Encountering God

Have you encountered the God of Israel? The God who opens up the earth and swallows those who rebel against Moses? The God who sends a flood to inundate the whole world of rebellious people? The God who has the mountain at Sinai shaking and saying, don't you come near this?

If you touch this mountain, you will die? The past few months have certainly brought us many opportunities to fear, disease, political turmoil, social unrest. But as we read Scripture, we see there's nothing in the universe more terrifying, more threatening, than coming face to face with the holiness of God. That's not the way most people speak of God these days. The focus is usually on His love and mercy. But to comprehend His love and mercy, it's essential we recognize the trauma of God's holiness.

Here's Dr. R.C. Sproul. The Bible tells us that the glory of God fills the entire earth. And I don't know how many times I've read that in the Scripture, but every time I read about the glory of God filling the earth, I scratch my head a little bit and I say, when I look outside, I don't see a whole lot of the glory of God. I see traffic jams. I see bright lights.

I see people hustling to and fro, caught up in all of the activities of their daily lives. In fact, in my whole life, I can count probably on one hand, maybe two, the number of times that I've had an intense, heavy, profound sense of the presence of God. Now, I don't mean to suggest that any experience of the presence of God is that rare in my life. Every time I pray, every time I'm in church, just about I have some sense of the nearness of God.

But I'm talking about those special moments, those waiting moments when you feel the almost palpable sense of the presence of God, so overwhelming, so overbearing that you can't ignore it and you become intensely aware of His glory. And of course, one of the most intense moments like that that I've ever had was when I became a Christian the night I first met Christ, where I was alone in my college dormitory room and on my knees in front of my bed. And of course, that moment more than any other moment in my entire lifetime changed the direction of my life from then and thereafter.

But a year after my conversion, I had another experience which was almost as decisive in shaping the direction of my life, and I want to take a minute or two to tell you about that, when it happened in the same college, only this time it was a little bit different. I had gone to bed for the evening, but I couldn't get to sleep, and I tossed and I turned, and my mind wouldn't shut down, and finally I had this overwhelming sense that I had to get up out of bed and get out of that dormitory. And I looked at the clock and it was 10 minutes to 12, 10 minutes before midnight, I got out of the bed, I got into my clothes, and I went outside, it was a winter night up north, there was snow on the ground, full moon was in the sky, and it was one of those eerie, quiet, still nights that I just had to walk.

And I wasn't exactly sure where I was headed, but I wanted to be by myself, I wanted to think, I wanted to reflect on some things that had happened to me earlier that day, and so I started toward town and toward the extreme north end of the college campus where I went to school. And while I was walking along that sidewalk that night by myself, and it was unearthly quiet, it was so quiet that the main tower of the college had a bell tower and it rang chimes every hour on the hour. And just before the chimes would go off, the gears in the bell tower would start to shift and move and get ready to move these huge bells that would chime, and it was so quiet that night that even though I was still quite a distance from the tower, I could hear the gears in the tower.

And then all of a sudden, the tower started to climb 12. And while it was gonging, I walked around the front of the tower to the entrance of the college chapel, which had been built in the 19th century, and it was built out of stone. And the doors of the chapel were these very heavy oak arched doors, and I didn't know whether the chapel would be open or closed, locked up for the night, but I just pushed on the door and it opened. And I walked into the North X of this chapel, and when the door closed, you could just hear it clang against the wall, and the floor was stone, and I walked then into the sanctuary. Now I was in that chapel every day.

We would have chapel, required chapel, every morning. Fifteen hundred students would come into this big building with the stained glass windows and the vaulted ceilings and so on for our chapel, and it was all busy and noisy, and the students walking back and forth, whispering to each other and so on. But this time when I walked in the chapel, I was the only person there, and I walked down the center aisle of the sanctuary to the chancel stairs, and I got on my face, literally, in front of the communion table, and was overwhelmed by the presence of God. And my experience that night was not the same as my experience of my conversion to Christ, but what happened to me that night that I'll never get over was that I had this overwhelming experience of the presence of God the Father.

And we know that God is one in three, one being three persons, but most of our attention in the Christian world focuses on Jesus, on the incarnation of God, and we sometimes forget that the purpose why Jesus came here was to reveal to us and restore for us our relationship with the Father. Well, what drove me to the chapel that night was something that happened in the classroom during the day. I guess I said I was a sophomore in college, I had been a Christian for one year, and I had decided to be a Bible major because I wanted to give my life to Christian ministry, so I signed up to be a Bible major.

But in my sophomore year, I had to take a required course in Introduction to Philosophy, and I thought that philosophy was the driest, most boring subject that I'd ever heard of. In fact, I used to sit in the back of the lecture hall, and I hid Billy Graham's sermons underneath my notebook so that when the professor would start the lecture on this dry as dust stuff about philosophy, I entertained myself or enriched myself by reading these sermons from Billy Graham. And I did that every day and just ignored what was going on, and then this one particular day, the beginning of winter, the professor was lecturing on a Christian philosopher whose name was Augustine, and he was speaking about Augustine's view of how the universe had been created initially.

And virtually against my will, as I'm trying to read this sermon and the lecture is going on, my attention was drawn to what was being said in the front of the room, and so I put the notebook aside and I started to listen. And the professor started talking about what he described as Augustine's view of the divine imperative. Now, you know what an imperative is. It's a command.

It's an obligation, a requirement. And Augustine, when he was thinking about how all of this universe came into being in the first place and reflecting on the first chapter of Genesis where we read, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, Augustine said the only description that Scripture gives as to the how of creation is that it speaks about the power of God's Word. In the beginning, when the world was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep, the Scriptures say that what changed all of that was a command from the mouth of God where God said, Let there be, and instantly there was. The lights came on, the darkness receded, the planet, the world, the universe began to teem with all sorts of energy and power and life, all by the sheer power of a command from God. And I sat there in that classroom and I started to think about that and I said, What kind of being is so powerful, is so transcendent, is so much greater than anything that I could ever conceive of, that I've ever experienced in this world, can bring universes into being by speaking a single word. And I remember reading about Jesus in the New Testament where by the sound of his voice he could calm the sea and stop a storm or raise a man from the tomb by calling him out of the grave saying, Lazarus, come forth. The power that is unleashed when God speaks brings things out of nothing and life out of death.

And I said, That's the character of God the Father. Now, that wasn't the first time I had thought about that because the previous year, the time of my conversion, I was so turned upside down that I read the Bible through in two weeks. And not because I was diligent or disciplined, but it was like I was reading a page-turning novel. I'd never read it before, I'd never been exposed to it before, I was converted from paganism, and I picked up the first page of the Bible, and I read the first page, read the second page, and I just kept going, second, third page, read Genesis, Exodus, and the whole way through. But I can remember in that first two weeks of my Christian experience, walking up and down the halls of the dormitory at 3 o'clock in the morning, pacing like a caged lion because of what I had been reading in the Old Testament. Because even though I grew up in the United States of America and had frequent churches for social reasons and all the rest, I had never heard of this God that I was reading about in the Old Testament. Do you read the Old Testament much? Have you encountered the God of Israel? The God who opens up the earth and swallows those who rebel against Moses? The God who sends a flood to inundate the whole world of rebellious people? The God who has the mountain at Sinai shaking with thunder and lightning and saying, don't you come near this?

If you touch this mountain, you will die? I never heard about that God in the churches that I had frequented as a youngster. And so this was my virgin exposure to the God of Israel these first two weeks, and I was getting it all at once.

And so I would pace up and down like the caged lion. I said, wow, if I'm going to be a Christian, I've got to take this seriously because this God plays for keeps. Now, I didn't understand the concept that I was wrestling with at that time, but really what was blowing me away in my initial reading of the Old Testament, in listening to this lecture about Augustine's view of creation, was the holiness of God. It wasn't the love of God or the mercy of God, all of which are wonderful things dealing with His sweetness and His excellency, but it was His transcendent majesty that was coming across. And I was saying, wait a minute, I don't know what this is about. I don't understand it.

I've never encountered it, but this is who God is, and I want to know more about a God who is that majestic, who is that transcendent. My professor took me on a trip to Philadelphia to a seminary where there were a series of lectures, again in my sophomore year, that were very weighty philosophical things, and they were way over my head. I didn't know what was going on in these lectures, but I sat still and listened politely. And then after the morning series of lectures, we broke to the cafeteria for lunch. And I happened to be seated across the table from the head of the philosophy department of this particular institution.

And the first course of our lunch was soup. We all got our little bowls of soup, and I had my little bowl of soup in front of me, and this professor sitting across from me looked up and he said to me, Young man, would you say that God is transcendent or immanent? I literally spit the soup out of my mouth because I didn't know what the word transcendent meant, and I didn't know what the word immanent meant either. But what he was asking me was, is God transcendent in the sense that He is high above and beyond the normal sphere of human things that we encounter?

Or is God nearby, close at hand, something that we can get our arms around, being immanent? And he explained the difference between those two things to me and then pointed out to me that the biblical God is both transcendent and immanent. He is at the one hand above and beyond, everything creaturely, and yet in His exalted position He still visits His people.

He makes Himself present in terms of His Holy Spirit, in terms of Christ coming to pitch His tent among us, and in terms of intruding into our lives right here. And I thought about a passage in the Old Testament that I want to take a couple moments to direct your attention to, that took place in the book of Genesis in the life of Jacob. Jacob had left his family and was leaving on this journey to pursue a wife, and he was traveling in the middle of the desert, and we are told that at the end of the day when darkness fell, that's where he decided to camp.

They didn't have holiday ends on every corner, that you would travel as far as you could until nightfall, and after it became dark it was too dangerous to travel after that because of marauders and robbers and wild animals or so on. So wherever you were in the desert, just lie down and go to bed. So that's what Jacob did. He took a rock, and he used that as a pillow and went to sleep there in the middle of the desert. And then the Scriptures tell us that this deep sleep came upon him, and in his sleep, God gave him this vision of a ladder that stretched from the earth up to the heaven, and he saw angels ascending and descending on this ladder. And in the vision we read this, and behold, the Lord stood above this ladder, and he said, I am the Lord God of Abraham, your father, and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants, and also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west, to the east, to the north, to the south, and in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Now listen to what he says. God says to Jacob, behold, I am with you, and I will keep you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land, and I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you. I don't know about you, but there's lots of times in my life when I do not feel like God is with me. It just doesn't feel that way. It feels like he's far away.

Sometimes I think he's abandoned me or that there's something wrong with me. I remember one time preaching in a church where the minister was in the hospital across the street from the church. He had been the pastor of this church for 30 years, and now he was on his deathbed across the street, you know, fighting for his life, and the elders had called me and asked me if I would come to that church and fill a pulpit for this pastor, and they also said that this particular Sunday they were celebrating Holy Communion, and would I administer the sacrament and preach, and I said yes. All week long I worked on my sermon because I realized that the people in the church were in a state of crisis. Their leader had fallen. Their leader was about to die. The person that they looked to for their spiritual guidance was sick unto death, and I wanted desperately to minister to them, to give them an unforgettable sermon and to make the sacrament as meaningful as I could possibly make it, and so Sunday morning came and the people gathered there, and I gave my sermon, and I led them in the Lord's Supper, and I have to tell you I cannot remember a single time in my whole life where I was more acutely aware of the absence of God than that. I no more felt like preaching than flying, and everything was flat to me.

It just wasn't cutting. In fact, when I was finished, I wanted to find a hole in the ground where I could jump in it and pull in and after me, and the last thing I wanted to do at the end of the service was go to the back of the church and shake these people's hands because I had this overwhelming sense that I completely let them down. And the weirdest thing, I get back to the back of the church, and I'm shaking their hands, and one person after another walks past me looking like zombies. Their eyes were glazed. They had this strained look on their face, and they would grip my hand, and they would say, thank you. And one after another one told me how overwhelmed they had been that morning by a sense of the presence of God. And I walked out of there, and I thought, wow, everybody else in this place felt the presence of God but me.

Two things. From that day forward, I said, I'm never in the rest of my life going to depend and rely upon my feelings to determine whether God was present. Rather, I'm going to trust that God says He will be with us. He says He will be with me. He promises He won't leave me. He promises He'll be there when I need Him, even if it's in the valley of the shadow of death, and it doesn't matter if I feel Him. In other words, I said, I'm not going to be a sensuous Christian anymore, but I'm going to trust that the Lord God, when He makes a promise like that, that He will not leave me or forsake me, that He means what He says and that He will keep His Word. And the other thing, I thought of exactly what happened here in this text with Jacob.

Listen to what happens. In verse 16, then Jacob awoke from his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord was in this place, and I knew it not. And then he said, How awesome is this place. Have you ever walked into a church, a cathedral perhaps, where as soon as you walked across the threshold, walked through the door, that you sensed what I sensed that night in that chapel in that wintry night, where you were making a transition from the common to the uncommon, that you were walking over a threshold from the secular to the holy, from the profane to the sacred, where, you know, you walked inside, and you had the ceiling and the stone and the stained glass windows, and you had that eerie sense of transcendence. Have you ever experienced that? Where nobody has to tell you to adopt an attitude of reverence. You know intuitively that reverence is the only appropriate response. That's what Jacob said.

How awesome is this place. And he named it Beth-El, Beth-El, the house of God, the place where he met a holy God. And he said, I was afraid.

That's one of the things we're going to look at in our series here. What it is about the majesty of God that provokes terror and fear, and why it is that in our day we seem to have lost our capacity to tremble before God. But if you look at the Scriptures, every account of every person who ever meets the living God, that person trembles before him. In his book, The Holiness of God, R.C. Sproul said this, How we understand the person and character of God the Father affects every aspect of our lives. No part of the world is outside of his lordship.

R.C. was passionate about wakening people to the holiness of God, and that's our focus this week here on Renewing Your Mind. We're featuring his series Fear and Trembling, The Trauma of God's Holiness.

In six messages, we learn about who God really is and our responsibility to know him. We'd like to send you this two-DVD set. Just contact us today with your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343.

You can also make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. Learning about the holiness of God is really a matter of thinking and living biblically. You'll find that Table Talk magazine is committed to helping us as Christians do just that. This issue includes thoughtful articles from gifted teachers along with daily Bible studies. Let me encourage you to consider making Table Talk a part of your daily reading.

You can subscribe at TableTalkMagazine.com. Well, before we go today, here's a preview of a lesson we'll hear tomorrow. This is the only time that an attribute of God is elevated to the third degree, to the superlative level.

The Bible doesn't say that God is love, love, love, or justice, justice, justice, or mercy, mercy, mercy, but that He is holy, holy, holy. We hope you'll make plans to join us Tuesday for Renewing Your Mind. .