The Trauma of Holiness

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind... In His Holiness, we see ourselves for who we really are, unholy, unrighteous, unworthy, and anything but perfect.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul explains the trauma we experience when we are confronted by a holy and righteous God. Now think of Isaiah. I can't imagine that there was any human being running around in the Jewish nation at that time who, humanly speaking, was more righteous than Isaiah.

Isaiah was about as righteous as human beings could be found, and he has this glimpse of the holiness of God, and the first thing he does when he sees the holiness of God is that he cries out in terror, and the old King James Version records his words as saying this, Woe is me, for I am undone. Now I know that nobody talks like that anymore. Nobody says, woe is me. The words kind of antiquated. The expression is an archaism. It's like somebody saying forsooth or alas and alack. Nobody talks that way unless you have some Jewish friends. Sometimes when things go wrong, they'll say oy vey ismir, which is the Yiddish rendition of the same verbiage here, woe is me.

But for the most part, we don't hear people talk like that in our culture. And so translators in trying to communicate the Word of God in modern verbiage will do away with some of this archaic language. But when we do that, sadly, we're in danger of missing another one of those semi-hidden gems of Biblical literature. There is a reason why Isaiah used the word woe. In the Old Testament, a prophet was a human being who was anointed by God to be a spokesman for God. The simple definition that distinguished the prophet from the priest in Israel was this, that it was the task of the priest to speak to God in behalf of the people. It was the task of the prophet to speak to the people in behalf of God. So that when the prophet uttered his message, he wouldn't preface his statement by saying, in my humble opinion, or it is my judgment that, or I think that perhaps this may be the case. That's not how they addressed the people.

You know what they did. When they gave their message, they prefaced their words by saying what? Thus saith the Lord. Because they understood that they were vessels of divine announcements. Now again, the literary form that was common to the prophet of Israel was the form that we call the oracle. You've heard, I'm sure, of a Greek oracle, the oracle of Delphi, who would give these announcements about the future. Well, among the Jews, the oracular literary device, the oracle, was of two types. There were oracles of will and oracles of woe. Now that means simply this, that there were announcements that came from God that were good news and there are announcements that came from God that were bad news. An oracle of will or an oracle of prosperity used a word that was important to this oracle among the Jews to introduce the good news, and it was the word blessed. Jesus obviously uses the form of the oracle self-consciously as a prophet when He gives the Sermon on the Mount. The people of His day would have recognized the significance of His giving this list of sayings that He would say, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, blessed are the pure in heart, and so on, blessed are the peacemakers.

He was pronouncing the oracle of God's will upon the people, the divine blessing, the divine benediction to those who did these certain things. But the flip side of the oracle of will was the oracle of woe, which was a grim and terrifying announcement of God's judgment. Here the prophet Amos, when he announces the judgment of God upon the nations and upon the cities, for three transgressions and four Damascus, woe unto you. Jesus, when He gave His scathing denunciation of the Pharisees, prefaced His words of judgment using the Old Testament prophetic oracle by saying, woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.

You cross land and sea to make one convert, and once you've made Him, you make Him twice the child of hell than you are yourself. I mentioned in our first session how rare it is in all of Scripture for anything to be raised to the repetitive level of the superlative, and I said the only attribute of God that's ever repeated to the third degree is the attribute of holiness, holy, holy, holy, but it's not the only thing that is repeated to the third degree. Jeremiah the prophet, when he went and gave the judgment of God before the temple of the Jews, he said to them, you people come here and you say this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. Jeremiah was saying, in effect, your hypocrisy is to the nth degree. You trust in lying words, words that cannot profit, and the darkest hour of this planet is foretold to us in the apocalypse of the New Testament where we are told that in that last hour the bowls of divine wrath will be poured out upon this planet, and we hear of this heavenly figure flying across the darkened sky announcing the final judgment of God with the repetition of one word, singing what? Woe, woe, woe.

You don't want to be around when that bird starts to sing. Do you see what happens here in the sixth chapter of Isaiah? That one who is called of God and set apart, the very words of God are placed in his mouth, the first oracle that he pronounces is an oracle of doom upon himself.

Woe is me. As soon as Isaiah sees the unveiled holiness of God, for the first time in Isaiah's life, he understands who God is, and the very second that Isaiah understood who God was, for the first time in his life, he understood who Isaiah was. And what came out of his mouth was something akin to a primordial scream where he curses himself. Woe is me, for I am undone. I know the more modern translations use for I am ruined, but I like this old one, undone, for this reason.

If we look at what's happening here through the glasses of modern cycle analysis, we could describe this experience that Isaiah relates as an experience of psychological disintegration. That is disintegration. To describe a person who is healthy, we say that that person is whole.

He has everything together. And when we see somebody who is losing it, we say what? He's falling apart. Isn't it interesting that a synonym that we use for virtue in our language is the word integrity? That is that we have everything about our lives meshed together in a coherent and a consistent way. Now ladies and gentlemen, here is the man who possesses the most integrity of the Jewish people who comes and gets one glimpse of the holiness of God, and he immediately suffers disintegration.

He comes apart. That's what happens to people who catch a glimpse of the character of God, because do you see that we spend our entire lives veiling ourselves from the true character of God, because our natural bent, our natural inclination, beloved, is to hide ourselves from Him, because we know instinctively that as soon as the holy appears, it exposes and reveals anything and anyone who is not holy by virtue of that standard. We have a justification for every sin that we commit. We are masters of self-deceit. Calvin makes this statement.

He said, as long as our gaze is fixed on the ground, we're safe. We flatter ourselves. We address ourselves as demigods, slightly lower than eternal deities. We do what the Apostle Paul warned us not to do when he said, those who judge themselves by themselves and judge themselves among themselves are not wise. Let me tell you something about human nature.

We could go out into the streets of America and ask this question to everyone on the street, and I can't believe how many people would answer it the same way. If I said to people, are you perfect, I'd be willing to bet that ninety-nine out of the hundred people that we ask that question, no matter what their background is, would say, no, I'm not perfect. The one axiom that all Americans will vote for is that nobody's perfect.

Herare humanum est. To her is human. Nobody's perfect.

But that doesn't seem to bother us at all. There's not one person in a thousand who will claim to be perfect. Beloved, there's not one person in a thousand who understands the seriousness of not being perfect, because the standard by which we will be judged ultimately is not a curve, but it will be the standard of God's perfection. I hear this, everybody's entitled to one mistake.

Says who? Where did God ever say, you can all have one mistake. One free sin. One free act of treason against my authority. One free insult to my integrity. He never said that, did he?

But even if he did, how long ago did you use yours up? Everybody's entitled to one mistake. I hope we get more than one. One mistake is second, is more like it. But you see, we're comfortable with our imperfection. We judge ourselves by each other, no matter how ashamed I may be of the weaknesses in my life. And sometimes when I look inside myself, I make myself sick. Don't you feel like that? Do you ever disgust yourself?

How could I do that? I can't believe that I'm that selfish or I can't believe that I'm that covetous or lustful or whatever it is. But we are quick to excuse ourselves, because we look around and we can always find somebody who's more depraved than we are, at least on this earth. So we can be like that Pharisee that Jesus talked about that went up to the temple to praise and said, oh God, I thank you that I'm not like that miserable guy over there.

And so we find a way to excuse ourselves and to flatter ourselves until we see the standard. And when that happens, we are undone as Isaiah was undone. When he saw pure holiness, he understood what it was that he wasn't. He couldn't stand it and he's on his face and he's screaming out in pain and he's saying, woe is me for I am undone for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty. I wonder why he said what he said. When he cries out now in his terror, he said, I'm undone because I have a dirty mouth.

I wonder why it went to his mouth. If you read the teaching of Jesus, one of the things that comes through his teaching again and again is a lesson that almost no one in the 20th century believes anymore. If Jesus of Nazareth taught anything, he taught repeatedly that someday every human being would be called before the tribunal of God, that every one of us will have to give an account before the holy creator of heaven and earth. And Jesus says that on that day, every idle word that we have ever spoken will be brought into the judgment, that everything that we've ever done, everything that we've ever said, every promise we've ever made and broken, every blasphemous statement that's come from our mouth, every slanderous word that we've made towards our neighbor will be brought up on the table. Jesus said, it's not what goes into a man's mouth that defiles a man.

It's what comes out. God has given us our mouths as vehicles to praise Him, to express His truth. And instead we've used our mouths to lie, to hurt other people, to blaspheme God.

We have dirty mouths. When Isaiah saw the holiness of God, his hand went instinctively to his mouth as he cried out this curse upon himself. Now, ladies and gentlemen, what did God do?

Did God look down from the throne and see His servant writhing in the dust and all of his remorse and repentance like some medieval monk in a monastery involved in self-flagellation and say, come, come, come now, Isaiah, you're taking yourself far too seriously. Don't have such a morbid preoccupation with your own guilt. You're going to give a lifetime of study for the likes of Sigmund Freud carrying on like this. Don't be so neurotic. You've got a guilt hang up. I mean, you must have been reading Jonathan Edwards or anticipating Queen Victoria. That's not what he did. Nor did God look at his servant writhing in the dirt and say to him, suffer, you miserable creep. You deserve to be undone and ruined. Go ahead, let the curse fall upon yourself. I've had it with the likes of you, Isaiah.

I'll catch you later. That's not what he did. Tell you something else he didn't do, ladies and gentlemen. God didn't say a word to Isaiah about cheap grace. God didn't say, look, Isaiah, all I want you to do is sign your name and a membership card or raise your hand and you can come into my kingdom.

No. God saw his servant in pain and he nodded to one of the seraphim, and the seraph went over to the altar where the white hot coals were burning there in the holy place, and the coals were so hot that even the angel's flesh couldn't come in contact with them. He had to use tongs, and with these tongs he took one of these white hot coals and he flew over to Isaiah, and we read in the text that he placed this hot coal on his lips. You know how sensitive the human lips are? It's with our lips that we express one of the most intimate forms of tactile communication, the kiss. The nerve endings of the lips are hypersensitive, and yet this man has the experience of having a hot coal placed right on his lips. You know that what happened is the instant that coal touched his lips there was a huge blister formed on him. You can hear his flesh sizzling. Why? Because God was being cruel and unusual in his punishment of Isaiah. No. The coal was applied to cauterize his lips, to purify him, to heal them, to prepare them for the message that he was to give.

Listen to what it says. One of the seraph flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar, and with it he touched my mouth and he said, See, this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for. I'm a Protestant by conviction, but one of the things that I miss from the Roman Catholic tradition is the confessional.

Yes, the confessional was at the heart of the Protestant controversy, but only one element of it, and we have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. How I long to be able to go someplace to someone that I can see and hear and experience their real presence and say, Father, I have sinned, this is what I have done, and list my transgressions, get them off my chest, and then be able to get on my knees and hear somebody say to me in the name of Jesus Christ, te absolvo, I absolve you, your sins are forgiven. How would you like to hear Christ come in this room right now and walk to where you are privately and say to you, I know about every one of your sins, but right now I want to tell you that every sin that you've ever committed in your life is forgiven. Your guilt is taken away, all of it. You never again have to worry about the sins that you have committed against God. I am forgiving you and cleansing you this moment and forever. What would you give to hear Jesus say that to you? That's what God said to Isaiah. It's God, Isaiah, all of your guilt. You don't have to speak the curse any longer.

I'm taking it away. Your sins are forgiven. They are atoned for. And now as Isaiah is trying to deal with that, God speaks once more, and He said, whom shall I send, and who shall go for us? And the first thing that Isaiah says after cursing himself is what?

Here am I, send me. Notice he didn't say, here I am. That would be telling God his geographical location. No, he said, God, here am I.

He could hardly say it through these lips. Ladies and gentlemen, the price of repentance is very, very painful. True repentance is honest before God, and to come into the presence of a holy God is a painful thing, but when we come humbly as Isaiah did, when we come on our face, God is ready to forgive, to cleanse and to send the only justification for any missionary's mission, for any preacher's preaching, is that that person has experienced the forgiveness of God. And that's why when we encounter God's holiness, we are eager, as Isaiah was, to be sent to share this good news with others. God is holy, and He is good. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Tuesday.

I'm Lee Webb, and we are airing portions of Dr. R.C. Sproul's classic series, The Holiness of God. We learned today that the trauma we experience in the face of God's holiness is actually good for us. It helps us understand more completely who God is and who we are.

It helps us see that we can only stand before Him because of His grace, not our merit. We're glad you've joined us today, and we'd like to send you a bundle of resources that will allow you to continue your study of this important truth. For a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries, we will send you the six-part series we're hearing this week, plus the accompanying study guide and Dr. Sproul's book by the same title, The Holiness of God.

And this is, by the way, the hardbound edition of that book. You can find us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift. Our number is 800-435-4343. You'll find many more helpful resources when you download the free Ligonier app. Hundreds of videos, audio messages, and articles are available to you there. Plus, you can follow a daily Bible study plan.

Just search for Ligonier in your app store. Do you remember the story in Acts chapter 5 of God striking Ananias and Sapphira dead? On the surface, it seems to be an instance of the punishment far outweighing the offense. Tomorrow we'll find out that in fact this and other shocking examples of judgment are expressions of God's holiness. I hope you'll join us Wednesday for Renewing Your Mind.