The Weight of Majesty | God’s Glorious Holiness

Media Gratiae

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:11

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and today we have the first of two special weeks in which we'll be listening to the men who contributed to the study,

00:21

Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty. If you're familiar with our studies, you know that this is the second

00:27

Behold Your God study. In the first study, we also had men contribute material for our videos.

00:34

There are different men who contribute for this study. In the Weight of Majesty study, we have asked each of these men to give us biblical comments on the different attributes of God, in particular, very practical applications.

00:50

This week, we're going to be listening to what they have to say about the holiness of God. Among the men you'll be hearing from, there will be

00:58

Sinclair Ferguson, Joel Beakey, Steve Lawson, Jeff Thomas, Ian Hamilton, Conrad Mbewe, Andrew Davis, and others.

01:07

I hope you find the material that we're able to pull together on this topic really helpful this week.

01:17

Why should we study the attributes of God? Aldous Huxley once said,

01:24

I object to Christians. They know too much about God. Now, that was a cynical kind of statement.

01:34

There is a germ of truth in it. We need to remember that we are on the outskirts of God's ways.

01:44

We are on the fringe of the mystery. For me, the wonderful thing about God is that He is so infinitely greater and more wonderful than we can possibly imagine.

02:00

God has made Himself known to us in the Scriptures and in Christ through the Holy Spirit. But there are mysteries in His inner being which we do not know and which we do not understand.

02:15

In the present state in which we live, we are incapable of doing so, and it is not admissible that we should do so.

02:23

The secret things belong to the Lord, and there is a mystery to God's being, which for me is a wonderful thing.

02:32

It means that eternity will be too short to understand and see and explore more of this mystery, and even then we shall be baffled.

02:43

Therefore, one of my favorite quotations from the great Augustine applies here.

02:50

Doctrine is a fence around the mystery. We have sufficient understanding to know how to defend the truth against misrepresentations one way or another, but we are defending it.

03:06

We are not defining it. You cannot define God. That is impossible. It's almost monstrous to think that we can define

03:14

God. We can't. Even when we've spoken about all His attributes, we are left baffled.

03:20

We are left astounded. I think that's right. I think that really is right.

03:27

I think that puts us just where we ought to be. Let God be God. Let God be

03:34

God, and let's embrace wholeheartedly and wonderfully in believing what

03:42

He has revealed of Himself to us, but let's remember that there is much, much more to come, and what a motive that is for looking to eternity.

03:57

What do we mean by the holiness of God? In a sense, the holiness of God is

04:06

His distinctive characteristic or attribute. It literally means that He is different, that He is separate from all other beings.

04:18

When we speak of the holiness of God, we are really talking about who God is. He is holy.

04:25

He is the Holy One of Israel, holy, holy, holy. They cry in heaven.

04:31

Isaiah saw that and fell at the feet of the Lord as he realized his sinfulness.

04:39

The holiness of God is His intrinsic nature as God, but the holiness of God also means

04:46

His moral purity, His perfection, His sinlessness.

04:53

In those two respects, we are to understand the holiness of God.

05:01

One of the most simultaneously wonderful and terrible things that I've ever read about the holiness of God was something in the

05:11

Puritan Stephen Charnock, where connecting God's holiness and God's justice together, he said that God's holiness is such that he would rather see sin die than his son live, that this gives you some sense of what it means for the holy, holy, holy

05:33

God to be against sin and what He has done and will yet do to undo and sweep away the curse.

05:47

How does the holiness of God relate to His other attributes? Well, in a sense, all the attributes of God are holy.

05:56

Since God is holy and that is His intrinsic nature, then every attribute about Him is holy, every attribute that He has is holy.

06:06

And that, I think, is the distinctive truth about God—His omnipotence,

06:12

His omniscience, His omnipresence, His inscrutability, His mercy,

06:17

His grace, His justice. They're holy because that is who

06:23

God is. I think they are determined by the very nature of God and are, in a sense, qualified or characterized by His holiness.

06:35

Yeah, I think, again, the holiness of God is what, in one sense, makes

06:44

Him terrible, were it not for the fact that God is also merciful, that He is also gracious.

06:53

A God who is holy, a God who is holiness unmediated, you might say, is a

07:01

God who is to be feared with an awesome fear and before whom there is no hope of standing if we are sinners.

07:08

So all that God is, is holy. That's true of the other attributes that we've been talking about to a large extent.

07:17

But His mercy must be a holy mercy. His justice must be a holy justice.

07:23

His love must be a holy love. So again, when people say, oh, God is love, as if to say, well, therefore

07:29

His holiness doesn't matter. No, whatever love God is, and we don't undermine or dismiss that for a moment, but that love that He shows is a love that is fundamentally conditioned by the fact that He is holy and must therefore be in accordance with that reality.

07:47

His justice is holy. It's why it's so fearsome. His mercy is holy. It's why it's so wonderful.

07:54

So there is nothing that God is that is not holy. That's why, for example, when

08:02

Isaiah saw his glory in the temple high and lifted up and saw those mighty angels with their faces and their feet covered and flying and saying, holy, holy, holy is the

08:15

Lord God almighty. It drove him to the point of despair until that holy

08:23

God sent the coal of fire from the altar. And only then was

08:30

Isaiah even in a position to say, here am I, send me, when he had been cleansed in the presence of that God.

08:39

So this holiness of God is at once the most attractive thing about him, properly understood, and the most fearful thing concerning him.

08:51

And that all has to do essentially with our character as sinners. And then by God's grace, our status is redeemed.

09:03

How is God's difference from all creation and all mankind shown in His holiness? Well, the fact that He is

09:11

God and we are human is itself a huge gulf, a huge metaphysical gulf, if you like, or a huge gulf in terms of being.

09:25

We are human. He is God. We are not God. We never will be

09:32

God. We will never be divine. He will always be God. We will always be human. So there's a huge metaphysical gulf between God and human beings.

09:45

And there's a huge moral gulf between the pure and holy

09:50

God and our sinful selves. So in two respects, we see ourselves to be creatures and sinful creatures in the light of His holiness.

10:05

And that means that we must be reconciled to Him, and He must be reconciled to us if we would know

10:12

Him in a personal saving way. How can we think of the person and work of Christ in light of God's holiness?

10:25

Well, bearing in mind these two distinctions between God and us, it is

10:31

Christ who bridges the gulf in the incarnation. He became man.

10:39

So this infinite metaphysical gap between us and God was bridged.

10:48

Godhead and humanity met in Christ. The gulf was bridged wonderfully in that astonishing miracle of the incarnation, which is the miracle of all miracles,

11:03

God becoming man. In the same way, the holy

11:08

Son of God, the sinless Son of God, the one whose moral purity was impeccable, became the sin -bearer for us.

11:18

So the holy one was made sin. The righteous one was made sin for us who are unrighteous.

11:28

The gap is bridged not only metaphysically, but savingly and morally.

11:37

We now receive the divine nature. We become children of God by adoption and by rebirth when we yield to Christ and when we trust

11:51

Christ and come to Christ and when He makes Himself known to us. So that salvation is found in Christ.

12:01

This gap is bridged in both respects. Though we will always be human, nevertheless, we are now children of God and God is our

12:09

Father. Though we are sinful, we are justified as sinners and made holy progressively by the regenerating work of the

12:18

Holy Spirit. That is all through the atoning work of our

12:23

Lord Jesus Christ, through His life and death and resurrection applied to us by the

12:28

Holy Spirit. How is the holiness of God a terror to those outside of Christ and a comfort to those inside Christ?

12:41

One of the beautiful things about God's solitariness is what we call His holiness.

12:48

Everything about God is holy, just to select one attribute, but it's hard to explain how holiness shines through all that God is.

13:01

I once thought of it this way when I was standing on the shore of the

13:07

Atlantic Ocean and the sun was going down and all the waves, the white caps were coming in.

13:13

I just saw one white cap after another, one white cap, this beautiful white light on the top of each wave.

13:22

And Jonathan Edwards once said, the holiness of God is the outshining of God in all

13:29

His attributes. It's like every little attribute of God, even from our perspective now, has this bright white spotless light.

13:38

Holiness is like a capstone of who God is from our perspective. From God, it's all one.

13:44

But once you understand this incredible holiness of God, this incredible separateness, the solitary separateness of God, that He's separate from all evil, and even

13:56

Jesus when He came, even in our human nature, is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, hence the necessity of the virgin births because He couldn't be stained with original sin, absolutely no sin, totally sin -free.

14:11

Once you understand that, then the wonder of salvation becomes greater because God cannot stand to look upon any sin.

14:21

I often say to my congregation something like this, wouldn't it be amazing if you could live an entirely sin -free life in all your words, your words were all perfect from the time you were born to the time you die, never said a bad word at all.

14:36

And wouldn't it be amazing if all your actions were entirely perfect, holy, as holy as God is holy, but you had one sinful thought in your entire life, according to the character of God, if that sin was not washed away by the blood of Jesus, by someone who was perfect,

14:58

God could not have any communion with sin. You couldn't go to heaven. You would actually go to hell. You say, what?

15:05

For one thought? For one thought. Why? Because of who God is. He's perfectly holy.

15:12

So, see, people got it all wrong. People think that God is like us.

15:17

So, they say, you know, God can deal. He can, you know, like President Trump, will deal, will make a bargain here.

15:23

If you do the very best you can, I'll let you in. If you, you know, are pretty good to your wife, pretty good to your neighbors, work pretty hard,

15:32

I'll let you into heaven. This is nonsense in terms of God. We are all sinners.

15:38

We have all piled up thousands of sins with God, tens of thousands.

15:44

Every moment we don't love God above all, which by nature is every moment of our lives because we love ourself the most, and every moment we don't love our neighbor as ourselves, we're sinning against the first table and the second table of the law.

15:57

So, actually, we're sinning every second, every tick of the clock. Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin.

16:05

What is it? Eighty -six thousand times a day if there's that many seconds. So, you're just multiplying millions of sins before a holy

16:11

God who says, I cannot stand to look upon one iniquity. So, God is entirely separate, entirely holy.

16:18

And therefore, the only way we can get saved is to have someone who's absolutely holy come and take our place.

16:28

And the only one is God's Son who could come and do that and take our nature. And He alone, by taking our nature, paying for our sin where the wages of sin is death and dying for us, but also obeying the law perfectly for us for 33 years.

16:44

Every single second, He loved God above all. Every single second, He loved His neighbors Himself. Absolute perfection.

16:51

And then He imputes that to us, and He takes our sin to Him and pays for it all so that God does for us in Christ the two things that we need to have done for us that we can never do for ourselves.

17:03

In His passive obedience, paying for our sin, wiping that sin slate clean, and then meriting eternal life for us by this perfect obedience of holiness.

17:14

And you see, it works. The gospel works with God because Jesus as man, when

17:22

He suffers for us and obeys the law for us, it has an infinite value because His person is

17:28

God, and God is infinite. And as Jonathan Edwards said, which I think is powerful and so important in understanding the

17:35

Bible and understanding theology, only an infinite God can satisfy an infinite

17:42

God. So we're finite. So we try to do the best we can. That will never please

17:47

God. A perfect obedience is what we need, the way God created us. And so because we're fallen, we need a

17:55

Savior to come, an alien righteousness to come from outside of us, as Luther said, to come to us, and we receive the

18:03

Lord Jesus Christ by faith, and His righteousness, His double righteousness, paying for sin, obeying the law, is then imputed to us.

18:10

Our sins are imputed to Him, and we're saved and we're made holy in God's sight and made pure.

18:16

And one day, as John says in 1 John 3, when we meet Jesus in heaven, we will be as holy.

18:23

I mean, it's unbelievable. As holy as He is holy through His holiness and His substitutionary obedience.

18:29

So He'll look on it. His bride is a perfect bride, and He'll say to His church, I see no sin in my

18:35

Jacob and no transgression in my Israel. And it will be a perfect utopian marriage between Christ and His church.

18:44

Perfect bridegroom, perfect bride enjoying one another forever. Well, if you believe that God is holy and you not only believe it, but you begin to see it, if the burning light of God's holiness shines into your heart, then you see what you're really like.

19:07

It's rather like light coming into a room where perhaps you're unaware of the dust particles in the room, but when the light shines in, you're very much aware of them.

19:20

When God's holiness bears in upon our lives, we see ourselves as we really are.

19:27

That's why Isaiah cried out, woe is me, I am undone, I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among the people of unclean lips, because my eyes have seen the

19:35

Lord. And it was the holy God that he'd seen. We cannot understand our sinfulness unless we really see

19:45

God as the holy God that he is. But when we do, when we realize that, then it is such a blessed relief to shelter beneath the arms of the cross, to shelter beneath the arms of our

20:00

Lord Jesus Christ, no longer on the cross, but now it's stretched to save us. So the sinless sin -bearer becomes our

20:06

Redeemer, and we are able to hide in him and take our refuge beneath his cross.

20:12

It's the only safe place. It's the only place in the universe where sinners can be reconciled to God.

20:17

God has reconciled himself to us in the cross. We are reconciled to him when we come to him in repentance and faith and trust in the one who died for us and lives for us.

20:31

The Old Testament and the New Testament both present God to us as a consuming fire.

20:38

There's no dichotomy, there's no divide between the

20:43

God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, as some would have it, that the God of the Old Testament is this angry, aggressive, vengeful being.

20:53

The God of the New Testament is this softer, gentler, kinder being.

20:59

There is one living and true God, and in all that he is, he is holy.

21:07

So that even the glory that Isaiah saw, John says, was the holy glory of the

21:13

Lord Jesus Christ. God dwells in light, unapproachable and full of glory.

21:19

It's the writer to the Hebrews who says our God is a consuming fire. When you come into the book of Revelation, you've got a

21:25

God who in his awesome majesty punishes all wickedness and scours its existence out of his remade world and punishes those who have stood against him with this everlasting judgment, that the holiness of God is what makes everything that he is in himself unattainable to the sinful man.

21:55

It's his highness, it's his majesty, it's his spotless moral purity.

22:03

And it's when we begin to see and know God as holy that we begin to understand what the old writers called the sinfulness of sin, the plague of plagues.

22:15

You can only properly understand sin in the light of God's holiness. And if we understood

22:21

God's holiness better, we'd have a more pure and perfect hatred of our sins. But it is

22:27

God in his holiness that is a scourge and a terror to the ungodly.

22:38

Where do you see evidences of a refusal to apply the holiness of God even within the church? I think the problems are both a refusal to apply it, but also fundamentally an ignorance of it.

22:57

I really don't know that we know God as holy in the way that we should.

23:04

And there may be a sense which we don't particularly want to, because once you see the holiness of God, you cannot be what you were.

23:15

To go back again to Isaiah, the distinctive name that Isaiah has for God over and over again after Isaiah 6 is the

23:26

Holy One of Israel. That just dominates

23:31

Isaiah's sense of God. Again, it doesn't sweep away any of the other things that Isaiah knows of this

23:38

God, but this Holy One, this is the one who is acting to save.

23:43

He is the one who will not share his glory with any others. He is the one who must be served by a holy people.

23:52

He is the one who will not tolerate anything that cuts across his majesty. He is the one who will stand against all idolatry and blasphemy and wickedness.

24:01

He is the one who will dwell with the man of a contrite and a broken heart. This is that God.

24:08

And in the absence of a biblically accurate and spiritually feeling sense of God in his holiness, we do not know

24:18

God and we will not respond to God as he really is. And that the result is men and women who profess the name of Christ, but have no appetite for holiness.

24:30

Men and women who dismiss or diminish the holy law of God who think that those things can be swept aside.

24:38

People who think that you can trust in God and yet live as you please. And perhaps in some senses, it's difficult to know which is worse.

24:51

The person who says that God may be holy, but that doesn't really matter. Or the person who claims to have a sense of God's holiness, but it doesn't work through us in the way that it should, that it doesn't compel us and constrain us.

25:08

That the holiness of God should bind us to God. It should put our feet upon the narrow path and keep us there.

25:17

And not in some sense of, who's that God watching over my shoulder? But this is something of what the true fear of God truly means.

25:25

That we know that this holy one has his eye upon us. And having redeemed us, our desire is to honor him.

25:34

We loathe the idea of dishonoring or displeasing our father who is in heaven.

25:40

So once you either dismiss or diminish the holiness of God, you're left with a church that is really no different from the world.

25:49

It can be what it wants, do what it wants, go where it wants, live how it pleases.

25:55

It stops being holy as God is holy. It loses its Christ -likeness.

26:01

I mean, what does God's holiness look like in human form? It looks like the incarnate son.

26:09

It looks like his perfect obedience. But obedience has become a dirty word in the modern church.

26:16

And yet it is in obeying God that we show our love to him.

26:21

It is in obedience to God that we attain more and more to the holiness which delights him.

26:32

And so this must be one of the great battles that, especially perhaps in the preaching of the word of God, and the preaching of God, and the preaching of Christ, that the holiness of God is magnified, not ranted about.

26:54

You couldn't exaggerate it in that sense. I mean, he is the perfectly holy God, but that that is presented in all its biblical fullness and richness, because it is still the holiness of God that makes us bow down and cry out concerning this one who is worthy to be worshipped, must be served, is worthy of all our praise, and all honor, and glory, and power.

27:24

The holiness of God is sweetly compelling when it grips our souls, and it is seen and known best in Christ Jesus.

27:33

You want to see the holiness of God, you must go to Calvary again, because that's where you see

27:38

God's holy hatred of sin, and his holy love for his people, and his holiness magnified in the manner in which he goes about conquering all his and our enemies, and making us his people.

27:56

Well, alas, sometimes in the lives of those who profess to be Christians, even sometimes of those who profess to be pastors and teachers of the

28:08

Word of God, whose lives do not match their words, and there is a kind of implausibility factor, therefore, that may be a hindrance to people from becoming

28:23

Christians, because they look at the lives of people and see inconsistencies.

28:29

We're all fallible, I realize that, but I'm talking about serious deficiencies and sins.

28:36

They see the lives of people and it seems to them that there's an implausibility there about the way in which people are living, and then they think that they can dodge the impact of the

28:48

Christian message. So it's a believing in coming to Christ.

28:54

That's a serious matter, the way in which sometimes people fall into sin, serious sin, and the holiness of God doesn't seem to be a felt thing.

29:06

It's rather a theological idea, something you preach about, talk about, rather than something that impacts upon your life.

29:16

We need, I think, a new generation of men and women who can be truly described as holy men and women, not holier than thou, but holy men and women.

29:27

I think that's one factor that is really very important today. The other is to put

29:34

God back where he belongs. When Paul wrote his letter to the

29:41

Corinthians in the opening two chapters, he spoke about the way in which God humbles men and women and exalts himself.

29:50

He does so in the gospel, the message of the gospel. He does so in the people he chooses, he calls ordinary people.

29:57

He does so in the means by which he communicates the gospel, the preaching of the Word. He does so by the way in which he has made the gospel known in the revelation of his will in Scripture.

30:07

In those opening two chapters of 1 Corinthians, what Paul is really saying is, he that glories, let him glory in the

30:15

Lord. No flesh should glory in his presence. The holiness of God means that we humble ourselves, we turn away from man -centeredness and honor him as God, worship him as God in our public worship, in our daily lives, in our relationships, in our callings, in everything that we are and are and have and seek to do, that God is the center of it all, not us.

30:52

Do we have historic examples of what it looks like when a people are gripped by the holiness of God? Well, the

31:00

Reformation was really about that because Luther and Calvin and the other reformers, they had come to experience for themselves the reality of God's holiness and his beauty, as well as the other attributes that are governed and controlled by his holiness.

31:24

So, for example, Martin Luther found that the justification of the sinner by the grace of God in Christ, that that was his entry into heaven.

31:36

It was his new birth into what he called paradise when he was converted.

31:42

It was that sense of God justifying the ungodly who believes in Jesus, the holy

31:48

God justifying the ungodly who believes in Jesus. It was that that really released him and gave him the burden to proclaim the gospel.

31:55

For Calvin, the glory of God, the honor of God, that was the key,

32:01

I think, to everything that he did and to everything that he wrote. It wasn't just one attribute of God that Calvin seized upon and developed, and sometimes people misunderstand him because they think that Calvin simply taught predestination and election and that was it.

32:20

No, it was the glory and the honor of God. It was the holy God whom he had come to know and love.

32:27

That was the key, I think, to Calvin's ministry and life. So the Reformation was really a rediscovery of the true meaning of God's holiness.

32:38

In times of revival, since that has also been the prevailing concern and the prevailing experience of God's people, the

32:50

Puritan period was really about holiness. It was about rediscovering again what it means to be a truly godly person and to live a truly godly life, a happy life, of course.

33:02

A godly life is a happy life. There have been these periods in the history of the church when it's as though the holy

33:11

God has borne in upon us and has made people very aware of who

33:17

He is and how life is to be lived for Him and for His honor.

33:28

What has happened in your own life to grow your love and appreciation of holiness? Well, I began to realize how wonderful God is.

33:40

My God, how wonderful Thou art. That really the purpose of my existence is to know

33:48

Him, to love Him, to enjoy Him, to serve Him. That began, that grows, of course.

33:58

I think the older we get and the closer we seek to live to the Lord, the more wonderful He becomes.

34:06

I suppose in a way, in a smaller way, it was rather like the experience of Jonathan Edwards who came to appreciate the glory of God in the works that he had made, the works of creation, in the love of husband and wife, in the harmonies of music, and supremely in the personal work of the

34:28

Lord Jesus Christ. The loveliness of God, the splendor of God, the beauty of God, the beauty of holiness, you just come to realize that He is the center of everything.

34:43

He is the one you want to adore and to love and to serve. You're very conscious, too, of your unworthiness and your smallness and of your failures and of the fact that you stagger very often and stumble.

34:58

But that's the thing that really gripped me, the wonderful holy love of God toward a sinful man like me.

35:09

I well remember being deeply moved by a story that a pastor once told in a crusade that we had in our home church.

35:19

His name was Omri Jenkins. He was head of a missionary organization called the

35:24

European Mission Fellowship. He was preaching one night on an occasion when he and a friend,

35:31

Paul Tucker, were looking for the grave of Spurgeon. They searched unsuccessfully for the grave and couldn't find it.

35:38

Eventually they did. Paul Tucker found it, and he motioned Omri Jenkins to come and join him. They stood around Spurgeon's grave, and what they saw there were the initials,

35:48

CHS, and underneath, Ere since by faith

35:54

I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply, Redeeming love has been my theme,

36:01

And shall be till I die. Then in a nobler, sweeter tongue

36:06

I'll sing Thy power to save, When this poor, lisping, stammering tongue

36:12

Lie silent in the grave. I was wonderfully moved that evening, just at the humility of the man, nothing about him,

36:23

CHS, everything about Christ, everything about the one who had redeemed him, the holy

36:29

Son of God who had come into the world to be his Savior. That, I think, is for me what has touched my heart the most.

36:40

The holiness of God is His beauty, and I want to see it more and more.

36:47

I look forward to heaven when we shall see it in its beauty and glory fully.

36:57

How did your experience of thinking of God and fearing His holiness shift and transition to loving

37:02

Him? Well, I was brought up in a Christian home, and one in which

37:09

I was taught the truth about the God of the Scriptures. And God, in His mercy, was pleased to ensure that, whatever else

37:20

I might have thought, I never had any doubt that the God of the Scriptures was the true and living

37:26

God, and really the only God who could be, that there was no other credible

37:35

God than the God of the Scriptures in all that He revealed Himself to be. But for me, knowing that I was a sinner, being aware of that, it meant that, first of all,

37:49

I thought, well, there must be something that I have to do to make myself acceptable to this God.

37:54

But there was nothing that I could do, and so I was in something of a downward spiral of despair, and it was only when, after a long and painful journey,

38:09

God was pleased to make plain that the whole point is there's nothing that I can do, that it has been done, and that this is the marvel of salvation, that God's redemption is something that has taken place outside of me, and is something that is held out to me and given to me, and that in Christ Jesus, that coming to Christ and laying all else and all others aside, certainly turning my back on my own self, and not only on my good deeds, but on my bad as well, in that sense, that I had to heap up all those things together and cast them both aside and come to the

38:54

Lord Jesus Christ. Now, because I'd spent too long looking at myself, wrenching away from that took, again, a measure of time, but I think as I began to grasp what

39:12

God in Christ had accomplished, that God became more and more...it's

39:24

hard to find words to express, but his holiness, his holiness, again, it hasn't stopped being awesome.

39:33

It hasn't stopped being crushing. The strange thing is that the closer we get to this holy

39:42

God, the more we feel our own sinfulness, and yet that holiness burns away that sin, changes our perspective on it.

39:53

It makes us want to be more like him. The old illustration of coming to the lamp, the closer you get to the lamp in the dark night, the more you see the filth that you had that you did not see when you were in the darkness.

40:08

I think when you think about the way the Apostle Paul speaks, if you work in time from 1

40:15

Corinthians 15, where he says that by the grace of God he is what he is, the least of the apostles, and you get into Ephesians, and there he's less than the least of all the saints, but to him this grace was given that he should preach among the

40:30

Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and then as you get into 1 Timothy, here he is now the chief of sinners, and I think that perhaps that progression reflects not only

40:44

Paul's deepening sense of his own sinfulness, but a corresponding sense of God's great holiness and great mercy, that Paul does not in any way have a reducing sense of the wickedness of his own heart as he goes on and grows in maturity as a

41:01

Christian, but the more he knows of God, the greater the holiness of God appears to him, and therefore the more marvelous the fact that this

41:14

God has crossed that breach as it were, that God has reached out and has made a way for sinful man to be reconciled to a holy

41:27

God, and it's out of that I think that the joy and the delight and the relief and the hope of salvation begin to bubble.

41:42

What must happen within the soul of a person for them to see the beauty of God? You must be born again.

41:50

That was our Lord's great message to Nicodemus, and as I think many people will know,

41:58

George Whitefield was once asked why he continually preached, you must be born again, and he replied, because you must.

42:07

The necessity of a new birth, the necessity of knowing the life of God in the soul of man,

42:14

God does that. He imparts the Holy Spirit to us. In a sense, salvation is all about that.

42:21

It's all about God giving us the Holy Spirit, God giving us repentance, God giving us faith, and the

42:28

Holy Spirit is the one who creates repentance and faith within us. We need to know

42:34

God working in us in that wonderfully powerful way. The new birth, it happens in different ways.

42:43

It's not sometimes as spectacular in some as it is in others. The Holy Spirit is likened to the wind, and there are hurricanes, there are gales, there are breezes.

42:55

Not everybody comes to know the Lord in precisely the same way. If they did, we should be a cultic, not a

43:02

Christian. No, no, it's all to do with the wonderful way in which the

43:07

Holy Spirit comes and dwells in the heart of a sinful man, creating new desires, new attitudes, new concerns, new ambitions, and ultimately enabling us to live new lives in Christ.

43:27

How can those in Christ describe God's holiness as beautiful or lovely? Well, God's holiness is beautiful inherently, but the beauty of his holiness is terrifying to those who are outside of Christ.

43:43

But in Christ, this God is reconciled to us, that his wrath is turned away, that the sword of his justice has been hammered into a shield that protects us, that the very holiness that was before a terror to us has become a delight to us, that this excellence, this moral glory, this spotless purity that belongs to God, that this is now the most entrancing and delightful thing imaginable, and not only looking at it from without, but something that we are called to pursue for ourselves, so that God, and this is a wonder,

44:34

God says, be holy as I am holy, that what he is in his own moral being is something to which we ought to aspire as those who are now made new in Christ Jesus.

44:48

And so with those aspects of the holiness of God not removed,

44:54

God isn't again diminished, God doesn't become less in our eyes, but we see him with new eyes, we have a way, as the writer to the

45:04

Hebrews says, into the holiest place of all, that that place from which we were once barred, lest we be consumed by God in his holy glory, is now the very place into which we come as his children and are made able to stand and to deal with him as this holy

45:24

God. In essence we're where Isaiah was, having been cleansed, our relationship with God is now radically altered, so that what was once awesome to us is still awesome, but now beautiful and delightful in a way that it could not have been when we were under the wrath of that God.