The Holiness of God

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind… Recently, I had the serendipitous experience of playing with some of the software of my laptop going into one of the search modes in this Bible software into the concordance section of it and looked up the term glory. And I looked up each individual specific reference to glory.

And I have to say to you, it took me quite a long time. But I mention that to you tonight for this reason, that when the Scripture speaks to us about the character of God, perhaps the aspect of God's character that is mentioned more frequently than any other is His glory. And if we do a simple word study of the etymological derivation of that word glory, we know that it comes from an ancient Semitic root that means heavy or weighty.

It's a word used to describe a quantitative substance, something that can be weighed on a scale. And yet when it is used with respect to the character of God, it takes on a different meaning to refer to the weight of the significance of who God is. When I made this study of the glory of God, one of the phrases that I read over and over and over again is that it says of God that God has set His glory above the heavens, which is to say in Hebrew terms that God has made a display of His majesty and set it at the pinnacle of creation. And it says of God that the whole earth is filled with His glory. How many of you noticed the glory of God on the way over here tonight? It's not that God has planted clues to His glory in esoteric places that only the most profound speculative philosopher can glean from this evidence. No, the world is filled with His glory.

You can't turn without bumping into it. It's all around us. John Calvin put it this way. He said, all of creation is not just a theater, but He said, it's a glorious theater. Now when he said it's a glorious theater, he didn't mean that the theater itself is so spectacular in its architecture that one marvels at the theater. No, what he meant by it's a glorious theater is that what is being shown every day in this theater, center stage, is glory. It's a theater of glory, and it is a theater of the glory of God. Well, then he went on to say that we walk, as it were, through this glorious theater wearing blindfolds, blindfolds of our own making.

And so even if we squint as hard as we can, we can't see through the blindfold. And we ask ourselves, where's the glory of God? Where is God in this place?

All I see are the sordid evidences of misery and suffering, of ugliness and affliction. All the while, we're surrounded by the glory of God. Chapter 6 of the prophet Isaiah begins with these words, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up. You look in verse 1, it talks about the Lord, capital L, little o, little r, little d. Get on to verse 3 in the song of the seraphim, and it talks about the Lord, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. How many of you have that distinction in your Bible? It's not a misprint, but rather the editor of the English Bible that you have in front of you is trying to alert you to a significant distinction that occurs in the Hebrew text. Even though the same word is used here, the word Lord in English, two different words are being translated by that English word Lord. Anytime you see capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, you can assume that the Hebrew word behind it is the sacred tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God, the memorial name of God that was revealed by God to Moses in the Midianite wilderness. You remember when God called Moses out of the burning bush and said, Moses, Moses, take off thy shoes from off thy feet and so on, and told Moses to go to Pharaoh and say, let my people go. And Moses said, who shall I say sent me? Have you ever wondered about that? I can't get over that. I have two problems with that text. Don't get me wrong.

I believe them, but I wonder, you know, the Bible just gives you a short sketch of what happens. I wonder how in the world Moses ever got in to see Pharaoh in the first place. Can you imagine? He comes down to the royal palace, and he's this decrepit nomad from the desert. He's got this crooked stick in his hand, and he knocks on the door, and the guard says, who are you? He says, I'm Moses.

He says, so what? I want to see the Pharaoh. What makes you think? Do you have an appointment?

No, I don't have an appointment. Why should I let you in to see the Pharaoh? And he says, well, I was talking to this bush out in the wilderness. How did he get in?

You know, unless he played some games with that stick in front of the guard there at the beginning. That's only half his problem. The other half his problem, he goes to the people of Israel, hundreds of thousands of slaves. And he says, ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention? Yes. He said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to carry out the biggest wildcat strike in the history of labor management relations, and we're going to do it against the most powerful government on the earth.

Oh yeah? Who says? And Moses said, the bush told me.

Do you see the problem he has? And so he says to God, who shall I say has sent me? Who are you? And God said, Yahweh.

I am who I am. That's the name that is guarded in the Ten Commandments. That is the sacred name of God that is never, ever under any circumstances to be taken in vain.

And if anything exposes our culture to the unmitigated wrath of God, it is the frivolous way that we use His name. The first word, Lord, is the word Adon. Adonite comes from that root, and it means sovereign one. Now again, if what is happening here is the king has died, and there's this sense of loss, of vacancy, of a vacuum of leadership in the land, Isaiah comes. He says, King Uzziah is dead, but in that very year I saw Adonai. I saw the sovereign one, the one in whose hand the entire destiny of this nation. I saw, as John tells us in the New Testament, an Old Testament Christophany. I saw the coronation of the King of the kings and of the Lord of the lords high, lifted up. I saw Him in His exaltation. I didn't see the King of kings in His humiliation, which he so graphically describes in Isaiah chapter 53, which is like an eyewitness account of the cross. But Isaiah in chapter 6 sees Him high. He sees Him lifted up.

He sees Him enthroned in heaven. His train filled the temple. That is, the magnificence of His garments were so complete that there wasn't enough room to contain. And then he goes on to describe the phenomenon of the seraphim. Above it stood the seraphim. Each one had six wings, with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And I've often wondered why Isaiah gives so much ink to these details. What difference does it make what the seraphim looked like, how many wings they had?

This isn't a lesson in biology, is it? But he tells us something very important about the inner court of heaven. God is seated on His throne in spectacular glory. And when Isaiah sees, when God removes the veil and lets him look directly into the inner chamber of the heavenly place, he sees the sovereign One in His exalted glory being ministered to and surrounded by the seraphim.

Now obviously the seraphim, which is a plural form, refer to angels. Now you notice in our study of biology that when God makes creatures, each creature that He makes is made suitable for his or her environment. If you go to the sea and you look at the fish, the fish have scales, the fish have fins, the fish have gills.

We don't. But why do they? Because their natural environment, their habitat is in the water. And if you look at the birds, you see that the birds have feathers and that they have wings because they were made by God to course through the air. We don't have feathers and we don't have wings because that's not our natural habitat.

So God makes us and adapts us for our environment. So why do the seraphim have six wings? Well, we know why they have two of them.

They use them to fly around. But the other two, they said, they cover their face. I can't get over that. Why do the angels of God, whose natural habitation is the internal chambers of heaven itself, have to cover their face? You remember Moses again when he went up onto the mountain and he had already had manifold experiences of the astonishing power of God, and he says, okay God, show me the big one. Let me see Your glory.

Let me see Your face. Remember what God said? He said, Moses, I love you. He says, but don't you remember no one can see My face and live.

I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll carve a little niche out of the rock here, and I'll put you in the cleft of the rock, and I will pass by and I will let you see what the Hebrew calls the hindquarters, the backward parts of Yahweh. But My face shall not be seen. And so for a brief instant, God passes His glory backwards past Moses as Moses is concealed in the cleft of the rock. He gets an instantaneous glance, the refracted glory of God, a backward glance, and when he comes away from that situation and comes down from the mountain, his face is shining with such intensity reflecting that manifest glory that he has to cover it. Moses' face is radiant from a reflection of the glory of God. Now if you're in His unveiled presence, the glory of God, the refulgence of His radiance is so intense, so overpowering, that even the angels of heaven cannot look directly into it. The glory of God is so bright, so blazing, that even the angels in heaven have to cover their eyes with their wings, be given special equipment by their Creator to deal with the overpowering brightness of His presence.

And with two He covers their feet. We don't know exactly why that reference is there, but presumably it's a reference to the creatureliness of the angels, and even the angels as exalted as they are are to give obeisance and manifest their humility before the grand majesty of God. But beloved, as you know, the thing that consumes me about this passage is not the anatomy lesson of the seraphim. It's their message, the message they declare as a heavenly choir, a chorus that sings in antiphonal response throughout the echoing chambers of heaven itself as the one seraphim sings to the other and to the others and to the others, the same refrain echoing across the chambers of heaven, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole world is filled with His glory. Well, I've mentioned before that as English-speaking people, we could read this text a thousand times and miss its significance because in our language, if we want to make emphasis, if we want to make sure that people get the point, we have all different technical devices, literary devices that we can use to give emphasis, we can underline, we can put exclamation points forever, we can use bold prints, we can set things in brackets or in italics, and all of those things say, this is important. And the Jewish people had all those techniques as well. But in addition to that, they had one other very important technique, and that is if they wanted to show the importance of something, the emphatic importance of it, they simply repeated it.

They simply repeated it. There's a funny passage in Genesis where this great pit is described, and the Hebrew there is simply the same word for pit repeated, pit, pit. And the idea is that there are pits, and there are pits. It's one thing to fall in a pit. If you fall in a pit, you're in trouble.

But if you fall into a pit, pit, you may never get out because a pit, pit is the pittiest of all possible pits. Our Lord uses this technique when He would say to His disciples, and of course, everything that Jesus said was important, but there were things that even He deemed to be of special importance that He would preface His words by saying, amen, amen, I say to you. Amen, amen.

He said it at the beginning, not at the end. Truly, truly, I say to you. The Apostle Paul right into the Galatians expresses his apostolic astonishment that they had so quickly removed themselves from the gospel unto another gospel, which was not another gospel, and he warns them saying, if anybody preaches unto you any other gospel than that which you have received, even if it's an angel from heaven, what? Let him be anathema. Let him be anathema. Let him be damned. That's harsh stuff coming from the Apostle. And then what he says, did you hear me? Again I say to you, if anyone preaches any gospel to you other than the one that you received, let him be damned.

He repeats it. The Bible doesn't say that God is holy. It doesn't even say that God is holy, holy.

But do you see it? The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy, not twice, three times, not the comparative degree, beloved, but the superlative degree, the only attribute of God that is ever raised to the third degree in all of Scripture is His holiness. The Bible doesn't say that God is love, love, love, or grace, grace, grace, or mercy, mercy, mercy, or justice, justice, justice, or wrath, wrath, wrath, or omnipotence, omnipotence, omnipotence, but that He is holy, holy, holy. That's the supreme emphasis. And when that emphasis is grasped, and when the people of God catch that same vision, the same thing that happened to Isaiah happens to us. We are overwhelmed, and we are driven to the ground in worship. That's Dr. R.C. Sproul teaching on the holiness of God. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Monday.

I'm Lee Webb. Thank you for being with us today. The message we just heard really is a hallmark of R.C. 's ministry. He said that the holiness of God affects every aspect of our lives, and as we heard today, it's something that we as believers need to understand on a deep level. This message is part of a series we call Essential Truths of the Christian Faith, twelve messages on critical topics such as the nature of man, the atonement, and the authority of Scripture.

Alistair Begg, James Montgomery Boice, Sinclair Ferguson, and John MacArthur explore these key truths of biblical Christianity. We'll send you all of the messages on a USB drive when you contact us today with a donation of any amount. And we're including a bonus series on that USB drive.

It's R.C. 's classic collection, ten of his most requested messages. You can give your gift and request the series online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us at 800-435-4343. Well, I hope you're taking advantage of all of the resources we've made available online. You can always visit our archive of past Renewing Your Mind programs, and one easy way to do that is with our free Ligonier app. Among the many things you'll find there are audio and video clips, articles, and blog posts.

Just search for Ligonier in your app store. Well, I hope you'll make plans to join us again tomorrow as we explore another essential truth of the Christian faith. Satan is a liar. He is a deceiver. He incessantly propagates lies that destroy God's truth. One of those lies is that the Bible is not the Word of God. And that lie, of course, is at the foundation of everything, absolutely everything. Dr. John MacArthur on the authority of Scripture, tomorrow on Renewing Your Mind.