The Holiness Of God

Turn with me in your Bibles this morning.

It's the book of Isaiah, the sixth chapter of Isaiah.

Isaiah, chapter 6, hallelujah.

Isaiah 6 · chapter mention

In the year that King Uzziah died, i saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple.

Above him stood the seraphim, each had six wings.

With two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.

And one called to another and said repeat it with me now Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory.

And the foundations of the threshold shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.

And I said woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar, and he touched my mouth and said behold, this has touched your lips.

Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying Whom shall I send and who will go for us?

Then I said Heneini, here am I, send me.

Father, i am trembling as I stand here this morning.

My inadequate sweet is to properly convey to your people this trait of your nature which makes you separate from every being in the universe.

But I pray somehow, through my meager words and the power of the Holy Spirit you make known to us as a people, you reveal yourself in our midst this morning as the thrice Holy God, the Holy One of Israel, the God of the whole earth, and I pray that that holiness would be a fearful thing and a wonderful thing, changing our view of you.

And let the weight, the full weight of your holiness rest upon us this morning.

I ask it in Jesus' name.

And everyone said Amen.

I'm sure many of you have read CS Lewis's famous Narnia Chronicle The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe, which is about four children, peter, susan, lucy and Edmund who enter a mystical world called Narnia through a wardrobe in their uncle's home.

Edmund immediately pledges his allegiance to the wicked witch, while the other three children make their way to the home of the beavers a hospitable pair, mr and Mrs Beaver.

And while they're having refreshments at Mr and Mrs Beaver's house.

The beavers tell the children that they will take them to see the king Aslan.

And the conversation goes like this, as Lewis wrote it, quote is he a man, asked Lucy.

Aslan a man, said Mr Beaver sternly.

Certainly not.

I tell you, he is the king of the wood and the son of the great emperor beyond the sea.

Don't you know who is the king of the beast?

Aslan is a lion.

The lion, the great lion.

Oh, said Susan, i thought he was a man.

Is he quite safe?

I should rather feel nervous about meeting a lion.

That you will dearie and make no mistake, said Mrs Beaver.

If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking they're either braver than most or else just silly.

Then he isn't safe, said Lucy.

Safe, said Mr Beaver.

Don't you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you?

Who said anything about safe?

Of course he isn't safe, but he's good.

He's the king.

I tell you Close quote Those words of Mr Beaver.

I want them to ring in your ears as we turn to this text this morning.

Safe don't you hear what I'm saying?

Who said anything about safe?

Of course he's not safe, but he's good.

I think the modern Western church has opted for a safe God instead of the unsafe God of the Bible, passages like it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God seem archaic to many in the Western church.

If you're here for the first time to this morning or maybe you haven't been here for a few months we are engaged in a series entitled A God Worth Knowing, and we have one passion in this series We are ransacking our Bibles to come to terms with the God that we have come to know through Jesus Christ, who is the Lord that we have come to believe in since we have exercised our faith in the Lord Jesus.

And we have seen in the previous messages that God uses two things to school us or bring us to the knowledge of God.

One theology, that is, the Bible, is a book about God.

If you're looking for anything else in the Bible, you may be disappointed, because the Bible is primarily a book about God.

The second thing we learned that God uses is providence The providential way He super intends all of our histories and guides us through our experiences to the intimate knowledge of God.

Providence is not only His super intending of events that are good, but all the affairs of our life.

We are taught that God directs our steps so that through our experiences, with our knowledge of God from Scripture, we might come to know Him intimately and personally.

And one of the greatest aspects of providence that God often uses, whether you like to admit it or not, is crisis Crisis.

One wisely once said that crisis is the seedbed of revelation, and I'd like to amen that statement.

I was thinking about this in the life of Abraham.

Consider Abraham, the father of us all.

If you read his story in the early chapters of Genesis, you discover that God is constantly bringing Abraham to a crisis point which he cannot get out of or beyond until he receives a greater revelation of God.

For example, remember God said you'd have a son.

Well, abraham was a patient man.

He waited until he was about 86, and then he figured it out.

God needs help.

And so he, along with his wife, produced an ishmael, the child of Hagar, the slave woman.

And when he's 99, god shows up and says I'll bless Ishmael because he comes from you.

But that's not the deal, That's not the promise.

I am going to give you a son.

And while he's talking, you can only imagine 99 years old.

His wife, sarah, is 90.

Her womb is way past the time of fruit bearing And God says I am God, almighty El Shaddai, and I will give you a son when you're nearly 100 years old.

Now, in the chapter we read this morning, isaiah, the golden-tongued orator of Israel, is having a crisis.

On one level, it was a national crisis the death of one of the best kings Judah ever had.

In the history of Judah, uzziah the king was one of the bright spots in their history And he came on the scene after a very devastating experience nationally because his father, amaziah, had been king and he was a godly king.

But Amaziah, uzziah's dad, in his latter days, turned from God and turned to false gods and died with dishonor.

And his son, uzziah, was 16 years old when he took the throne of Judah And by the two, under the tutelage of a godly priest named Zachariah, who, we are told, taught him and mentored him in the fear of God, uzziah, as a young man, began to seek the God of his father And we are told in 2 Chronicles 26 that as long as he sought the God of his father, god made him prosper, and prosper he did.

In fact, under Uzziah, judah almost reached its zenith, not realized since the dynasty of King David.

He built up the military of Judah so that Judah was stronger than it ever had been.

He actually created machines of war and he made Judah strong and impregnable.

And now Judah was now able to successfully resist its enemies.

But sadly, at the strongest point of Uzziah's kingship, we are told, his heart became proud and lifted up.

And Uzziah looked at the temple one day and said you know, i'm king.

I should be able to go into the holiest of all or holy place and offer the incense of the priest.

There's nothing that should bar me.

And he burst into the temple and began to offer incense while 60 or 80 priests began to plead with him.

Uzziah, this does not pertain to you.

Get out of here.

You're impeding on the office of priesthood.

Uzziah refused to leave And even while the censor was in his hand, the Bible says the leprosy came up on his forehead and he was driven out of the temple as a leopard And sadly, he lived as a leper all the rest of his days in a separate house, because lepers had to be separated from the rest of Israel, and then he died, which was a national tragedy for the nation.

There were many questions now that had to be answered political questions.

Who would replace him?

Was Judah now susceptible to war?

Would foreign armies take advantage of the death of this monarch And would they now invade Judah And would she be susceptible to invasions?

But more than political crisis, it helps to know that for this prophet, isaiah, it was a personal tragedy and crisis.

You see, uzziah was Isaiah's nephew and they grew up together.

In fact, we know that Isaiah was a counselor to the king, having ready access to the court of the king of Judah, and you can only imagine how Isaiah had such high hopes for Judah under King Uzziah.

You can imagine, when he was struck with leprosy, how Isaiah would have prayed day and night for God to heal this king and restore him to the throne.

Yet Uzziah dies and both Isaiah and his nation are devastated by his death.

But, as is often the case, here's where theology meets reality.

This can be the seedbed for new revelation And while Isaiah is mourning the loss of one king, god gives him a vision of the true king.

And in fact, isaiah actually receives three visions in chapter 6.

They have been called by other authors the upward vision, the inward vision and the outward vision.

The upward vision is God giving Isaiah a vision of the king of glory, the thrice holy one, and Isaiah now glimpses who is really on the throne.

There is a king who died.

God takes Isaiah to the true cause of all that happens in the universe, the king of glory, and shows him he's fine, sitting on the throne governing all the affairs of the human race.

But that vision of God that Isaiah has leads him to an inward vision.

And I will tell you that the upward vision of the person of God will always lead men and women, when they have it, to an inward vision, a vision of their true condition before the holy one of Israel.

And what Isaiah sees, when he sees God in his utter holiness, is Isaiah realizes who he really is as a fallen human being.

Then the thing that is his strength and it's helpful to know that in Judah's history the Jewish people regard Isaiah, he is called the golden-tongued orator of the prophetic period.

Nobody spoke like Isaiah.

If you read his book in Hebrew, it has the highest literary value.

This man is educated, he's brilliant, he's an orator, and yet when he sees the holy one, the thing that is his strength, his lips, he cries out I am ruined, i am a man of unclean lips.

And this picture of his personal depravity leads to now a picture of glorious cleansing.

God commands one of the seraphs to take a coal drenched in blood and apply it to Isaiah's lips, and God says this has atoned for your sins.

By the way, it's not Isaiah doing something to be atoned for, it's God taking the initiative and atoning for Isaiah's sin, which is exactly what the gospel is.

And that upward vision that leads to an inward vision begets an outward vision.

Isaiah is so broken by his vision of God he overhears a heavenly conversation.

He isn't directly called, like other prophets.

God doesn't now call to Isaiah, isaiah, isaiah as he calls to Jeremiah or Ezekiel.

But now he is so broken by the awful revelation of God's holiness and his utter sinfulness and cleansing that he's now in the proper position to hear God's voice saying who will go for us And notice the plural.

We talked about the Trinity last week Who will go for us and whom shall we send?

Now, for the remaining moments of this message this morning, come with me to the upward vision, because if we are not properly viewing this, the rest of the two visions make no sense.

One of the reasons in the church today the level of conviction of sin is at such a paltry level, folks is simply we do not know God in his utter holiness, and everything we would agree together needs to be corrected in the church, i am convinced has its origins in having a proper view of God, and this is the premier vision in the Old Testament.

It sets forth an aspect of God we desperately need.

First of all, isaiah has shown the throne, and I don't want to stay here, but I just want to remind you of something I said earlier Whenever the picture of God and we see this in Revelation 4, we have it here in Isaiah 6, and there are other portions of Scripture Whenever we see, listen to it.

In the year King Uzziah died, when there was crisis in the country and I was in personal crisis, i saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up.

This is a picture of God in His awful sovereignty I'm using awful positively this morning.

He is the sovereign Lord of the universe.

Isaiah had been caught up in various causes political causes, political manipulations, military strategies.

God says I'm sitting on the throne, high and lifted up.

If you would, isaiah is taken to the ultimate cause.

Listen to AW Pink define God's sovereignty, his throne rulership.

Overall.

It's a great definition.

It is, quote the exercise of His supremacy.

Infinitely elevated above the highest creature, he is the most high Lord of heaven and earth, subject to none, influenced by none, absolutely independent.

God does as He pleases, only as He pleases, always as He pleases.

So often you and I have a problem, and it's this We deal all the time with second and third causes What He did to me, what She said to me, what's happening at my work?

I'm mad at my employer.

I don't like this.

I don't like that.

We're always dealing with causes.

God takes Isaiah to the throne and shows him the ultimate cause.

It's the same thing God does with John at the beginning of the revelation, and those of you who know Revelation, i've taught it here years ago that John has this throne vision, just like Isaiah.

In chapters four and five And the word throne I think it appears 17 times in two chapters God's trying to give a message to John And it's critical that John receive it because from here on out in Revelation bad stuff is happening And John is being told something.

Listen to this message.

You need it this morning.

You see, john and the churches were tempted to think God's not on the throne.

If God was on the throne, this wouldn't be happening And most of Revelation was written to prepare a suffering church for more suffering.

And John is shown a throne and he's told by God.

This is what is reality, john.

It's not what's happening.

These things are happening to the church not because I'm not reigning.

They are happening because I am Lord And I rule in my sovereignty over all the earth.

John, now Isaiah now sees at the throne seraphim, heavenly creatures around the throne The only place they appear in Isaiah in the scriptures is in the book of Isaiah these angelic beings of glory that have six wings.

These creatures are sinless.

They hover around the throne of God, yet even though they are sinless, they are still creatures And therefore, john, isaiah has shown that with two of the wings, they have to hide their eyes.

No one can look upon God and live.

Even their feet are covered by two of their wings.

Why are their feet covered?

The feet speak of creatureliness.

Remember when Moses, at the burning bush God, says take your shoes off, you're on holy ground.

These creatures are sinless, yet they still have to cover their feet because they're reminded in the presence of the Holy One.

They are creatures, they are of earth And with two wings they hover around the throne, speaking of the book of Ezekiel, where the throne creatures revolve around it.

And then Isaiah overhears this magnificent song that I want to abide at for a few minutes.

In the remainder of this message It's been called the thrice holy.

One song, the three times holy.

Listen to this.

These creatures that hover around the throne of God.

They do nothing, day and night, but say holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of His glory.

Now I don't want to be in any way disrespectful, but you could read this and think subtly.

God is an egomaniac.

Think about that.

He created creatures and their only function is to hover around the throne of God and remind God constantly of how holy He is.

You could come away, if you didn't understand this, with the impression that God is a egomaniac.

He has to be constantly reminded.

In fact, i don't know if you know this, but that's what kept CS Lewis from becoming a Christian fora long time.

He himself, in his biography, said that when he read the book of Psalms he was offended because it seems that God is an egomaniac and needs to be constantly praised.

In fact, lewis said God reminded him of a vain woman constantly seeking compliments until he got it.

And I wonder if you get it?

Why does God have creatures, for that matter?

why has God created worship For us?

why are we called to worship God and remind him of His greatness?

Is God insecure?

Is He hung up?

And this is what Lewis said, opened his eyes to realize the truth.

He said wait a minute.

If God is God, then He must promote the highest good.

If you understand that, raise your hand.

How many know?

if God is God, he must stand for and promote the highest good.

Do you agree with that?

Yes, it's a true statement.

But I have a second question church, what's the highest good?

It's God.

So for God to promote the highest good, he has to be hung up on Himself, because there's no higher good than God.

So God is an insecure.

He's good and He promotes the highest good.

And since the highest good is Himself, he calls people and creatures that He's created to worship Him.

But there is a reason in the text that God is worshiped by these creatures, by terms of the thrice holy designation.

These beings that are the closest beings to the throne of God do nothing day and night, but say holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of His glory.

Question why do they repeat it three times?

Is it a misprint?

Is God hard of hearing?

Actually, it's a hebraic form of literature.

It is repeated three times simply for the sake of emphasis.

You see, if we write something and we want to emphasize it, we have things like exclamation points, you can bold it, and when you read it in bold or exclamation, you know this is important.

But the Hebrews didn't have those advantages that we do.

So they had a technique for emphasis.

They would double something or triple something at some cases.

For instance, jesus used the double emphasis.

How many remember he would say often something like this Truly, truly, i say to you okay, the first, truly, we were fine, god, you have to double it.

What he's saying is listen up, this is really important, truly, truly.

And so you have times in Scripture where something's doubled.

But when something is tripled, what do you suspect?

Do you think it's important?

In fact, in Revelation, right before one of the judgments, john sees eagles flying through the midair and the eagles repeat whoa, whoa, whoa to the inhabitants of the earth.

I don't know what's going to follow, but I have a feeling it's really bad because it's a triple whoa.

Well, here we have the only time in Scripture when an attribute of God is tripled Holy, holy, holy.

We know God is love, but we have no instance in Scripture where God is called love, love, love.

We know he's merciful, but nowhere in Scripture is mercy repeated three times mercy, mercy, mercy.

But when it comes to the holiness of God, it is so important an attribute of God, it is tripled by the seraphim because it is the essence of who God really is.

Now, when we hear the word holy, the majority of us in this room think of purity.

And you are right to do so, because inherent in the idea of holy is purity.

But purity is only a secondary meaning of holiness.

It is not the essence.

And when you think of holy, if you think of not smoking, not drinking, not cursing, you are right, that's an aspect of holiness, but it's not its essence.

You will never grasp the holy one if you think of holiness first and foremost as purity, instead of thinking of purity as an outcome of what holiness is.

When the seraphim cry holy, holy, holy, they're not crying purity, purity, purity.

They're alluding to something even higher.

The word holy, in its essence, comes from a Hebrew word which simply means to separate, like when I get my paycheck at the end of the week, i put some to KUB and some to my mortgage and some to my insurance, and then there's something left for my pocket not much these days and it's increasingly shrinking, but it's mine.

I've separated it out, it's really mine, it's all mine, but this is mine and I can put it in my wallet and spend it on stupid stuff.

When we refer to God as holy, before we think of purity, we should think of the reality that God is separate from everything else.

He is, in a word, to put it in the modern vernacular, he is in a class of His own.

In fact, one author says the technical term is simply He is transcendently separate.

I have a term that I'll use this morning that you've probably heard, but it fits this as a T.

You know, when you think of basketball players, there's a lot of good ones.

When you think of Michael Jordan, what do you think of?

One of the good ones, along with many?

No, in a class of His own.

Maybe that's debatable, but I think He is.

When you think of the voles, they're in a class of their own.

It's sad that I got more responsive to you that than I did about God's holiness, but we won't go there.

The way to say this and I'm not unique in saying it this way is that God is other.

He is other.

He's not just like people, but a little bit better.

So we come to Him.

No, although He's treated that way by the church, the God whom is being worshiped in Isaiah 6 is being worshiped by the thrice repeated term holy.

Because, brothers and sisters, when it comes to separation, this is it.

There is no one more separate and higher than God.

In fact, there was a man in the 20th century, rudolph Otto, who did a scientific study of the holy, and it was an amazing study.

What he did is study different cultures to see how they react to the concept of something being holy or separate.

Every culture has it, And what he noticed about all these cultures is that they all struggle and have a difficult time defining the holy.

They can't get their hands on it.

It's an intangible, and Otto ended up giving it a term.

He called it the Mysterium Tremendum, the awful mystery, he said.

In every culture, whatever they deify is considered holy and it's mystery.

It can't be defied.

It defies description.

But he said there's one common trait all cultures have.

He said the overriding emotion that people have when they're in the presence of the holy is fear and a sense of their own creatureliness.

Whether it's Moses in the presence of God at the burning, bush, or John when he sees the exalted Lord Jesus at the beginning of the revelation, the reaction is always the same Get down on the ground, i'm in the presence of the other.

I like to say it this way When I'm in the presence of the absolute, the one who is I am, i immediately realize I'm not, and that's good.

Now it becomes evident, or it should be evident this morning, how important this aspect of God is and how important and vital it is for the church to have it restored.

We must recapture once again in the church of God the otherness of God, so that we separate Him in our minds and our hearts from everything on earth.

There is way too much flippancy in the church when it comes to our attitude towards God.

He's not your big buddy, he's the awesome, awful, holy, separate God who has become your Father in Jesus Christ.

But church, he has never changed.

He is other and the church must treat Him as other.

Now you might say, well, he's our Father.

Yes, and Jesus taught us to pray.

Our Father, who art in heaven.

Hallowed be your name.

Notice that the moment we call Him Father, it is followed by the petition hallowed be your name, which means Lord, make your name holy, sanctify it.

So one of the priorities that Jesus gave the church in its service to God is to know that He's Father, but not lose that sense that He is separate, other different to be feared while He is loved.

I think the writer of Hebrews sums it up best.

Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

That is a New Testament grace verse.

One of the words in the text this morning time will not allow me to teach on it is the Hebrew word Chabad or glory.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of His Chabad, his glory.

You know what that Hebrew word really means Weight, or weightiness, heaviness.

When you talk about God's glory, you're getting heavy, man.

You're talking about heaviness.

It suggests that wherever God is present, there is a weightiness that can be felt And that weightiness is meant to affect us.

If you take a rock, if you take a heavy stone or rock and throw it in a pool of water, the rock, because of its weight, affects the water and ripples go out.

You cannot throw a rock in water without expecting the water to be affected, because it is being affected on by something weightier.

And when God, the awesome, awful, god of holiness, abides in His glory in the midst of His people as well as in all the earth, that weightiness is meant to affect us.

That's why we become holy.

That's why we become purified, because the one who is holy is purified or separate from all impurities.

And that's how we become holy.

But it's not by trying to be pure in our own strength.

It is by being affected by the holiness of God.

When creatures come into the presence of the holy, the weight of His glory is meant to affect us.

Personally, i hope this doesn't offend you, but I am suspicious of people who constantly talk about being touched by God and who never change, who get up off the floor and are as selfish, ungodly as they've ever been and said but I was touched.

If you are touched by God, you will be changed.

And what we discover and we will be parked in this chapter again.

Next week we'll go to the second and third vision.

What we discover and I want you to take this with you now, because we're now going to segue into our closing communion service but what we discover is the upward vision produces an inward vision.

Holiness is traumatic.

This encountering God in His holiness will never be the same.