Holy Ground

I was moved to teach on the doxology and the benedictions, first of all, because of what they mean to me in my own devotional life. I turned to them in my own private meditations for refocus, for worship, for self-examination, for building up a faith. And then, as a result of that, I've been looking for opportunities to teach them to our church, because I believe they aid the people of God in looking up and seeing the greatness of God in these succinct statements of blessing and or doxology that are memorable and meaningful. We take them for granted, but they are there for our blessing and benefit.

Wishing and praise by H. B. Charles Jr. Visit Ligonier.org slash teaching series to learn more. When Moses approached the burning bush, God declared that it was holy ground. Was there something in the composition of the soil there in the Midianite wilderness that was different from any other plat of real estate in this world?

Nothing intrinsically that could be found in the dirt. What made that ground holy was the presence of God. Moses had passed a threshold from the secular to the sacred, from the common to the uncommon, from the profane to the holy. The natural earth was touched by God's supernatural presence. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind on this Friday.

I'm Lee Webb. The story of Moses and the burning bush is our focus today as Dr. R.C. Sproul helps us discover the character of God through this divine yet mysterious encounter. In this session, we're going to continue our study of the implications that we draw from the narrative history of Moses' encounter with God at the burning bush in the Midianite wilderness. We've seen already that this was not only a watershed moment in Moses' life, but a watershed moment for the whole of human history.

And in this session, I want to look more carefully at a small portion of the text beginning in verse 3 of chapter 3. After Moses had seen the burning bush, the bush that was burning and was not consumed, we read, Then Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn. And so when the Lord saw that He turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here I am. And then God said, Do not draw near this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.

Moreover, he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God. Let me begin by referring to the work of the French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose perhaps most famous work was the play that he wrote entitled, No Exit. And in that play, the last act ended with a group of people sitting in a room with outdoors, and they were gazing at each other, reducing each other to objects, and beneath this stare that these people were experiencing, Sartre said in conclusion to the play, Hell is other people. And of course, in the whole of his work, in the body of work of philosophy and drama, he as an atheist continued to say that not only is there no exit for people from hellishness, but that is because there is no access to God. There is no access to the sacred. There is no access to transcendent reality. Human beings, whom he described as useless passions, and for whom his final description of our human condition was found in the word nausea, he said that's because we are chained, we are trapped in the here and now, in the secular, and there is no escape from the trap.

There is no door. There is no window by which we can reach anything of eternal significance. In the 20th century, the two greatest sociologists of religion in the world were Heinrich Cramer and Mircea Eliade. And Eliade responded to this description of the human predicament by saying that yes indeed, human beings are in a profane state, which in fact in our fallen condition we choose, not because there is no access to the holy, no way in which we can encounter that which is sacred, but rather we choose an existence that is profane. And I think if you're aware of your culture at all, you can see that profanity that marks our culture in every medium is a profanity that continues to escalate one year after another. Our speech of profanity is merely an expression of our sense of living in the realm of the profane. But Eliade went on to say that as much as we seek to live in profanity, as much as we choose the profane over the sacred, human life simply cannot live in total profanity. Because for Eliade and his study of all the cultures of the world, there is ultimately not no access to God, not no exit from profanity, but rather there is no escape from the sacred, because everywhere we go the sacred intrudes upon us. In Isaiah chapter 6, when he was having his vision on the occasion of his call to be a prophet, we recall the song of the angels in the presence of God in which they sang, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts.

And what else did this song contain? For the whole earth is full of His glory. So do you see the antithesis, you see the collision between the radical secularism of people like Jean-Paul Sartre and the teaching of the Scripture? The teaching of the Scripture is not that the holy and the sacred is in some hidden realm, some esoteric sphere where only the most brilliant elite thinkers can penetrate to find a slight glimpse of the holy. On the contrary, the whole earth is filled with the glory of God. So why then do we have this sense of the profane?

Well Calvin answered that question this way. He said, the whole of creation is a glorious theater, screaming as it were, manifesting so clearly the holiness of God. But we are blind to it. But that blindness is a willful blindness. We are like human beings walking in this glorious theater wearing blindfolds, blindfolds that we have put on our own eyes, lest we see the holy and the sacred because there is nothing more terrifying to sinful creatures than to be exposed to the holy.

And that's what we see here in this story. Moses sees the bush that's burning and is not consumed, and we are told in the narrative that he turns aside to look at it. And as he turns aside looking in the direction of that bush, he's not satisfied to observe it from a distance. He begins to walk towards the bush. He begins to approach it. And as he's approaching it, suddenly the voice comes out of the bush calling to him by name saying, Moses, Moses, stop right there. Don't come any closer.

Don't draw near. Instead, take your shoes off. Take the sandals from off your feet because the ground whereon you are standing is holy ground.

Let's ask a couple of questions about that. What made it holy ground? Was there something in the composition of the soil there in the Midianite wilderness that was different from any other plat of real estate in this world? Was there anything particularly consecrated or sacred about the dirt under his feet?

Nothing intrinsically that could be found in the dirt. What made that ground holy was the presence of God. Anything that God touches receives as it were an injection, a radiation from His own transcendent majesty. What makes that ground holy and different from any other ordinary piece of land was that it was here, that there was an intersection. It was here that there was a divine visitation.

It was here that the natural earth was touched by the supernatural presence. What we see here is a concept of what we call a threshold, a threshold that marks a spot that marks a place of transition, a border as it were between the natural and the supernatural. And that border was crossed when Moses came near, and God said, that far no further, Moses. Every Sunday morning we publish a bullet in the earth, St. Andrews, and on the front of the bulletin we have these words, we cross the threshold of the secular to the sacred, from the common to the uncommon, from the profane to the holy.

Now I have to admit that I wrote that, and I did it for a reason. I wanted people to understand that when they come into the church on Sunday morning, that they're coming into a place that is different from a movie theater, a civic meeting hall, from any other place that they visit in this world, that as soon as they open the door and walk in, they've made a transition. They've crossed a threshold. They're entering into holy space because this is holy ground. The very architecture of our church was designed to communicate that idea to people that when they come in this building, they're crossing a threshold, that this is not a place that experiences the triumph of the secular. A lot has been said about secularism and secularization, and all that means that the term secular originally in the ancient world meant this world in terms of this particular time. And secularism teaches this, that there is the here, there is the now, and that's all there is.

There is no heaven. There is no realm of the eternal, no realm of the transcendent. And secularism means a commitment that you only go around once and that this world is all there is.

There is no more. But when we walk in that door, we step across the threshold from the secular and in to the realm of the sacred, and that which is sacred is that which is different. That which is sacred is that which has been set apart, and it's set apart divinely by God. The sacred space is where God steps and where God acts and where God moves. And we come here on the Sabbath day because God calls us to be here. He says, this is the place where I will meet with my people on Sunday morning. That's why the New Testament tells us never to neglect the assembling together of the saints because we need it as human beings every week to visit holy ground. To get away from the secular, step across the border into the sacred. It's a place where we move from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the common to the uncommon, from the profane to the holy. So, what we experience in our lives here is exactly what Moses experienced there in the wilderness and in the desert.

He came near. He stepped across the threshold, and God spoke to him and stopped him and said, that far, no further, Moses, take off your shoes. This is holy ground. Remember, in the book of Genesis, the story of the experience that Jacob had at Bethel. I'll read a quick recapitulation of it, where he went to sleep on his journey, and he had this dream and this vision of a ladder going up to heaven and the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And in this dream, he said, and behold, the Lord God stood above it. And God said, I am the Lord God of Abraham, your father and the God of Isaac, the same way in which God speaks to Moses later in Exodus.

And he promises the covenant promise to him. And then we read, Jacob awoke from his sleep, and he said, surely the Lord is in this place, and I know it not. He was here, right here. While I was sleeping with my head on a rock, God was here, and I missed it. I missed it. And then what did he say?

How awesome is this place, for this is the gateway to heaven. And he took that stone that he had used as a pillow, and he took out oil, and he poured the oil on the stone. What a strange thing. Why would he do something like that? He was consecrating his pillow. He was consecrating that piece of rock. He was making it sacred, marking it. He said, this is holy ground.

This is sacred space, because here the Lord God appeared to me in my dream. I read a story of a family that went on vacation to St. Louis. Don't ask me why anybody would go on vacation to St. Louis, but they did. And one of the things that they wanted to do was to visit the St. Louis Cathedral. And the story goes that before they entered into this church of Gothic architecture, the teenage girl was being somewhat silly and frivolous in the parking lot and making jokes about what they were doing on this trip, and then they went in the front door.

And as soon as they got into the sanctuary, the girl became completely silent. And the parents were watching her, and they couldn't get over the transformation that came over her countenance as she looked up at the vaulted ceilings and looked at the Gothic arches, saw the mosaic tiles depicting the history of redemption, and she was very tentative in taking steps. And she saw something across the room in the cathedral that she wanted to look more closely upon, and she turned to her parents and she said, is it okay for me to walk in here? See, she was overwhelmed by a sense of the presence of the holiness of God. That should be our experience every time we walk into a church because here we travel across the border. We make the transition. We cross over the threshold as Moses did.

And finally, in this narrative of Moses, we read that God said to him, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And here's the sentence I want you to ponder. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Just he wanted to look. He walked over to get closer. But when he realized where he was going, when he realized where he was standing, when he realized who was there, I can't look.

It was too much to take him. That's Dr. R.C. Sproul with a message from his series, Moses and the Burning Bush. And all week here on Renewing Your Mind, we have been learning more about the character of God through Moses' encounter there. God's majesty and power were on full display at that bush. And in this series, R.C.

explains the importance of God's appearance. You can receive all ten messages on two DVDs when you request Moses and the Burning Bush. Just give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. There are a couple of ways you can reach us to make your request. One is by phone at 800-435-4343.

But you can also go online to renewingyourmind.org. Throughout this series, R.C. reminds us of God's sovereignty over all of creation. And that means we can rest in the knowledge that He's in control of our circumstances, even in the trials and challenges we face in this life. So again, call us at 800-435-4343 to request Dr. Sproul's teaching series, Moses and the Burning Bush.

Or if you prefer, you can give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. We have the great privilege of sharing the life-changing truths of historic Christianity with you each day here on the program. And there are many ways you can listen, ways that you may not know about. You can listen for free on Ligonier's mobile app. You can subscribe to the podcast, and you can receive the program by email each day. Just go to renewingyourmind.org, and you'll see there on the homepage a section called Ways to Listen. Renewing Your Mind is a listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Thank you for joining us this week, and we hope to see you again beginning Monday.