The Holy Place

Sometimes, the preposition the New Testament uses is the preposition into. We believe into Christ. And this is the fundamental thing that happens to us when we're born again, when we're converted to Christ. Our faith unites us to Him. The Spirit unites us to Him. And in that way, we are bound together. And underneath all that is the fact that in everything Jesus did, He was representing us.

And because He was representing us, everything He has done is really ours. None of these things are what we work up in ourselves. All of these things we draw down from our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. He is everything and He fills our nothingness. Today on Renewing Your Mind, the Holiness of God. There is something about the holy that draws us to want to step more closely to it, to find out what it's about, and yet there is something so mysterious, so different about it that we want to run from it. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind on this Monday, and all this week we are pleased to bring you portions of Dr. R.C. Sproul's classic series, The Holiness of God.

R.C. believed that holiness is the one attribute of God that should inform our thinking about worship. He said it defines God's character and should be manifested in how we respond to Him, not just in worship, but in all that we think and do.

So let's join Dr. Sproul now. As we continue our study of the holiness of God, we remember that in our first segment of this series that I recounted a personal experience that was a crisis moment for me in my life back in the days when I was going to college, and I had listened to a lecture from the writings of St. Augustine. And if you recall, I mentioned how Augustine opened up for my understanding a whole new dimension of the character of God, and that I was awe-stricken as I listened to Augustine explain the power and the majesty and the holiness of God. Well, Augustine himself wrote an interesting passage about his own personal experience with the presence of God. Here is what he said, What is that which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it?

I am both a shudder and a glow, a shudder insofar as I am unlike it, a glow insofar as I am like it. Well, Augustine had a tremendous gift for articulating his innermost thoughts and feelings, and here he talks about a question. He asks, What is it that smites my heart without wounding it? Do you see the contrast between those images, something that pierces him, something that strikes him, something that hits him with enormous force, and yet doesn't harm him, doesn't wound him, leaves no scar?

But as Augustine reflects on this question, he expresses an attitude of ambivalence about it. There is something that is at the same time attractive to him about this that smites his heart, and yet there is something that frightens him about it at the very same time. He says, At the same moment I feel a shudder and a glow. What does he mean by a shudder? That it's a shuddering experience, an experience that causes him to tremble. We remember the old spiritual, Were you there when they crucified my Lord? And the refrain goes, Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. And I think we can identify with that, can't we? There are those moments in our own experience when we contemplate the mystery of Christ, the greatness of God, the secrets of the workings and operation of the Holy Spirit that it causes us to tremble.

There is something fearful about it. Early in the 20th century, a German theologian who was also an expert in the field of sociology and anthropology wrote a small book that had an enormous impact on the thinking of his generation. His name was Rudolf Otto, and his book when it was originally published had a very short and crisp title, simply in German, Das Heilige, which literally means the holy. When it was translated into English, the English title for this book was called The Idea of the Holy.

Now, Otto didn't carry any brief or traditional conservative evangelical Christianity. He was examining not simply something about God, but he was perhaps even more interested in people. His study was a study on how human beings react and respond to whatever they consider to be holy.

It may be the feelings and reactions of people in primitive tribes to animistic spirits that frighten them. It may be a priest in a temple. It may be a Christian in prayer. And he said, how do people respond emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically to a sense of the presence of the holy? And basically he said that the normal human response to the holy is ambivalence, but that which is sacred attracts and repels at one and the same time. There is something about the holy that draws us to want to step more closely to it, to find out what it's about, and yet there is something so mysterious, so different about it that we want to run from it. Otto used a technical term to describe this sensation of the holy, which he called using the Latin phrase, the Mysterium Tremendum, the tremendous mystery or the mystery that produces tremors, trembling within us. Have you noticed in our own day and in our own culture how people seem to be fascinated with the occult?

They'll rush to the movie theater to see films like The Exorcist. They're interested in reports of Satan worship, and yet there's something ugly about these things that is grotesque, from which we want to flee. But we're not quite sure. We're fascinated. We want to draw near. And it seems like that we will follow anything that gives us some hope of penetrating the barrier of the secular and of the profane, something that will open a gate for us into the realm of the supernatural.

It frightens and fascinates all at the same time. I remember that when I was a boy, we used to listen to the radio. There was no such thing as television then.

I'm dating myself, I guess. But the difference between radio and television is that when we were restricted to following our favorite programs by way of radio, that we only heard the story. We listened to the dialogue and the descriptions that were given to us by the narrator.

We didn't see anything except the plain front of our Philco radio. And that left it to our imagination to fill in the gaps. We would visualize in our mind's eye Superman or the Lone Ranger in Tonto.

In fact, I can see certain advantages to that for the developing of creativity that we were forced to use our imaginations. Well there are all kinds of different programs, soap operas during the day, adventure stories at night, stories of Western heroes like Gene Autry and the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers and so on. But one of the most popular genres of radio programs in the 40s were the mystery stories or the detective stories like Gangbusters or Mr. King, Tracer of Lost Persons. And they also had a program that was extremely scary called Sustents. But the scariest program of all programs on the radio that I recall as a child was one that was on in the evening. And the lead-in to the radio was the opening of the door of a vault in a cemetery, a mausoleum. This door of a crypt swung open, and we always spoke about the creaking door. And the sound of the creaking door was the lead-in to this program.

And as that door would creak, we would shiver in fear as little children. And then the voice of the narrator would announce the program, inner sanctum. You know, all I had to do was say it, inner sanctum.

And we were terrified. Now the thing that I'm fascinated now in reflection on that is that when I was a boy, I didn't know what inner sanctum meant. Now I know that the words inner sanctum mean within the holy. And when I think back on it, I think it is astonishing that the producers of radio programs in the entertainment world, when they were looking for something that would hold people spellbound and evoke feelings of terror within them that they couldn't think of anything more mysterious, anything more frightening to a human person than to be close, so close to be virtually within the holy. Now it's that kind of reaction that Rudolf Otto examined by looking at various civilizations and cultures. And he said, when we're talking about the holy, we're talking about something that is one of the most difficult things in human experience to define with precision and with clarity. In fact, Otto says that with respect to the holy, we're dealing with what he calls a certain plus.

A strange word to use, isn't it? Plus. Whenever we use the word plus, we use it in arithmetic or in mathematics. It's a form that indicates some type of addition. Something added on is a plus.

Something that is extra. One of the most popular movies ever to be seen in the United States of America had perhaps the shortest title of any movie ever. There was a movie I saw when I was a boy called She, S-H-E, that's a pretty short title.

But this title wasn't even a word. It was two initials. E-T. E-T. The whole country fell in love with this strange visitor from outer space. What does E-T mean? Extraterrestrial.

E-T is the abbreviation that we give for one who is alien. One who comes from outside our experience and our environment. One who is different.

One who is extra. He is a part. He is strange. He is alien. One would think that the title E-T would even more suitably apply to God, who is above and beyond this terrestrial ball, this sphere and environment that is locked by this land in which we live. That God is the supreme alien.

The one who is supremely extra. And so what Otto was getting at when he talks about the holiness of God as communicating a certain plus, he is talking about that sense in which God is above and beyond anything that we experience on earth. We may be made in His image. We may enjoy a certain likeness or similarity with our maker. But beyond that likeness and beyond that similarity is the enormous difference, the dissimilarity between who God is and who we are. Again, let me go back to that statement I read to you at the beginning from St. Augustine. He asked the question, what is that which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it?

I am both a shudder and a glow, a shudder, that is afraid, trembling, in so far as I am unlike it, a glow in so far as I am like it. And so Augustine roots this ambivalence of which Rudolf Otto speaks in the fact that there is some sense in which we're like God. We are made in His image. And because we are made in His image and made for His glory and made originally to have fellowship with Him, Augustine, you recall, began his famous book on the Confessions with a prayer in which he says, O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.

E.T. wanted to go home, and we responded to that. He wanted to go to His heavenly residence. We can understand that because there's a sense in which we have built in to our own nature as creatures made in the image of God, an eternal longing for our residence in His presence. It's as if there is some kind of empty void within us, a vacuum that haunts us in the depths of our soul until we can reach out and embrace in a harmonious relationship the God who made us. And yet, because of our estrangement from God and because of the dissimilarity between who He is and who we are, we remain a shudder whenever He intrudes into our presence. So that intrusion, those precious moments, those pregnant moments where we do sense the presence of God are filled with this ambivalent reaction of attraction and of fear.

Let me read briefly to you what Otto says in description of this awful mystery. He says, the feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its profane non-religious mood of everyday experience.

Can you relate to that? We've all had those mountaintop experiences that are thrilling, but inevitably they fade and we return to our earthbound profanity. He says it may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions or lead to the strangest excitements to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and stuttering.

It has its crude barbaric antecedents and early manifestations and again may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery, inexpressible, and above all creatures. What he is describing here is what I call the human experience of holy dread, a pervasive chilling bloodcurdling sensation that we associate with drawing near to the living God. We need to explore that and to explore it deeply, which is what we will do in the days to come.

So with that, we hope you'll make plans to be with us all week here on Renewing Your Mind. To understand, to experience, to be in the presence of a holy God is something that is far beyond us. But as we learn about God's holiness, we find that even catching a glimpse of the Holy One of Israel changes everything. This is the theme of Dr. Sproul's classic book, The Holiness of God, and today we are making the special 25th-anniversary silver edition of the book available to you for your donation of any amount. This edition was a special project that has not been available for sale, so contact us today and request it at renewingyourmind.org. You can also call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. I'm actually holding a copy of this edition. It's so beautifully done, silver hardback with embossed lettering. So I hope you'll contact us today with your gift and request it, The Holiness of God by Dr. R.C.

Sproul. Our number again is 800-435-4343. Our web address is renewingyourmind.org. And in advance, let me thank you for your generous donation.

Well, if you have been blessed by R.C. 's teaching on the holiness of God, let me encourage you to check out our Ligonier mobile app. There's a vast library of audio and video content there. It weaves a rich tapestry of theology, apologetics, church history, and biblical studies.

You can enhance your small group or personal study when you take advantage of all that's available to you on the Ligonier app. Well, before we go, here's R.C. with a final thought for us. As we consider our thought for today of quorum Deo, of living before the face of God, I want to leave you with this question that you, I hope, will ask of yourselves.

How do you feel? How do you respond when you have any sense of the presence of God? If you can think in those moments in your life where you have sensed His presence, did you want more or did you want less?

Did you want to come closer or did you want to fall back and retreat? Do you relate to this sense of ambivalence of which Rudolf Otto speaks in his book? Does the presence of God make you glow or does it make you shudder?

Or perhaps like most of us, it does both. Think about that. Tomorrow Dr. Sproul continues this series by looking at the life of King Uzziah. What can this Old Testament monarch teach us about ourselves and the holiness of God? We hope you'll join us Tuesday for Renewing Your Mind. You