Reformation is needed in almost every day. If Paul, within years of founding the Corinthian congregation, needs to see them reformed, we can't be surprised that churches need reforming regularly in the history of the church. Sometimes that reform is more in the nature of a revitalization, but I think people have, especially in America, been too content to be satisfied with entertainment and with shallowness, and we need a seriousness about God, about Christ, and about His Word, and I think to be drawn again to a passionate interest in the Word is going to take a major reformation of the church today.
My hope is that this series will serve the church by causing people to reflect on what the church ought to be according to the Word of God. It is our propensity to exchange the truth of God for a lie and begin to serve and worship the creature rather than the Creator. That's our natural inclination to affix our gaze to the things of this world and never acknowledge how the things of this world drive our attention beyond this world to the glory and to the majesty of its Creator. When I moved to Florida almost 12 years ago, I gained a new appreciation for the beauty of a sunset. I'm sure that you've had a similar experience, whether it was a sunset or the stars in a clear night sky. Or seeing the Grand Canyon, where you stop and you see the beauty, you see the wonder, and your heart is filled with gratitude for our Creator, who is altogether wonderful.
You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday, and I'm glad that you're with us. Creation points us to God. As the psalmist says, the heavens declare the glory of God. Unbelievers ignore it, suppressing the truth, but Christians, we too can sometimes get distracted and fail to see the glory of God. Here's R.C.
Sproul on the majesty of God that is revealed all around us in creation. Several years ago, I was in western Pennsylvania and was invited to speak at a college in the industrial basin there near Pittsburgh. And I had to take a bus from downtown Pittsburgh out to the campus where these events were being held. And it was a local, and it was one of these buses that went through all these depressed mill towns of western Pennsylvania. And this was a late fall day, and the bus itself was dirty and the windows were grimy, and it cast a pall of gloom as one looked out the windows on this gray November day. And as I was riding through each of these little mill towns where I saw store after store boarded up and clothes signs displayed outside, I had this overwhelming sense of depression. And I watched the people as they got on and got off of the bus along the route, and these people would get on with a stooped posture, their shoulders sort of hunched over, and you could just see lines of despair etched in their faces. And as I watched this in this somewhat melancholy mood that I was experiencing, I was wondering, is there any hope for these people?
Is there any hope for these towns? And I look at the outward facade, the buildings that are decaying, the streets in disrepair, and I think of all of the hopes that went into the building of these towns in the first place. And now we only see evidence of decay and of death and of hopelessness. And as I was in this contemplative mood, suddenly we passed by a little storefront that had been converted into a storefront church. And in simplistic language and a kind of crass neon, there was the cross in the window of the store. And I thought of that and I said, there is the universal symbol of hope. And so I became alert and I began to watch more closely, and I discovered that I couldn't go a single city block without somewhere seeing the sign of the cross. And as I observed that, I began to think, I thought, you know, as I'm sitting here worrying about hopelessness, even as I am thinking at this very second, somewhere in this world there's a group of people seated around a table eating bread and drinking from a cup in remembrance of Christ. And I began to realize that not a single second ticks on the clock, but that somewhere in the world people are celebrating the coming of Christ into the world and the triumph of Christ over darkness, over ugliness, over despair. And so for a brief second I had a vignette of insight to the glory of God, the glory of God that could not be hidden or concealed by this facade of decay and of death. And I thought about the sixth chapter of Isaiah, where when the angels sing in antiphonal response, celebrating the holiness of God, saying one to another, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. They add to that refrain these words, the whole earth is full of His glory.
Think about that. It doesn't just say that there are hidden clues concealed behind doors, hidden under rocks, veiled from our view of the glory of God, but that the world is filled with evidence of the glory of God. Recently I read a book written by perhaps America's most famous and most talented Jewish theologian, Abram Heschel, in which he talks about life in America in the 20th century. And he says the thing that characterizes us in the 20th century is our superficiality, that we have become a people who are satisfied with skimming over the surface of life. Interested only with images and impressions on television, not with deep and profound truth, but with sound bites that entertain us but don't delay us in any serious call to reflection. We're pragmatists.
We want to be practical. And in our busy practicality, we go through life blind to the very depths of the reality that is steering us in the face. The Apostle Paul in the first chapter of Romans describes the situation that is common to all mankind. Paul tells us in Romans 1 that from the very beginning of time, from the very beginning of creation, that God has revealed Himself and continues to reveal Himself through nature.
He says in there that the invisible things of God are clearly perceived through the things that are made, that they are made manifest by God, even God's eternal power and deity. But then he brings the whole of the world before the tribunal of God and assesses them in terms of a universal indictment because the most basic primordial sin of mankind. According to Paul, for which all of us are guilty and for which none of us has an excuse is that we hold this truth of revelation in a spirit of godlessness. We hold it down. We repress it. We bury it.
We incarcerate it. And so the Apostle says that the wrath of God is revealed against the whole world. And the reason why God is angry is because we repress and suppress the glory that He makes manifest even in nature itself. And he says that it is our propensity to exchange the truth of God for a lie and begin to serve and worship the creature rather than the Creator. That's our natural inclination, which is an inclination to idolatry, to affix our gaze to the things of this world and never acknowledge how the things of this world drive our attention beyond this world to the glory and to the majesty of its Creator.
The fundamental sin, according to the Apostle, is that we refuse to honor God as God, neither are we grateful. So what Paul is describing there is similar to what the psalmist says when he says, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows forth His handiwork. All of these things merely echo what the angels are declaring within heaven itself that the whole earth is filled with His glory.
If the earth is filled with the glory of God, we don't have to be rocket scientists to find it. We don't need a microscope in order to discern a glimpse of the majesty of God. The whole world, Calvin once said, is a glorious theater of the majesty of God, but we walk in that theater as men and women who are wearing blindfolds and we willfully put the blindfold on. We close our eyes and will not look at what's right in front of our faces, the manifest clarity of the majesty of God.
It's all around us. And like the Jewish theologian Heschel indicates that somehow we've become inoculated to it, inured to it, we've lost our capacity for amazement. We have trivialized the theater of divine glory and walk through it impervious to its wonder and to its awe. Now I want us to see here the contrast between our response to the manifestation of the glory of God and to what Isaiah describes takes place in his vision as he hears the seraphim crying, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.
The whole earth is full of his glory. The very next thing that he says in this text is extraordinary. He says, And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke. Now here Isaiah is peering into the heavenly temple, and as the voices are crying of the holiness of God, the doors of that inner temple of heaven themselves are suddenly shaken at their foundations and moved by the spectacle of divine glory.
I went into a maximum security prison several years ago with Lem Barney, who for many years was an all-pro defensive back for the Detroit Lions. We were both at the time on the board of directors of Prison Fellowship, and we went into the inside of this prison, and Lem stood up before hundreds of hardened men, tough men, and like a little boy, he began to sing a child's song, Others, Lord, yes, others, help us to live for them. I couldn't believe that this professional football player would have the humility to sing such a simple tune, and he began in his own way to speak to these men of the riches of Christ and of the glory of God. And in the middle of his address, he stopped and asked the men, he says, Does that turn you on? And there was no response, and he paused for a moment, and then he said, Gentlemen, if this doesn't turn you on, you don't have any switches, and everybody laughed.
And I thought, that's right. If we can't get excited about the glory of God, there's something wrong, something malfunctioning in our souls, because here in this text, when the glory of God is made plain and manifest, and His holiness is radiating through the sanctuary, the doors in the pillars of the temple are moved. Now, these things are inanimate objects. Doors do not have spirits. Doors do not have souls.
Doors do not have minds. But even these objects made of wood or of metal were moved by the presence of God. This comparison is one that the prophets make repeatedly, isn't it, that they say that we who refuse to be moved by the greatness of God don't have as much sense as animals.
The ox knows his crib and so on, and they talked about how the animals, the donkey, the horse and so on, they do by nature what God has willed them to do, and they have more sense to respond to their Creator in obedience than we do, because we miss it. A poll was taken a few years ago in the United States asking people who had stopped going to church why they stopped going to church. This was not a survey of people who had never gone to church. This was a survey conducted to make inquiry to those literally millions of people who at one time or another were involved in the life of the church and then became dropouts. And in this particular survey, the number one reason that people gave for stopping their attendance of church was that church was boring.
The second most frequent answer that was given to the survey was that they regarded church as irrelevant. When I read the pages of Scripture, particularly the pages of Old Testament, whenever an episode is communicated where people have that momentary glimpse of the unveiled glory of God, there is a wide variety of human responses that are recorded. Some people rejoice and they exclaim a sense of thrill and elation for having been present, having seen this manifestation of glory. Other people are stricken with a somber mood of silence and they stand paralyzed.
But the one reaction that is most common is a reaction of frozen fear. Shepherds on the plains outside of Bethlehem in the dead of night suddenly witness the most spectacular sound and light show that the world had ever seen when suddenly there is in the heavens a heavenly host and the glory of God shines round about. And the Scriptures say what?
And they were sore, afraid. That's the normal reaction to any visible manifestation of the glory of God. But however the reactions may differ among human beings to the holiness of God, one thing I never ever find in Scripture is someone who is bored in the presence of God or someone who walks away from an encounter with the living God and says, that was irrelevant. There is no encounter a human being could ever have that is more relevant to daily life than meeting up with the living God.
If people are bored in church on Sunday morning, what that tells me is that somehow the presence of God, the character of God, the God who really is, is not made manifest there. I had a woman come to me one day who was bitter and angry, and she was angry with her minister, and I said, what's the matter? She said, I'm so angry at my minister, and I said, why? She said, because I've come to the conviction that he systematically does everything in his power to conceal the character of God from us on Sunday morning. He's so afraid that someone might be offended, that someone would not like to hear that God is holy or that God is sovereign or that God is capable of wrath, that he never talks about that. He has disarmed God.
He has de-fanged him, taken away his claw and his tooth. He's taken away anything that might be fearful, and so that God now becomes innocuous, and we're bored to death. You were not created to be bored by the glory of God. You have to be spiritually dead to be bored by the glory of God, for God's glory fills the world.
When is the last time you noticed it? In our quorum day of thought for this day, I would like us to think about the question, how practical is pragmatism? How practical is it really to go through life being so concerned with the busyness of the moment that we never stop to penetrate the surface when we understand that just below the surface are a thousand points of light? Not political light, not social light, but the light of the radiance of the glory of God. There is nothing more practical, nothing that changes our practice more radically than coming face to face with the glory of a holy God.
The evidence of it is all around you. If you haven't seen it, perhaps you've been blindfolded, and it's time to take the blindfold off and to open your eyes to the glorious theater of the glory of God that's all around you. In an age of distraction, an age of busyness, we need reminders like this to stop and to consider the glory of God that fills the world.
That was R.C. Sproul on this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind from the extended edition of his classic teaching series, The Holiness of God. This series has had a profound impact on so many people. When I meet Renewing Your Mind listeners, this series or the book is what's typically mentioned as what the Lord used to help them grow in their understanding of who God is. And until tomorrow, with your donation of any amount, you can request the hardcover 25th anniversary edition of The Holiness of God. This is a wonderful addition to add to your bookshelf, even if you own a previous copy. Or with Christmas approaching, maybe you'll request a copy to give to someone as a gift. You'll also receive digital access to the extended edition of The Holiness of God series.
So visit renewingyourmind.org or call us at 800-435-4343. And remember, this is the 25th anniversary edition of The Holiness of God and digital access to the extended edition of the series. This week, R.C. Sproul has been teaching from Isaiah 6 and Isaiah's encounter with God. So how did Isaiah respond when he gazed into the inner chamber of heaven? That's what Dr. Sproul will teach on tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. .
