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THE HOLINESS OF GOD #1
LONGING FOR HOLY MAIL AGAIN
Would you want to live in a completely holy environment?
Oh, no, you say — that sounds intimidating. But imagine: no terrorism,
no anthrax in the mail, no death, no sickness, no danger. All of a sudden,
we look wistfully in the direction of such a holy haven.
All of a sudden, it seemed, what was once the most harmless act in the
world was no longer safe. You couldn’t take a letter out of a mailbox,
eagerly rip it open, and read the message it contained. No, first you
had to look for white powder. You had to worry whether some faceless enemy
was sending a tiny piece of bioterrorism into your life by way of Bacillus
anthracis: anthrax germs. Tom Brokaw’s office got such a letter. Senate
Majority leader Tom Daschle got one. So did Microsoft. Bob Stevens of
Florida was already dead. All over America, the risk of what the experts
nicknamed “bugs and gas” — meaning germ and chemical warfare — was terribly
real.
David Gates, a writer for Newsweek, described the United States’ new “stress
points,” and here was one of them:
“The late-dawning certainty that some people in the
world hate you enough to die themselves if that’s what it takes to kill
you.”
Just a few weeks after the September 11 attack, and
at the very height of the anthrax scare, a letter just like that arrived
here at the Voice of Prophecy. It was from a foreign country, and as soon
as one of our Bible workers opened it — white powder. Well, that was a
heart-stopping moment. Were deadly germs or spores already invading her
mortal body? Should she have worn one of those head-to-toe yellow suits
we’ve all seen on television . . . for the simple act of opening up the
mail? Buy a $200 protective device from GasMaskExpress.com? Throw out,
unread, any letter that comes in piled high with too much postage – which
experts suggested could come from a terrorist who wants to make sure the
poisonous letter doesn’t come back to him?
Well, in our case, the appropriate parties dialed 911 and disinfected
themselves, and carefully bagged up the letter as Exhibit A, and took
it to the nearest police station. The verdict: a harmless seed a well-meaning
Christian had put in this envelope had burst open, causing the powdery
residue. As they say, no harm, no foul. But friend, it’s a sobering reality
that, more than ever, we live in a world that is fatally stained. Planes
don’t always stay in their paths and neither do germs and neither do the
hearts of man.
Our topic this week is THE HOLINESS OF GOD. We would all agree that this
is an awesome topic . . . but “awesome” can always be taken two ways,
can’t it? Is it good news that God is holy?
“Consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am the Lord your God,” Jehovah
thundered down to Israel in the book of Leviticus.
Were the stumbling, fumbling 12 tribes of Israel comforted
by that announcement? We sing in church on Sabbath or Sunday morning —
and church, by the way, is supposed to be a holy place too:
“Holy, holy, holy. Angels adore Thee. Holy though darkness
hide Thee. Though the eye of man Thy great glory may not see.”
Are we cheered by the thought that God is so holy,
so pure, so Almighty, that to see Him would be instantaneous suicide?
The Bible, and Christian students, talk about heaven being a holy place.
Believers being holy. Our hands being holy. Our feet. Our hearts. Our
attitudes. The Christian Church. The things God makes. The DAY God makes,
meaning the Sabbath. But the essence of holiness, the bottom line, is
God Himself. The Bible teaches us that HE is holy.
We have a kind of hallmark statement to begin our time of radio study,
found, appropriately enough, in the marvelous Christian book, The Knowledge
of the Holy, by A. W. Tozer. It has 23 chapters, all of them powerful
descriptions of the character and nature of God, but toward the end, he
goes to this topic: “The Holiness of God.” And here’s what he suggests
for us to think and pray about:
“Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform
to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite,
incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than
it is. Because He is holy, His attributes are holy; that is, whatever
we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.”
I suppose that here in this sin-sick world, where we
can’t even open an envelope anymore because of the unholiness of man,
we tend to decide something is holy by comparing it to other things. The
church we attend is holy because we compare it to Disneyland or to a bar
or a gambling casino. A deacon is holy if we compare him to a terrorist
or a habitual thief. God’s Word is holy because it’s more noble and pure
than the latest cheap thriller you buy at the airport. Valid or invalid
as those comparisons might be, friend, we simply cannot and must not do
that when we think of God. God isn’t holy just because He is better and
less stained than you and me; He is holy because He IS God . . . and God
is the standard of holiness. He’s the yardstick; we hold everything in
the universe up to Him; we don’t hold Him up to anything. Is that safe
to say?
And this is a very challenging suggestion by Tozer. God is infinitely
holy. You and I, on the best of days, may have traces of holiness, to
the extent that God is in us. But infinite holiness? Holiness beyond measure?
This is what God has and what God is. Tozer is right in calling that “incomprehensible.”
It’s almost hard to think about what “fullness of purity” could be. All
around us are just shadows; our best thoughts, our holiest impulses, barely
register on God’s scale, but our heavenly Father is completely pure .
. . meaning not just that there is no sin, no stain, no Bacillus anthracis,
but that every thought of His, every deed, every action, every plan, is
POSITIVELY pure as well.
It would not be enough to say that every letter God sends us doesn’t have
germs in it. The letter itself would express pure and lofty holiness;
every line, every statement would be highest nobleness.
And think about this as well: every attribute of God’s is just as holy.
He is mighty in a holy way . . . and we have all learned to dread might
and ingenuity that is depraved. His omniscience is holy — and we will
want to think together about how a God who knows everything, who is aware
of all terrorist plots, all pornographic horrors on our worldwide web,
all dark thoughts of wicked people everywhere can still be, not only unpolluted,
but having that fullness of purity. How can that be? But all of God’s
character traits are not reaching up to the high bar, they ARE the high
bar. Isn’t that incredible?
And then Tozer finishes by quietly reminding us that all things that belong
to the Lord must be considered holy as well. His kingdom is holy. His
Church. We’ll prayerfully consider that concept more as well, but over
in First Corinthians 3, Paul shares this warning:
“If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy
him; for God’s temple is sacred, and YOU ARE THAT TEMPLE.”
Meaning the people of God, the believers, the global
church.
Well, friend, it’s a lot to get our minds around, but let’s finish with
this thought. It’s incredibly good news that God is so holy. Are you ready
to agree with that?
If not, let me ask you to consider this. Would you wish to go back — or
forward, or sideways, or whatever — to a time when you could open your
mail without fear? Or get on a plane without having to see armed soldiers
standing by the x-ray machines? Or stand on the observation tower of a
tall and glorious building and not fear that one of Osama bin Laden’s
lieutenants was steering a plane directly at you? Wouldn’t it be Paradise
to live in a total freedom from fear?
Of course it would. In that Newsweek essay by David Gates, here was the
title: “Living a New Normal.” And most of the world yearns to have back
the old normalcy, even as sin-stained and scary as IT was. The threats
and dangers of pre-September 11 life look like Paradise to us now, but
just imagine what it would be like to have God’s holiness — that “fullness
of purity” — as being everything we have and are.
If we truly understood holiness as it exists in God, and as it permeates
His universe . . . friend, we would want it. We’d be utter fools to be
afraid of it, or to shrink from it, or to want to put off living in it.
We would embrace it with everything we have, and pursue it with everything
we are. Jerry L. Walls once commented:
“In our age, as in every age, people are longing for
happiness, not realizing that what they are looking for is holiness.”
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