful slow motion. So His holiness isn't a lily-white ignorance.

Instead, it is expressed through passionate pursuit of the lost, through Calvary and an all-out effort to proclaim and ADVERTISE Calvary. And what that means is that this "holiness Catch-22" disappears. Because of the Cross, this holy God is no longer a supreme terror, no longer a Being we must hide from, no longer a heavenly Deity we have turned into an enemy through our sins.

We mentioned last week that it is hopeless and ridiculous — and oh so common — to try to fool God or hide from Him. Adam and Eve tried to hide behind a bush and then behind fig leaves . . . to no avail. We think we can keep things from God by simply not telling Him about them! But as another Sunday School dropout named Huckleberry Finn once admitted, when trying to do a snow job on God:

"Deep down in me, I knowed it was a lie, and HE knowed it. You can't pray a lie — I found that out."

And the beauty of God's Calvary holiness is that lying to Him is no longer necessary. He knows — and He loves. He is aware — and He forgives. He watches — and He embraces.

God has the kind of Calvary holiness that invites us home.