Fear and Trembling with R. C. Sproul, “Inner Sanctum,” 3

A few years ago a survey was taken outside of Chicago in which people were visited who at one time in their lives had been members of Christian churches but who dropped out of their membership. And so the questionnaire these people were asked to fill out included questions like these.

And the main question was, why did you stop going to church? And when the results came in they tabulated the answers that a couple of thousand people gave and the number one answer that people gave for dropping out of church was this, church is boring.

The number two answer given by these people who quit going to church was the answer, church is irrelevant. Now let me ask you that question, do you ever get the feeling that church is boring? Have you ever been bored in church?

Don't lie. Have you ever felt that what was going on in church was irrelevant? You know, asking yourself, what in the world am I doing here? Well when I heard the results of that survey, I thought again to the narratives that we find in sacred Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament, of what happens when people encounter God.

We've already seen what happened to Isaiah when he got an unveiled manifestation of the character of God. Let me ask you this, was he bored?

No, no way.

I mean he was on his face, he's screaming in pain, you know, and cursing himself. How did Job respond when God manifested Himself to him? Job says, I will speak no more against you. I'll take my hand and place it over my mouth.

I'll repent in dust and ashes. Habakkuk went up into his watchtower, remember, and he was shaking his fist in the face of God and demanding answers from God. And finally God came to him, and Habakkuk said, and when He came, my lips quivered, my belly trembled, rottenness came into my bones.

You look at it, and you'll see that not everybody who meets God in the Scripture has the same reaction. Some tremble, some get all excited, some rejoice, some fall in a swoon, they pass out and everything, but you will never ever find in the Bible an example of somebody's meeting the living God and being bored, because there is nothing less boring in all of reality than God Himself.

And can you imagine somebody like Isaiah having this experience of seeing God high and lifted up and walking out of that situation, going out on the street and saying, hmm, so what?

Big deal.

I mean, that was irrelevant. If God is holy, in fact if God is, that's all we have to say, it's the most relevant affirmation any creature can ever understand. And that's why it boggles my mind when people are saying that the reason they don't go to church or that they drop out of church is because they're bored and because they find it irrelevant.

That tells me one thing. It tells me that when they come to church, they're not having any kind of encounter.

With the living God.

They're coming to a human gathering that is focused on humans and not on Him. I also talked to a lady from San Francisco who's a practicing psychologist. She came up to me and she was very angry. And she was angry with her minister, and I said, what's the matter?

And she said, I'm convinced that our minister does everything in his power to conceal from us the real character of God. I said, what do you mean? She says, well, he never talks about the wrath of God.

He never talks about the justice of God. He never talks about the sovereignty of God, and he certainly never talks about the holiness.

Of God.

All he talks about is the goodness of God, the love of God, the mercy of God. He just tells us what we want to hear. But he's afraid that if he preaches the whole counsel of God and sets forth the whole character of God as God reveals Himself in Scripture, that people will be upset and they will quit going to church.

The Modern Idolatry of a Customized God

That's our modern version of idolatry. In the ancient world, idolatry was practiced by people, you know, going into their workshop and taking a piece of wood and then getting their knife and sharpening the knife and carving and shaving this block of wood into the figure of a person or some kind of an animal, and then put the knife down and polish up this wood very nicely, then take out the whisk broom and whisk up the sawdust and the wood shavings, and then carefully throw those in the garbage and go put the knife away in the closet, and then they were done.

They get down on their knees in front of this block of wood and start talking to it and asking it to protect them, asking it to meet their needs and so on. What could be sillier? Well, we're more sophisticated in that.

Instead of fashioning idols out of stone or out of wood, what we do is we go to the Scripture with scissors and paste, and we construct for ourself a God who has been stripped of the attributes that we don't like, the attributes that frighten us.

I remember once lecturing on the holiness of God, and some little old lady objected at the end. She says, well, my God is a God of love. And I said, well, how many gods are there? Is there one for you and one for me?

I said, is God like a smorgasbord restaurant where you can go with your tray through the line, and you take the attributes of God that you like, you take a little spoonful of love, a little spoonful of goodness, a little spoonful of mercy, and a ladleful of grace, and then you pass on the sovereignty, the justice, the wrath, and the holiness?

You see, the same place where we find out that God is a God of love is the same source that we get that He's holy. So, like it or not, the God who is is a God who is holy. And if we're going to relate to God as He is, we have to take His holiness seriously.

The Meaning of Holiness as Greatness and Otherness

Well, what are we talking about? What do we mean when we say that God is holy? What comes into your mind when you think of that word holy? What does it mean to be holy? Well, the simplest answer I can give to that, I learned with the first little prayer that I learned in my family when I was a little boy.

My grandmother would visit our house, and she would insist that before we ate our dinner that we had to say a little table grace. And she taught me this little table grace to recite before the dinner was served, and we would say this.

I never could really figure out how this worked, but it was, God is great, God is good, and we thank Him, help me, for this food. But my grandmother said food to make it rhyme. God is great, God is good, and thank Him for this food, because good and food, you know.

So in any case, that was the first prayer. I didn't have any theological understanding of that, but it says in that little kid's prayer two things about God. It said that He's great, and it says that He's good.

And we have one word in biblical terms that captures both of these ideas about God, and it is the word holy. Now, usually when I ask people to define holiness, or the word holy, they will answer my question something like this.

They'll say, well, to be holy means to be really good, or really righteous, or in fact to be perfectly pure, without any defects, without anything soiling our character, or so on. And so to be really holy is to be perfectly pure.

Now, the Bible does use the term holy like that, and when the Bible says, you shall be holy even as God is holy, that's the reference it's making there, that we are supposed to mirror and reflect the character of God, His righteousness.

We're supposed to behave in such a way that mirrors His own behavior. But that's the secondary meaning of the term holy in the Bible. It's a legitimate use of the word holy, and one of the ways in which it is, in fact, used, but it, in terms of numerical frequency, is second.

The primary meaning of the term holy refers to what we would call the otherness of God.

The greatness of God.

The sense in which God is different from you, from me, and anything in this created order. Now, it refers to His transcendent majesty, that majesty that is high and above anything in the created realm.

God as the Supreme Being Who Simply Is

Now, sometimes when we talk about God, particularly when we're teaching theology and things of that sort, we can define God as the supreme being, and we define ourselves as human beings. You know, what's the difference between a human being and the supreme being?

Have you ever wondered about that? What is it about God that makes Him different or other than a human being? What is it about God that makes Him supreme over all things? Well, there's some irony here.

There's a little surprise in this definition, and it's this. You know, if you really want to find out what the difference is between the supreme being and the human being is, it's found in this word, being, because, you know, we're really not beings because being, to be, is to be in a state of pure essence that never changes.

Anything that changes, like you, you're getting older since you started here this morning.

Did you know that?

You're changing. We all change, don't we? We get older, we get thinner, we get fatter, we get taller, whatever, we are becoming. We are always moving. We're always changing. There's nothing permanent about who we are.

But God is never changing. God never grows older or taller or heavier because He is eternally perfect in who He is and what He is. Now, the biggest difference between every creature and God is this, that I as a creature cannot live by my own power.

I had a beginning in time, didn't I? I have a birthday, just so do you. How long can you live without oxygen?

Not very.

How long can you live without water? Not very long. How long can you live without food? If you lack these things, what happens? You die because you're a dependent creature. You're fragile. Your life could end this afternoon, but God can't die.

He doesn't need water, He doesn't need food, He doesn't need anything because He has the power to be in and of Himself. And not only does He have the power to be in and of Himself, but He holds the power of everybody's existence.

You know, the Bible says, in Him we live and move and have our lives, and we live and move and have our being. You can't move apart from the power of God. You can't live apart from the power of God. You can't be apart from the power of God because only God possesses being in Himself, of Himself and by Himself.

You don't have that power, and I don't have that power, and the universe doesn't have.

That power.

We have people falling all over themselves in this day and age trying to account for you and that table and this universe for being without appealing to God. And they'll say such things as, you know, the universe just exploded into being by itself.

They resort to total irrational ideas to get away from it. And you have to understand that if anything exists right now, if you exist, if that table exists, if that book exists, if that rug exists, if there's anything in existence, then something must have eternal being.

Because if there ever was a time that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, you don't have to be a rocket scientist or a philosopher to know that if there ever was a time there was absolutely nothing, think about it, absolutely nothing, what could there possibly be now?

But there is something. So somewhere, somehow, transcendently, something has to have the power of being or nothing could be, and that belongs to God and to God alone. Only God has the greatness of having the power of being within Himself.

And when you contemplate that very concept of pure being, you come up on tiptoe, and you begin to look down into the deepest question the mind can ever contemplate when you contemplate the idea of pure being.

The Mysterium Tremendum and Fear Before the Holy

Now early in the twentieth century, a philosopher who was also a sociologist studied various world religions and beyond the pale of Christianity and examined how people in different cultures, different parts of the world, and different societies reacted or responded to whatever they thought was holy.

And he found that there's a kind of pattern, a uniform pattern across the world that anytime a human being comes into an encounter with that which they regard as sacred or holy, the universal reaction is the same, fear.

And this theologian, anthropologist, sociologist identified this feeling as what he called the mysterium tremendum, the tremendous mystery. And the mysterium part and the tremendum part as well calls attention to how we respond to the holy.

Now, I can remember something that none of you can remember in your lifetime, the advent of broadcast television. I'm old enough that I grew up as a kid not watching TV, but listening to the radio before television came out.

And when you listened to the radio every night and all these different programs that were on there, you had to use your imagination. They had all kinds of adventure stories and cops and robbers stories and all the rest.

But there was one story on Sunday night that was the scariest story of all. And they had a couple of stories that were scary. One of them was called suspense, you know, kind of eerie. But the scariest one, the lead-in to this radio program is you would hear this crypt, this cemetery vault door creaking open at night.

You'd hear this thing creak open on the radio, and then this ungodly voice would come on the air and announce the program. And you know what the program was called?

Inner Sanctum.

Well, it never really registered on me when I was a kid. When I'd listen to this program and get scared to death, I just knew that there was this creaky door and the scary voice, but I never really thought about the title of the program.

But the title of the program, Inner Sanctum, means within the holy. And then when I discovered the character of God, I said, hmm, no wonder the entertainment industry in this country, when they were trying to find some way to scare the bajabbers out of people with a radio program, they intuitively understood that the scariest thing they could come up with was to be in the inner chamber where God was, where the holy was, like in Israel, where the innermost portion of the tabernacle and of the temple was the Sanctus Sanctorum, the holy of holies, where only one person was allowed to enter and that person only once a year.

And even then, after he had gone through an elaborate ritual of cleansing, because you see, there was a barrier there. And the barrier, the reason for the barrier was simple. God who dwells in the holy of holies is Himself altogether holy, and we are not holy.

And those who are not holy fear whatever is holy. The Bible tells us that it is the reaction of fallen creatures to flee when no man pursues, that the pagan trembles at the rustling of a leaf. Tell a story of a friend of mine who was a professional golfer, and he was out one afternoon getting ready to play in a tournament on the tour.

And on the day before the tournament started, there was a practice round, and the practice round was made up of a foursome of four men. The man who was the reigning champion of this particular event, who also was the previous year's player of the year, and he had three people playing with him in this tournament.

He had Jack Nicklaus, he had the President of the United States, and he had Billy Graham. So imagine a foursome of Nicklaus, the reigning guy, I'm not going to give you his name, the President of the United States, and Billy Graham.

So my friend watched these guys tee off, and then he did his practice, and then at the end of the day, he watched when this foursome finished their round, and his buddy, the other golfer, came off the 18th green, and my friend walked up to him and he said, geez, tell me what it was like playing golf with Billy Graham.

And the guy snapped and about bit his head off, he says, I don't need to have him trying to shove religion down my throat. And he stormed off and went to the practice tee, got a bucket of balls, took out his driver and started beating those balls to death.

And my friend just patiently stood there and watched him until the guy cooled off, and he finally said to him, he said, did Billy really come on strong to you on the golf course? The guy sighed and put his driver in his bag, and he turned to my friend and he said, no, he said, no, actually, he said, Billy never said a word.

I just had a bad round.

What's going on there?

This guy was very uncomfortable in the presence of Billy Graham. Billy never said a word to him, but everybody in the world knew what Billy Graham stood for and what he represented. And this man was uncomfortable and probably would have gone home and said, Billy Graham is one of these holier-than-thou's, self-righteous, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You don't, if you're a Christian, you never have to say a word to anybody. If people know you're a Christian, you're going to be accused of being self-righteous, even if you've never thought about being self-righteous, because you represent something that actually none of us are in and of ourselves.

You represent the one who is holy. And there is a natural, built-in discomfort with every human being. That's why people flee from God. That's why churches compromise the integrity of the message of the Scripture, because we know people are afraid of the God who really is.

Coming Near to God Through Christ Without Losing Reverence

That's the great tragedy, because what Christianity is saying to all of us is that in Christ, God removes the veil. He doesn't stop being holy, but He says to those who are unholy, He gives to us the righteousness of Christ.

So He said, you can come into my presence, you don't have to be afraid. I'm giving you peace. I'm giving you access. Come near to me. But it's the hardest thing that we ever can learn. And there's a sense in which even in Christ, we will always have, I hope, a healthy fear, the fear of respect, the fear of awe, that when we contemplate who He is, we will still have the capacity to tremble before Him.