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THE HOLINESS OF GOD #7
UNPOLLUTED BY PRISON TALK
In some rough, despairing neighborhoods, it’s nothing
but “F-words” all day and all night. And God is there, listening. As men
die on the battlefield — cries and curses. And God hears it all. How is
the holiness of God not compromised by all the obscenity and pain He witnesses?
If there’s ever a Voice of Prophecy day when it isn’t hard to find current
illustrations, this Tuesday has got to be that day. Because what we want
to think about is this question: How many bad things does God know? Is
He aware of cruel thoughts, obscene words, racial hatred, sexual degradation,
mean-spirited books? Even though He dwells in heaven above, does He know
the gutter words of the streets here below? And if so, how can that still
be holiness?
Back in late October of 2001, an 18-year-old kid named Jason Anthony Hoffman
was in prison for the crime of taking a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun and
shooting five fellow students at Granite Hills High School in El Cajon,
California. Prison officials had put him in a padded suicide-watch cell,
but a doctor had cleared him to go back to regular incarceration. Bad
mistake — because the Monday before he was to be sentenced, he hanged
himself with strips of bedsheet looped around the grillwork on an air
vent.
And he left a note. Just one page, but it was filled with profanity .
. . a sad, despairing, X-rated farewell to a cruel world.
Did God read that note? As Jason penned those explicit expressions of
anger, was the mind of God infected by the string of F-words? What does
it do to the holiness of God when He hears us curse and swear and talk
dirty? How does He continue to be, as A. W. Tozer put it, “absolutely
holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity”?
A recent radio news bulletin described the continuing legal battles that
wage around the world over child pornography on the Internet. Law enforcement
often takes the legal tack of prosecuting distributors of kiddie porn
because the rights of underage children are violated. But now, in today’s
digital world, evil men and women are able to concoct absolutely lifelike
child pornography where no humans at all are involved. There’s nothing
but anonymous pixels on your screen. So who is there to arrest? And yet
— on multiplied hundreds of thousands of web sites — these destructive
pictures are there in fleshly color. Does a holy God see them? Of course.
Does He weep? Of course. Does He despair? Certainly. Does He continue
to be holy and pure? Yes . . . but we don’t see how that can be.
Here in our world, if a missionary goes into a bar and hears coarse, vulgar
language, it leaves a stain. A dedicated Christian takes a job counseling
troubled teenagers. Day after day, these kids pour our their anger, their
jealousy, their lurid fantasies. She hears every imaginable kind of gutter
remark. Do those words creep into her mind? Yes, they do. A Christian
prays to remain pure in this fallen world, and yet the mud of Lucifer’s
playground sticks to the pale white stockings of our virtue. How can we
have the experience of God, being holy on a planet that is decidedly and
vehemently unholy?
One thing that should be patently obvious is this: holiness doesn’t consist
in having never heard an F-word, or seeing a seductive image. God has
those experiences every day He rules and watches over this world, and
so do His emissaries here. Your guardian angel sees and hears all sorts
of base, sinful things . . . and yet is a holy, heavenly being.
We found a helpful quote on this very point, and it’s by John Brown, the
great 19th-century Scottish theologian. Notice:
“Holiness does not consist,” he writes, “in mystic
speculations, enthusiastic fervors of uncommanded austerities; it consists
in thinking as God thinks and willing as God wills.”
What do you think of that? And you know, immediately
I think of the life of Jesus Christ. For the first thirty years of His
life, He had a very common family life there in Nazareth. His childhood
chums swore and told dirty jokes; no doubt they would have sneaked a smoke
behind the barn if tobacco had been invented. And yet Christ, their everyday
playmate, is described in the Bible, Luke 1:35, as “that holy thing.”
And during Jesus’ three-and-a-half years of ministry, don’t forget that
He lived — day and night — with 12 men. Most of them were fishermen .
. . need I say more? Did it take time for the salt to work its way out
of their vocabularies? I have no doubt that they said, “Uh, excuse me,
Jesus,” many, many times as a curse word slipped out. Peter, you remembered,
denied Jesus three times, “calling down curses on himself, and [swearing]
to them, ‘I don’t know this man you’re talking about.’”
Anglican writer and philosopher Evelyn Underhill captured the street-smart
holiness of Jesus when she wrote:
“There is nothing high-minded about Christian holiness.
It is most at home in the slum, the street, the hospital ward.”
And just as the Great Physician waded into homes and
hospitals where leprosy germs were everywhere, He unhesitatingly went
into the bars and brothels and the elementary school playgrounds where
children told dirty jokes . . . and he continued to be holy. He had a
kind of “Immanuel Immunity” to the germs of sin. On the cross, He was
assaulted by every vile word in Hebrew, Greek and all the languages of
the then-known world . . . and He continued to be a holy sacrifice for
you and me.
Speaking of Scottish theologian John Brown, an Internet search took us
to the book, Loving God, by Chuck Colson, which contains the above quote
about holiness “[consisting] of thinking as God thinks and willing as
God wills.” Ironically, the chapter we found it in has this title: “The
Everyday Business of Holiness,” and Colson takes us through several powerful
but common vignettes, where people just like you and me walk the mean
streets and work in real workplaces and go to ballgames and hear real
vocabularies being expressed. And this gifted writer concludes each section
with a summary: Holiness is obeying God — loving one another as He loved
us. Holiness is obeying God — even when it’s against our own interests.
Holiness is obeying God — sharing His love, even when it is inconvenient.
And Holiness is obeying God — finding ways to help those in need.
That sounds like Mother Teresa, doesn’t it? She once had this to say:
“Holiness consists in doing the will of God with a smile.”
These Mother Teresa-type stories, however, make it
clear that it isn’t just Mother Teresa who is called to do this. Friend,
God invites you and me to do it too — be holy men and women in a sin-stained
world. To hear F-words, but have a mind so filled with GOD’S Word that
the profanity slips past, and we continue to love the profane person.
To go into the red-light district, not as a consumer, but as a witness
. . . seeing half-clad girls, not as playthings, but as lost daughters
of Eve, needing agape love and rescue. Jesus had a hooker bathe his feet
and hair in perfume, and, man that He was, He loved her with redemption
instead of lust.
This doesn’t mean that a Christian shouldn’t be careful. Or wise as serpents.
The eyes are still the avenue to the soul, and no believer should go out
of their way to be needlessly on dangerous territory. Philippians 4:8
is the laundry list of protection for the believer: “Whatever is true,
whatever is noble, whatever is right” . . . and so on. So you don’t go
into the bar or the nightclub unless you know FOR SURE that you are there
on a mission for God, that God actually has some person waiting there
for you and not just the bartender.
I think it’s also true that Philippians 4:8 isn’t just a negative “hedge-blueprint”
but a positive “castle-blueprint” as well. If our minds are filled weekly
and daily and hourly with the positive, powerful truths of God’s eternal
kingdom, then the cheap profanities in our neighborhood will seem much
more lightweight. The Teflon of God’s truth can be our shield just as
it was for Jesus.
The Bible almost describes God’s followers as having a coat of Teflon,
actually. Notice this wardrobe counsel from Colossians 3:
“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, HOLY and dearly loved, clothe yourselves
with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”
Can the Christian down in the trenches be protected by a coat of compassion?
Sure. Sealed by a cape of kindness? A heavenly hat of humility? Yes. When
you really care about your fellow man – I mean, caring for him the way
Jesus on the cross cared for those soldiers – the X-rated words they use
are not going to have the same staining effect.
Here’s what it boils down to . . . and we couldn’t find a better expression
of it than this challenge by Leonard Ravenhill, author of Why Revival
Tarries. Listen to this:
“The greatest miracle that God can perform today is to take an unholy
man out of an unholy world, and make that man holy and put him back into
that unholy world and keep him holy in it.”
Isn’t that a fantastic challenge? “In the world, but
not of the world.” And of course, Jesus Himself prayed this marvelously
powerful prayer for His disciples:
“Holy Father, protect them [while they’re still in
the world] by the power of Your name.”
A guy named Paul said it just about the same way, and
he writes this note, by the way, from prison, where a “Shawshank vocabulary”
was certainly the order of the day. Here’s Philippians 2:15, 16:
“Everything you do should be blameless, innocent and
above reproach.” In other words, holy. “You are God’s children living
in a corrupt world. You are lights in the darkness, like stars lighting
up the night sky as you hold out the Word of Life.”
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