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.
