The Dreaded God: Encounter With the Holy
As I write this, I realize how undone I am writing about the holiness of God. My personal existence falls short in the way I live and in the way I think. Being created and called by the Holy One is nerve wracking and threatening. Its like standing too close to a burning fire and feel the heat and the danger of being burned. It reminds me why scripture says “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever!” (Ps. 111:10 ESV)
I also write knowing the folly of modern church and worship. In the past, church buildings were designed to heighten our understanding of the holy, the use of vertical spaces and stain glass and dark woods strikes us a place where we whisper in respect or maybe fear. The worshiper was encouraged by this environment to think about the holiness of God. Modern buildings are built more like movie theaters where we are entertained. Worship, particularly music, does nothing to express God’s holiness. We express joy but before we rejoice, we need to understand the threatening nature of God before we rejoice in the grace that brings us into his presence.
When I was a little boy, my sister went to a party. All the girls were dressed in their nice dresses, and they expressed their best behavior. When It was time for the girls to go home, I had to go with my mother to pick her up.
My normal attire was a pair of shorts and maybe a baseball cap and shoes. I was sort of a wild child, and I took my playing outside very seriously.
I had to go with my mother to pick up my sister. I felt utterly and completely ashamed. The girls were clean and were wearing their party dresses and I was in my shorts, no shoes and covered in dirt, I smelled like a wet dog. That moment still rolls around in my mind reminding me how out of place I am in certain life circumstances.
It dawns on me that when we stand before God, it is much like me at the party, completely out of place and totally undone by the presence of God. The difference is the presence of God is life threatening. If we are to understand our relationship with God, then we need to understand the holiness of God. We need to have the uncomfortable relationship with the Holy.
God is the Wholly Other. We are not like God. We are made in his image, but the image is marred beyond our recognition. We are fallen, sinful humans who are totally undone by the presence of God. Please notice the experience of Israel
7 Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain.
18 Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the LORD had descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly.
19 And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder.
20 The LORD came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain. And the LORD called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. (Exod. 19:17-20 ESV)
18 Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off
19 and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” (Exod. 20:18-19 ESV)
We cannot begin to understand God until we understand God as Holy. When we understand what holiness means, we will be like the people in Exodus 20 who experience the absolute terror of a holy God. Moses prepared the people to meet God at Mount Sinai. The preparation was according to the instructions of God himself. Yet, they feared that they might die. And they asked Moses that he would be the mediator between God and the people because they were in such fear in the presence of God’s holiness.
The Nature of a Holy God
Holiness is central to the core nature of God. The holiness of God cuts across all other attributes. Holiness is the expression of the essential nature of God’s being. While God first reveals to Moses himself as “I Am,” He next reveals Himself as “I Am Holy.” God declares that his name is holy. In the Bible, one’s name reflects the essential nature of the person. The word “Holy” becomes synonymous with Yahweh.
The word for holy in the Hebrew Bible is Qadesh. Often the word is said to indicate something that is separate or set apart. It is, but that is not an adequate definition. Holiness signifies the object of awe. In the case of God, it is the essence of his being and includes God’s transcendence, his perfection, his glory, his separation from man, his purity and righteousness. But it also includes his power, love and goodness.
God’s holiness is strange to us and unfamiliar. When we encounter the holy, it produces in us a sense of awe or dread (see Rudolf Otto). We are undone by the presence of holiness. The Bible often speaks about the “fear of the Lord” as a righteous attribute for God’s people. The prophet Isaiah, while in the temple, found himself in God’s presence. He cried, “Woe is me, for I am ruined. Because I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” (Isa 6) The physical presence of God brought great judgment on Isaiah. Isaiah felt a sense of dread because he was unclean, he was a sinner in the presence of God. God atoned him by touching his lips and making him holy before him. Only then did he feel that he could stand in God’s presence.
Isaiah was a believer. He followed and trusted God. Like Abraham, before him, he believed, and it was accorded to him as righteousness. Yet the presence of God caused an immediate crisis in the extreme. To worship God from a distance is one thing, but to be in his glorious presence is another thing all together. It is a deadly matter for those who are unprotected by God himself.
Rudolf Otto called holiness the “Mysterium Tremedum,” the tremendous mystery. He used words like awesome, terrible, overpowering energy, wholly other, a mystery, all to describe holiness. The experience of the holy is beyond our experience and understanding. Holiness engulfs us and causes great fear.
I think that human words fail us when we try to understand God as holy. Yet, He is our God and Creator. And by His hands all things are established. So, we must make the understanding of holiness central to our thinking, even with only a modicum of understanding and, if we are wise, a lot of fear.
Maybe the poet and hymn writers of the past have had more success than theologians in describing the nature of God. Robert Grant, the hymn writer, wrote the following verses in Oh, Worship The king:
Oh, worship the King, all glorious above.
Oh, gratefully sing his power and his love;
Our shield and defender, the Ancient of Days,
Pavilioned in splendor and girded with praise.
Oh, tell of his might; oh, sing of his grace,
Whose robe is the light, whose canopy space;
His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,
And dark is his path on the wings of the storm.
God is described using imagery from the Bible. He is the Ancient of Days. He controls nature and uses the storm like a chariot. God is clothed in light and his presence is like thunder and lightning. It is an awesome sight and experience.
God’s description of himself in Job 38-39 is humbling to Job, who only moments before decided he could complain and contend with God. As the wholly Other, He is holy, His holiness is expressed by His command and control of nature. And even the suffering of Job, as powerful and deep as it is, has no merit in God’s court.
I am sure that Paul’s language inspired the words of the hymn. “He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.” (1 Tim. 6:15-16 ESV)
In the Book of Revelation, God is described as sitting on the throne as light the color of emerald and red and He was surrounded by light. John heard the voice of God as peals of thunder that went out as commands to heaven and the world.
When we think about God, we need to see and understand that He is like no other. He is totally separate from all of creation. God is transcendent above all the universe. His being is frightening and causes fear in His presence because of our finite nature and because of our sin. And yet, we crave to know God’s holiness.
God Himself Protects us from His Holiness
God, in his grace, shields us from his holiness. We know God indirectly. People of old would hear from God through the Prophets or see God in his mighty acts. We know God through the Bible. Only rarely do we know God directly. Such an experience is uncomfortable at best, frightening and even deadly. The common theme of the Bible is “who can see the face of God and live?” Yet, God has made it possible for us to know Him through His Word and through the intimate presence of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is God in the flesh. The incarnation protected the disciples from his holiness. The disciple got a glimpse of his nature and glory on the Mount of Transfiguration. Jesus is our mediator between The Father and humanity. God is permanently with the believer by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit: In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, 14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. (Eph. 1:13-14 ESV)
We must remember that the Holy Spirit is fully God and has all the attributes of the Godhead. Many church practices forget the nature of the Holy Spirit in both their behavior and their claims.
Moses wanted to see the glory and the holiness of God. The text reveals so much about the nature of God. Even His goodness is dangerous to us:
18 Moses said, “Please show me your glory.”
19 And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.”
21 And the LORD said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock,
22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by.
23 Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen. (Exod. 33:18-23 ESV)
Called to be a Holy People
The holiness of God holds precise demands for his people. Everything reflects the holiness of God. The Tabernacle and later the Temple were arrayed to remind the People of God of his holiness. Central to the temple and tabernacle is the area called the Holy of Holies. It was the place where God met the High Priest on the Day of Atonement to cleanse the people of their sins. The continual presence of the Holy of Holies reminds both the priests and the people that God is the Holy Other, the one who cannot be approached without cleansing and preparation.
Those few people like Isaiah, Abraham, and Jeremiah, were completely undone and forever changed by God’s holiness. Yet, God expresses his grace to us by limiting his revelation of himself. In this life we are not prepared and equipped to be in the raw, unfettered presence of the Holy.
We also need to remember that God does not change. The God of the Old Testament is the same God we find in the New Testament. There are those who like to think that somehow God in the New Testament is milder that in the Old Testament. In the words of Dorothy Sayers regarding modern Christianity, “they have pared the claws of the Lion of Judah.” Yet what we think does not change the reality of God. He is still holy. The Second Person of the Trinity became flesh and blood so that he might get close to us. Flesh and blood covered His holiness. He was mistreated by those around him. We see holy restraint in God as he is beaten and marched to Golgotha and nailed to a cross. These things did not happen because Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity was any less holy or any less God. These things happened because God in His grace restrained His holiness, his anger and wrath, and directed them to himself for our sakes. God’s holiness was focused on our redemption.
We can never redeem ourselves. How can we please a holy God? What about us thinks that we are in some small way acceptable to God? Our arrogance is even more when we understand that the grace of God, the Love of God restrains him from our utter destruction. Rather, it is poured into our salvation. Our holy God took on our sin as our substitute so that we might be set free from death and destruction that is the consequence of our unholy state of being.
The Demand to Be Holy as God is Holy
God calls us to be His people. When God established the covenant with Israel, His command to them was to be holy. “For I am the LORD who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy. (Lev. 11:45 ESV). It was common for Israel to be called a holy people. The apostle Peter applied this command to the church, to those who follow Christ. “But as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1 Pet. 1:15-16 ESV) We who are redeemed are holy!
The command to be holy is overwhelming and it is something that we do not take seriously. Our contemporary practices are pasteurized and detuned so that God is turned into something meek and mild just like us. God is therapeutic. He makes us feel good about ourselves. We think that God is about our happy emotions. We feel excited about elements of worship that are emotion laden, but it is false worship if it causes us to forget the awe and fear as the overwhelming power of the Wholly Other brings us into his presence. No worship leader brings us into the presence of God. Those are just words used to manipulate our emotions. Our holy God is present, or He is not, but we cannot conjure Him up by our practices. He is our ever present holy God.
I wonder if today’s church is so impotent because we refuse to conform to the holiness of God? God withdraws from us when we refuse to be a holy people. When we read Isaiah, we find that God withdraws his Spirit from Israel because they refuse to repent and be holy as God commanded. In Ezekiel 5, God had reached his limit with Judah because of their arrogance and he became their enemy and withdrew from them. Their rejection of God by the people of God is a terrible thing. Over time, deliberately sinning against God’s holiness, demands judgement.
These are sobering thoughts. What does it mean to be holy as God is holy? Obviously, we are not like God. God is infinite in all his being, in all his attributes. We are very limited in our being. And when we read about Abraham, we understand that he was a righteous man, but he was not a perfect man. Holiness is not perfection. Perfection is something that comes to us when the age has ended and we are glorified, that is, we will be made perfect so that we will stand before the face of God.
Nonetheless, we are called to live in the world. The New Testament instructs us how to live an ethical and moral life. In fact, Paul has a section of how we are to treat each other in all of his writings, and it reflects the second table of the Law and how those who are loved by God should treat others.
The most holy object that we ever encounter besides God, is a fellow believer. Holiness requires us to be in the world but not of it. Holiness requires us to treat each other with love in the same way God has loved us. Our holy character must extend to how we treat the poorest in our society. The way we treat the least among us has very grave consequences:
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,
43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’
44 Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ (Matt. 25:41-44 ESV)
The frustrating question is, how do we live holy lives as we are commanded? The only way we can live this way is if we are enabled to do so. Paul announces a mysterious relationship between God and the believer, “To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Col. 1:27 ESV) In Galatians 2: 20, Paul describes his relationship with God, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” (Gal. 2:20 NAU)
In the eyes of God, the old man ceases to exist. We may not feel differently about ourselves, but to God our old person has died and we are new creatures in Christ, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ . . .” (2 Cor. 5:17-18 NAU) This is a matter of status before God, but it is also a matter of reality for the believer. We are the “Temple of the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit lives in us. Christ is in us.
Our capacity to live a holy life is not in our native ability but in the fact that our Holy God lives in us and causes us to live in Him. Our resource is God himself. The grace that God extended to Abraham and the Old Testament saints is the same grace that caused God to become flesh and live with us and die for us and rise from the grave, still abides with us in our everyday living. We live holy lives by being in communion with God daily and by resting in him. God equips us to live a holy life. He is at work in us making us a holy people.
We are called to humble ourselves before God and each other, no arrogance, no superior attitude, no belittling another who is redeemed of God. We love each other as Christ has loved us. He is our example and our goal.
(Revision of my 2018 article)
