Sunday School at 9 am | worship at 10 am

Another Incomprehensible Sermon

A few weeks ago I preached on the incomprehensibility of God. The key concept there is that God is infinite, so we cannot understand Him fully (even though we can know Him truly). This Sunday I plan to preach on the holiness of God, and as I began preparing for that I came across the following quote from A. W. Tozer, under the heading “We Cannot Understand Holiness.”

I suppose the hardest thing about God to comprehend intellectually is His infinitude. But you can talk about the infinitude of God and not feel yourself a worm. But when you talk about the holiness of God, you have not only the problem of an intellectual grasp, but also a sense of personal vileness, which is almost too much to bear.

Well. Sounds like I’m in for a long week, then!

One helpful hint to understand God’s holiness is to notice where it first comes up in Scripture: the book of Exodus. God had spoken to the patriarch Abraham and promised to make him into a great nation. But, it isn’t until that great nation has come and God calls Moses as their first deliverer that God begins teaching those people about His holiness. God meets with Moses on “holy ground” (Exodus 3:5), and later meets with all Israel at Mount Sinai to make a covenant with them and call them to be His holy people (Exodus 19:5-6). We cannot separate God’s holiness from God’s redemption of His people and His call for them to be holy as He is holy.

This means on the one hand that we don’t know God’s holiness apart from knowing God’s commands. God’s instruction to His people teaches us to learn His holiness by being holy ourselves. As we meditate on His commands, we learn to value what He values, love whom He loves, and act as He wills. And this requires an ongoing commitment on our part. It is all too easy to think we have holiness figured out, and limit our understanding to a few commandments—perhaps the ones those people are always breaking, but we have no trouble keeping? I am convicted that the church today, myself included, is in danger of losing sight of some crucial aspects of the holiness of God which we are called to imitate.

On the other hand, it is important to remember that God’s holiness is revealed in the redemption of His people. Though we are unclean people, our Holy God gives Himself to us and claims us as His holy people. We tend to associate God’s holiness with fear of judgment, but for the Israelites on the far side of the Red Sea, God’s holiness was tied to joy of salvation. “Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” (Exodus 15:11b)