Month: February 2016

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Gen 1:3)

Is anything too hard for the Lord? (Gen 18:14)

Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea — the Lord on high is mighty. (Ps 93:4)

Lord God Almighty, let us not merely comprehend that You can do many things. Let us see Your power at work around us. Grant us confidence as we live life that You can do anything. Give us faith to act on Your mighty power, and let us remember that the immensity of Your power makes us weaker than babes in Your sight.

It is a marvelous thing to sit and look on something as powerful as Niagara Falls, to be confronted with something before which we are helpless. We are reminded quickly of our own weakness. It is not that we humans are completely powerless creatures, for we have the power to harness the power the Falls produces. It is that, strong as we think we might be, the Falls confronts us with the fact that there are simply some things we cannot do. Nature can humble us. When a hurricane strikes the coast, people flee. Some things we cannot control.

But God has made Niagara Falls, and God has made the ocean, and the imparted power which they have is nothing to God. Nature has limited power. Humanity has limited power. God has all power. He is the Almighty. He can snap His fingers and scatter stars across the sky. He can cure a child from an incurable disease. He can speak a word and bring a billion-man army to its knees. He can raise a Savior from the grave. Such is the power of God.

Is there something you think He cannot do? Then your God is not the God of the Bible, for the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is God Almighty. Job was right to say, “I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted” (Jb 42:2). To deny the miraculous is to deny the Almighty. He created this world.  He can do with it as He pleases.  He also gave you your life.  He can do with it as He pleases.

When we live as if the only forces on Earth are physical, political, economic, or cultural, we deny the Almighty.  When we mentally strip the power of God from history, we also strip Him from our lives as well.  We forget that He controls our destiny, that He works in history, that He hears prayer and can actually do something about it.

To think that our circumstances are beyond the hand of God is foolheartedness. He can handle the universe, and He can handle what you are going through.  In this sense the power of God is a great comfort.

It is also humbling.  Presidents and wealthy men think themselves powerful.  They do not understand power.  If they did, they would humble themselves before it.  And so would we.

If we saw it.

There is no one holy like the Lord; there is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God. (I Sam 2:2)

 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling one to another:

 “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

“Woe is me!” I cried. “I am ruined! 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.” (Is 6:1-5)

God Most Holy, I am a man of unclean lips, a sinful creature. How can I comprehend Your holiness? And yet it is right for me to think on it. Show me Your blazing purity.  Give to me a vision of Your holy nature.  But have mercy.  Give me what I can handle but increase what I can handle so that I can know You more. Give me this vision not that I might merely know but that I might fall before You in worship and that I might live before You in right fear and with a right heart.

Whatever is holier than we is a mystery to us. Unholy people cannot understand a righteous man. His ways are an enigma to them. And the righteous man will be the first to tell you that he is not so righteous as people think. So if we have difficulty understanding a righteous man, what shall we do when we find a holiness so pure, so white, so bright and burning that viewing it would bring terror to the stoutest heart. Sometimes Christians talk too glibly about yearning to see God. We should have such yearning indeed, but seeing God is no small matter, and we ought not think of it lightly, as we might think of seeing our dad in Chicago. We can be like James and John asking for what we do not understand. To see God is to come before holiness. Take off your shoes. Cover your mouth. Fall on your face. The holiness of God is not some kind of relative holiness as we might find in a man or woman.  The holiness of God is absolute.  It is the fountainhead of all holiness.  Nothing on earth compares to it. Isaiah was a righteous man, but the veiled picture Isaiah saw in the temple caused him to bemoan his sinful state: “Woe is me. I am ruined.” To see the holiness of God is to see our own wicked hearts for what they are and to realize that we do not belong in such a presence. The person who sees himself as a decent fellow knows nothing of the holiness of God.

Everything God is and everything God does is holy. He is blindingly pure and fervently separate from everything we are and do. That is what holiness is. Separateness. God is not like us. Fresh snow is as scarlet beside Him. We cannot see or understand the holiness of God in the raw. We can have a sense of it. Luther did and it caused him to unravel. Some may have special visions of it as Isaiah did and perhaps the mystics. We worship Him because of it. We change our lives because of it, for His holiness is the source of ours, but we can never fully grasp the overwhelming purity and separateness of the Living God.