Holy and Awesome, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. When we live in a culture that's all about self-help and all about feeling good about yourself, being confident in yourself, what you're seeing is a culture that is teaching us not to know God at all.

That's the first sign you're coming into God's presence as you start to feel undone. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Vitovich, and we are so glad that you're back with us today. So if you want to get to know someone, what's the first thing you do? You introduce yourself. Knowing someone's name is an important part of knowing them.

I mean, think about it. You're never going to feel very close with someone if they're always calling you by the wrong name. So in our new series, Pastor J.D. is helping us know God personally by learning His name.

As always, if you miss any of our programs or if you are in search of our featured monthly resource, you can find it all online at jdgreer.com. Now let's rejoin Pastor J.D. as he teaches from Exodus chapter 34. There are even more of you perhaps listening to me who I described last week as like I was. You believe in God. You know how to say I have a relationship with God. But for many years, I just felt no warmth of affection of emotions for God. I told you I would hear people talking about God and they would get emotional and I'd just be like, there's not a whole lot going on down in here. I believe in Him. I know I'm going to answer to Him, but there's no warmth of feeling for Him.

And there's a number of you that would, if you were honest, would be in that category. All these issues are addressed in Scripture through coming to know the name of God. Exodus 34 is the place that we are working from.

So if you have a Bible, I'd invite you to take it out and begin to open it to Exodus 34. That's where God declares His name to Moses. I want to talk about the holiness of God's name. Holiness is one of those words that most Americans find bland and unattractive. If you ask them what holiness means, they're going to think of some kind of bright white colorless light or they think it means, you know, weirdly religious. So that if you say, you know, so and so is so holy, that's usually not a compliment. But holiness just means perfection. In English, the word comes from the word whole like wholeness. And so when you're saying holiness, you're saying the something is complete. It is holistic in its goodness. It is the essence of goodness.

It is something that I want to show you today that you yearn for whether or not you've ever known what to call it. For example, we want holiness in our relationships. Nobody wants a spouse who is unfaithful. Nobody wants a boyfriend who lies. Nobody wants a friend who exploits them. We want holiness in our business dealings.

Nobody wants to deal with a contractor who shows up late, does inferior work and overcharges us. You may not have known what to call that, but what you're yearning for is holiness. Let me show you. Exodus 34. And God said, I will make all my, here we go, goodness.

That's your keyword. I will make all my goodness pass before you. And I will proclaim before you my name, the Lord.

Verse 20. But God said, you cannot see my face for men shall not see me and live. In these encounters, both Moses's and Isaiah's, we see God set apart in at least two ways. Number one, we see that God is set apart by his awesomeness. You see, often we want to reduce God to being just a slightly bigger, slightly stronger, slightly more intelligent version of us. But God is not just one of us, just a slob like one of us for you children of the 90s. And at the end of the day, we are not in a position to judge him. That's kind of the whole point of the book of Job.

Let's take a look at the expanse of your knowledge for a second. Now, listen, I am not telling you there is never a place for you to question God. The Psalms are filled with people doing just that. But God's point in Job is that we are not supposed to ask God questions. We can't ask him questions, but we're not to do so in a way that supposes we can bring God down to our level as if God had the answer to our bar of justice as if we could see or know enough to bring God into judgment. You see, the classic objection that people have to Christianity, it's probably the number one, is what we call the problem of evil. And the problem of evil, it's basically built on two premises.

It goes like this. If God is all powerful, then God could stop evil and suffering. If God is all loving, then he would want to stop evil and suffering, but evil and suffering still happen. Therefore, God must not be all powerful or all loving, and a God who is not all powerful or loving would not be the Christian God. Therefore, God does not exist. That's the explanation of the problem of evil. But I've explained to you before that that problem is missing a premise. And that premise is this, that if God is all powerful and he is, and if God is all loving, which he is, then it would also follow that God is all wise. And if God is all wise and his wisdom exceeds my wisdom to the extent that his power exceeds my power, then it makes sense that there might be a lot of things that my small mind are not immediately be able to grasp, at least at the present moment.

Does that make sense? The sun, the sun, our sun generates enough energy in one second, one second to supply all U.S. energy needs for 13 billion years. And God just spoke the sun into existence. He said, let there be light. There's light. I work my heart out for two minutes and I can light four light bulbs. God just has a throw aside comment and he creates one star out of millions of stars that produces enough energy to light our earth, our planet for 13 billion years.

Here's my question. If God's wisdom exceeds mine to the extent that his electrical generating power exceeds mine, then am I really in a place to hold God to account? It's like Evelyn Underhill, the British political writer of the early 20th century used to say, if God were small enough to be understood, he would not be big enough to be worshiped. So God has set apart his awesomeness. Number two, God has set apart in his moral perfections. He set apart his moral perfections. God is pure goodness with no mixture of bad at all. He is without injustice, without deceit, without capriciousness, pettiness or impurity.

As I told you, these are all things that we value in people, but they're going to find their ultimate expression in God. God's holiness is terrifying. It's terrifying. The angels have to cover their faces when they're in the presence of God. The temple, the pillars of the temple, which aren't even people, they're shaking with fear.

Isaiah, the prophet of God, the man with the message, God's appointed messenger for that generation, Isaiah falls on his face and he says, I'm lost, I'm ruined, I'm undone. That's God's holiness. They are seeing the extent of his power and it is terrifying to them. Why is God's holiness terrifying to us?

Give you a handful of reasons. First, just to be in the presence of greatness is terrifying. For me, Michael Jordan, just to be in his presence is a mixture of fascination and fright, right? Because that's what it always means to be in the presence of greatness. Fascination, you're simultaneously attracted and repelled at the same time, right? Rudolf Altho, the German philosopher said, that's how you know when you're worshiping. Whenever you're filled with a sense of fascination and fright at the same time. The idea of a threatening, frightening God is really out of fashion today.

I understand that it's unmodern. We'd much rather have God be the precious moments teddy bear that we, you know, makes us feel warm when we're cold. But if being in the presence of human greatness makes you feel fascination and a great deal of fright, how much more is it to be in the presence of the almighty God? How much fright must you and I feel in the presence of that kind of greatness? You see, we want to reduce God down to being our buddy.

You know, when I was in college, I had a teacher. Jesus is my homeboy, my precious moments God. But you understand that when we say things to God like, oh God, we want to be in your presence and just be with us. That if in the middle of worship today, God answered our prayer and said, okay, you want me?

And rips off the roof and looks down in here, we would all outside of Christ, we would all die. That is the God that you and I are dealing with and it is terrifying. Second, God's holiness is terrifying because it exposes our sin. Notice that Isaiah says, I'm unclean, I'm lost and I'm ruined. The KJV, King James Version I grew up on used to say, I'm undone.

I'm undone. And actually, I like that translation better out of all the different English words because the word in Hebrew implies I'm coming apart psychologically. The glue that had held Isaiah's life together. His sense of goodness is revealed to be nothing before God. You see, when God's presence enters your life, begins to enter your life, that's how you always feel.

You feel like everything that I've depended on to be good, everything that I've used to justify myself, everything I've used to feel strong, I feel ruined and I feel undone, I'm coming apart. The sign, listen to this, the sign that you don't know God at all is that you feel pretty good about yourself. And so when we live in a culture that's all about self-help and all about feeling good about yourself, being confident in yourself, what you're seeing as a culture that is teaching us not to know God at all.

That's the first sign you're coming into God's presence is you start to feel undone. You see, we are creatures of comparison. And so we tend to console ourselves as people by comparing ourselves to other people. We think, well, I'm not as bad as so and so.

I'm not perfect, but I'm not as bad as so and so. I know that God's going to grade the curve. It's like when you're in school and everybody does bad on the test and you feel good because the teacher walks in and said, all of you did badly on the test.

So the only ones that are going to fail are those who did really, really badly. And you think, morally speaking, that's got to be the child porn people and terrorists and you're not one of those. So you're going to be okay and God's going to be fine with you. But all of a sudden you get in the presence of God's holiness and you realize that it has nothing to do with how you compare to somebody else.

It's how you compare to the goodness of God. And you look into His holiness and you see how sick and twisted and deformed your heart has really become. Isaiah would later explain, I probably reflected on this counter, he would say, Isaiah 54, he'd say, all my righteousness is like a filthy rag. We don't really translate that well in English because we just don't have a word that captures the word filthy. For them, filthy, it meant defiled.

They only used it in the Old Testament to describe two different things. A filthy rag was used to describe a leper's rags who had wrapped the open sores of his leprosy. These rags now filled with blood and pus and disease, contagious disease. That would be a filthy rag.

The other one they used it for is a woman's menstrual rag, which they believe made her ceremonially unclean. And Isaiah said, oh my goodness, that I was carrying all these things that I thought made me awesome. All these things I thought made you approve of me and that gave me hope for the future. He said, suddenly I realized that I was standing there holding a big group of pus-filled, blood-filled leper's rags and I was saying, this is how I want you to accept me.

God's holiness is terrifying because it reveals our goodness to be not that good. You're listening to Summit Life with JD Greer. We'll be right back with the conclusion of today's message in just a moment. But first, did you know that you can find Pastor JD on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? Social media is a great place to receive daily encouragement, as well as an easy way to share Jesus with those you care about. Let's flood our feeds with the life-changing message of the gospel. Just search for us on all platforms and give us a follow. And while you're online, visit our website for transcripts, videos, and other free resources.

It's all available right now at jdgreer.com. But for right now, let's get back to our teaching. Here's Pastor JD. Third, God's holiness is terrifying because it reveals our strengths to be weaknesses. Notice that Isaiah starts talking about his lips. You know what's significant about his lips?

My lips are unclean. For a prophet, his lips would have been his pride and joy. That's how he proclaimed the message of God. He's been a prophet now, by the way, for several years.

This is not his calling. He's been a prophet for five chapters. For Isaiah, his lips would have been his greatest strength.

It was like the quarterback's arm or the dancer's legs or the scientist's mind. But God reveals even his strongest strength to be weakness. That's why he feels undone.

Because even his best is insufficient. Here's how Tim Keller says that the holiness of God does not make Isaiah ashamed of his weaknesses. The holiness of God makes Isaiah look at his strengths and realize that they're not really strengths at all.

That's how you feel when you come into God's presence and that's why you feel undone because the glue that you believe holds your life together is suddenly gone. The Apostle Paul had a very similar experience. He describes it in Romans chapter 7 when the Apostle Paul says, what I thought always held my life together. What I thought made me awesome, what I thought was my hope for the future, was my knowledge of the Ten Commandments, knowledge of God's law and my obedience to the Ten Commandments. He says, I was a Jew of the Jews.

I kept the law better than anybody. I knew that I was in the upper one percent when it came to religious zeal. He said, but one day I was studying the Ten Commandments and I came to the Tenth Commandment, thou shalt not covet, and it suddenly God illuminated my heart to see that all my life I've been jealous and I'd never been satisfied with what I had and people that I thought were a little better than me, I just hated them. He said, and suddenly I realized that every one of my obedience to the Ten Commandments was saturated with this disease. And he said, in that moment, now I'm going to switch to Galatians 3, he said, in that moment I saw that all my obedience to the law was, and he uses another word we don't know how to translate, scubola. All my obedience was scubola to God. Scubola, we translated as dung, but let me just tell you parents this, if your kid spoke Greek and said scubola, you would wash their mouth out with soap. The apostle Paul did not use a polite word.

In fact, he used a pretty rough word. He basically said all my best righteousness was nothing but a bunch of human dung. It was filthy and nasty and my greatest strength was revealed to be weakness. Let me just ask you for a moment, what is that for you? What is your glue? What do you feel like is your strongest thing that gives you hope for the future or justifies you before God? Is it your bank account? You think, you know what, this is a rough season, but we've got enough, we're going to be fine. Is it your business ability?

You're like, yeah, things will all work tomorrow, I'll rebuild the things because I'm awesome. Is it your athletic ability? Is it your looks? Is it your family? Is it your involvement in church?

Is it your moral goodness? George Whitfield, who helped spark the great awakening in the United States in the 18th century, he basically had one message he preached in different forms. A lot of preachers like this, including me, you have basically one message you just put in different forms and tell different stories.

His message had only two points. He would always tell the people he was speaking to, he'd say, number one, repent of your sins. He would always tell the people that he was number one, repent of your sins. People understood that, repent of your sins, you know, stop doing the bad stuff you know is wrong. But Whitfield's second point was always really surprising to people, is he would say, repent of your goodness. Because he would say, two things have happened with your goodness. Number one, you use your goodness as a cover to justify yourself, to cover up the fact that your heart is really evil. He said, number two, your goodness is the place where you do not depend on God because you feel like this strength and this goodness is going to give you the ability to succeed in life. What is that for you? What do you feel like will justify you?

What do you think holds your life together? Because that will be the greatest source of your sin. Because it's that strength that takes your eyes off of your hope in God's grace and it's that strength that makes you rely on your strength, not his. The apostle Paul would say it like this, whatever is not a faith is sin.

What does that mean? What it means is whatever in your life does not come from hoping in God's grace for your justification and dependence on God's grace and strength for your future, that is the very thing that has become sin to you. And it is more likely that your strengths will keep you from hoping in God's grace than your weakness as well. You see, you naturally lean on God in a place of weakness. When you feel unable, you're like, I gotta have God help this one out. It is your strengths where you begin to rely on yourself and it is your goodness that keeps you from hoping in God's grace. That's why the writer John Newton of Amazing Grace would say, grace first teaches our hearts to fear. And then our fears release. It makes us feel undone.

It makes us feel like nothing we have is sufficient. That's how Isaiah feels at the holiness of God. Now at this point, it all feels like bad news, doesn't it? Watch what happens next. Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth with it and he said, behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt has been taken away and your sin has been atoned for. Out of the darkness comes a burning angel with a coal from the altar and he touches Isaiah's mouth with it.

You might be tempted to think of this as some kind of purification by fire, you know, burning out the impurities. But that's not an Old Testament concept. We never see that metaphor used that way in the Old Testament.

What's happening here? The coal, listen, represents the fire of judgment that's already been burned. You and I, of course, see even more clearly than Isaiah saw. But what Isaiah saw was that God's holiness was not just terrifying, listen to this, this is the irony, God's holiness was also cleansing. Because not only was God's goodness so far above Isaiah's he felt undone, God's goodness also included him being filled with love so that God could not watch Isaiah suffer.

God would ultimately come and receive the punishment that was due to Isaiah for his sin. We know that that land that was offered on the altar was going to be Jesus and in Jesus we would see the holiness of God on clear display. That though God was so holy that sin could not survive in his presence, we see that God is so loving that he offered up himself in our place so that we could survive with him forever. We see in Jesus that God was so righteous, he was so good that we had to die for our sins.

But God was so loving that he was glad to die in our place. This is what it means for God to be holy. And what Isaiah experiences in this moment is this kind of understanding of who God is and how much he loves Isaiah. And when he sees, listen, this is not his salvation. He's already been a prophet now for five chapters. It's the sense where God's grace is becoming real to him.

It's what we talked about last week. It's when all these theories suddenly become felt and that's when your eyes begin to fill with tears because you begin to say, oh my God, look at what you saved me from and look at how much you love me. And that experience caused two things to happen in Isaiah.

Number one, it propelled him outward. You see the next phrase, see what happens? Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, whom shall I send and who will go for us?

And I said, here am I, send me. It's like I've often told you guys, God's a spiritual cyclone. He never pulls you in without immediately propelling you back out. This virgin used to say, a burning heart will always find for itself a flaming tongue. The sign that you have met God is that you suddenly become very overwhelmed with people around you who don't know God, who are no less holy than you were, but are under God's condemnation. And you begin to see and sense how much God loves them. I think when I read this, I think back to my own call to ministry, overwhelmed with the sight of the holiness and the grace of God. I said, God, please let me go tell these 2.2 billion people. Let me preach to people in a way that brings them to faith in Christ. And y'all, it was one of those moments where the Holy Spirit said, finally, you're asking the right question.

You see, I volunteered to go. That's what Isaiah did. Some of you guys are sitting around waiting on God to reveal something. The problem is you've never been overwhelmed with God's grace because when you're overwhelmed with God's grace, it will turn you into an evangelist.

That's why Spurgeon said you're either a missionary or an imposter because those people who have been saturated by an experience with the grace of God, they become zealous evangelists for the grace of God. So Isaiah gets propelled outward. Here's the other thing that happens. Watch this. It gives Isaiah a ridiculous amount of confidence. Notice how God describes Isaiah's ministry assignment. Listen to this.

Imagine hearing this. And God said to Isaiah, notice, go and say to these people, keep on hearing and do not understand. Keep on seeing, but do not perceive.

Make this people's heart unperceptive and dull. What kind of call to ministry is that? God, I need a prophet who's going to go preach for the next 40 years and everybody's going to hate him and nobody's going to listen and not a single person is going to be converted. And Isaiah's like, oh, me, me, me.

Let me do that. Listen, that means nobody ever wrote a glowing review of Isaiah's ministry. Nobody ever came up to Isaiah on the street with tears in their eyes and said, man, your sermons have really touched my life. Isaiah would be hated all of his life.

He would be rejected. In fact, we know that Isaiah died because one of the Israelite kings took him and put him in a log and cut him in half. How does Isaiah volunteer for a ministry like that? He volunteers for a ministry like that because he knows the holy God stands behind him. And he says, if that God is with me, if that God promises to supply my need, if that God is waiting for me at the end of the journey to say, well done, good and faithful servant, then I can stand against the world because I've got him on my side.

That's how he does it. You see, I think about that sometimes. And all of a sudden in the midst of preaching, I'll get the sense of confidence because I'll know.

I'll know. I'm like, if that God stands behind me, then I don't care who stands against me. Some of you are where Isaiah was. You're discouraged. Success is not in front of you.

Nobody praises you. You need a vision of what Isaiah saw. And that is the holy God, if you're doing what he told you to do, standing behind you saying, I am with you.

Others of you are where the nation of Israel was. You're in the year that King Uzziah died. The foundations of your life are shaking. You've suddenly learned you got cancer, or maybe you're in a divorce, or maybe your family's falling apart, or I don't know what's going on with you. But something's happening and you lost your job. And the foundations of your life are shaking.

Am I going to be okay? You need to see that where others fail you, parents, leaders, a friend, your job, where they have fallen off the throne, God never will. And the God that made his promise to you at the beginning is going to stay with you for the rest of your life. And that God is the one rock that you can build your life on. He's the one throne that will never falter.

It will never fail. And you can establish the rest of your eternity on it. You see, Jesus is the God that you see high and lifted up. And it's the God you've always wanted to know. You may not have realized that, but Jesus is the God that you have always craved. You've craved this kind of goodness. Do you know this God, the God who gave himself for you? If you don't, then consider this your invitation to get to know him personally. You're listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor and author J.D.

Greer. So J.D., most Christians believe prayer is important, but when it comes down to it, we sometimes go whole days or even weeks without really spending time in prayer. Why do you think that is? Yeah, most of us want to blame our lack of prayer, our prayerlessness on a lack of self-discipline. Same reason we don't work out enough, eat enough broccoli and alfalfa sprouts.

It's a lack of discipline. But prayerlessness is, I always think of it as a gospel problem because I'm not aware of how dependent I am on God or how willing he is to help me. That's why what we're offering this month is a great little prayer bundle. Looks that I use both as a pastor when I lead people and also in my own personal time. My wife and I pray through these at night before we go to bed. Five Things to Pray for Your Kids by Melissa Kruger. There's Five Things to Pray for Your Parents by Chelsea Stanley.

And then Five Things to Pray for Your City by Helen Thomas and Pete Nicklaus. It's a great bundle that will really put some structure and maybe even jumpstart your prayer life. I'm very excited to be able to commend them to you. If you'll reach out to us at jdgreer.com, we'd love to start a partnership with you where you support the ministry here.

And this would be our way of saying thank you. As our thanks for your generosity today, we'll send you this bundle of three books when you donate to support this ministry. You're joining us and reaching the world with the transforming power of the gospel through this program. So donate today and request our new prayer resource by giving us a call at 866-335-5220.

Or you can always give online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Venovich. Be sure to listen tomorrow when this teaching series continues. We'll see you Thursday here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.