The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Holiness is the attribute of God mentioned more than any other in the Bible. Yet it's one of the hardest of his qualities to understand from a human point of view. How can we be holy when the Bible tells us that only God himself is holy?

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Men seek holiness through their attempts at keeping the law, by trying to obtain sinless perfection through rituals and self-denial. But the problem lies in the fact that we are just not holy.

Let's join Dr. Boice as he examines Psalm 99 and discover God's answer to the seemingly unsolvable mystery of answering his call to be holy as I am holy.

Dr. James Boice: We're studying Psalm 99 this morning and it's a psalm about the holiness of God. It's also about the kingly reign of God, which is the way it begins, "The Lord reigns." It's the third of the psalms in the Psalter to start this way or contain those words. It's also next to last of this group of psalms that we're studying that have to do with the kingly reign of God. They're called the kingly psalms.

But it is also true that it's chiefly about God's holiness. This is the aspect of it that is brought forward. We have to understand this if we're to appreciate it. Now it's impossible to miss the emphasis because the words "He is holy" or "The Lord our God is holy" are repeated three times. You find it in verse three at the end of stanza one, in verse five at the end of stanza two, and at the very end of the psalm.

Now not only is it difficult to miss the importance of that theme for this psalm, it's also difficult to miss the importance of holiness as an attribute of God in the Bible generally. This is the attribute of God which is mentioned more often than anything else, much more than sovereignty, although people in the Reformed tradition particularly like that, much more than words like justice, though people who are concerned with social action are often very interested in that, much more than even a mention of God being love or references to his compassion or his mercy.

It's the only attribute of God that is repeated three times over in the same verse like this: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty." I'm sure you know that in the ancient world where they didn't have the ways of emphasizing things that we do in print. If we are writing a document and we want to call attention to some statement, we can italicize it or print it in boldface. We can also make it a subheading as part of a major article that we're writing.

They didn't have any of those means of doing that, and so one of the ways they had of drawing special attention to a statement was to repeat it. We have one good example of that in the words of Jesus Christ who frequently began something that he was about to say with the words, "Verily, verily," or "Truly, truly." It was a way of saying, this is important, this is important, or pay attention to this, pay attention to this. You get the idea.

Now if it's true that to repeat something a second time calls special attention to it and says this is important, how so if you do it three times as you do with the word holy? "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty." It's a way of saying that it is superlatively important.

Now as we read the Bible and look at this theme, we discover that only God is holy. We read verses like this: "Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy" (Revelation 15:4). Or again, God is said to be majestic in his holiness, which of course is the major theme of Psalm 99. Exodus 15:11: "Who among the gods is like you, O Lord? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?"

You know when people in the Bible are given visions of heaven or they see the throne of God, what they report to us is that this is what the angels are saying around the throne of God. Isaiah heard them sing, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory." You go to the end of the Bible, you find John the Evangelist doing the same thing in the book of Revelation: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come."

Now it's significant that the Bible also commands the people of God to join with the angels in exactly this kind of worship. Psalm 30, verse four: "Sing to the Lord, you saints of his; praise his holy name."

Now when we begin to talk about holiness, we have to recognize that we're talking about a word that is very difficult to define. As a matter of fact, it's impossible to define it adequately because it has to do with God as he is in himself and by definition in those things that set him apart from us. We're not at all holy. God is holy, and so we don't really have a point of contact when we talk about the holiness of God.

We ought to look at the outline of the psalm because it's going to help us get into it. It does it this way. You can divide it into a couple parts. One way of doing that is to recognize that verse five and verse nine are identical and so get two parts from it. Some of the commentators do that. You can divide it into three parts because the words "He is holy" are repeated three times at the end of the first, second, and fourth stanzas.

Or if you want to look at the places where God is worshiped and approach it that way, you find that there are four places: between the cherubim, at his footstool, from the pillar of the cloud, at his holy mountain. And if you follow that, then you divide it into four sections as the New International Version seems to have done as they have printed it out for us. I think the best way to do it is to divide it into the three sections because the theme really is holiness and these tell us important things about holiness.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon had a title for the psalm. He called this the "Holy, Holy, Holy Psalm." Very good title. And J. J. Stewart Perowne wrote rightly, "In this psalm not only the righteous sway of the king, but also his awful holiness forms the subject of praise."

I'm going to use that phrase, his awful holiness, because it causes us to pause and think about this holiness of God. What is this that we're talking about? As I said, this isn't easy to define. It's difficult to define.

The first stanza is emphasizing the awesome nature of this because it's comparing the throne of God and the glory of God somewhat to the throne of an earthly monarch and the throne of an earthly monarch and it's saying we ought to stand in awe of God and his holiness somewhat the way we stand in awe of the great of this world. And yet when you make a comparison like that, you're speaking in a terribly inadequate way because strictly speaking there's no real comparison between anything human and what's divine.

We're not talking here about an earthly throne room or an earthly throne and certainly not an earthly king. We're talking about God in his heaven, heavenly Zion, and the cherubim between which he is described as being enthroned are not brass replicas of figures that you might find on earth but the awesome glorious angels that surround the throne of God in heaven.

Now this vision that we have in this first stanza, the Lord exalted, enthroned between the cherubim causing the earth to shake, is something that we find wherever we catch a vision of what heaven is like and the throne of God is like elsewhere in Scripture. I've already referred to Isaiah. That's probably the best known of all the passages, although there are similar descriptions in Psalm 18 or in the book of Ezekiel, the first and the tenth chapters, or again in the book of Revelation.

But as I say, this great vision of Isaiah, which he records in the sixth chapter of his book, is probably the best known. He tells us there that he had this vision in the year that King Uzziah died. That doesn't seem to mean much more to us than a bare historical reference, but it's significant that this king Uzziah had lived a long, long time and reigned over the nation for 52 years.

That would mean that most of the people who were living at that time had never lived under the guidance of any other king. He would have been an institution that seemed virtually permanent. And yet he died. And certainly it would have been a shock for the nation and a time of anxiety as they wondered now what in the world's going to happen now that this good King Uzziah has finally died.

Now it was in that year that God gave Isaiah this vision and what he sees is the King of kings sitting upon a throne. It's a way of telling Isaiah and all who would read his prophecy that though the kingdoms of this world rise and fall and though the leaders of this world flourish and die, there is a king who endures forever and a Lord of lords whose throne is never shaken.

And so Isaiah describes his vision and here's what he says: the Lord was seated on a throne, high and exalted, the very language that we find in Psalm 99. 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, with two they were flying, and they were calling to one another, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory." And Isaiah says that at the sound of their voices, the doorpost and the thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

Now what does it mean to say that God is holy? We make a great mistake at this point when we begin with the idea of righteousness or moral perfection. It's what we normally think of and it's part of what holiness is about, we come to it in time, but as I say, we make a mistake when we begin there simply because it limits our idea of what holiness really is. There are several aspects to holiness. I say even as I begin to talk about them that they don't exhaust the idea, and even when we talk about them we don't talk about them adequately.

But to give some idea of what's involved, let me say that holiness really has to do with God being different from us. In other words, it has to do with difference or separation. The theological term for it is transcendence rather than with moral qualities primarily. Perhaps the best way to illustrate that is by our use or the Bible's use of the word saint or sanctify, which are the exact equivalent of the word holy or holify except we don't use the word holify in the English language.

Holy comes from the Germanic languages. You talk about the Bible in German as das Heilige Bibel and if you talk about the Bible in French it's la Sainte Bible where you get the word saint or holy, but that's exactly the same thing.

Now recognizing that, let's ask the question, what is it that constitutes a saint or how do you sanctify something? The Old Testament, they sanctified all the vessels that were going to be used in the temple worship. What does it mean to sanctify the vessel? It doesn't mean you change the vessel somehow so it becomes more morally pure than it was before. What it means is the vessels were set apart to a sacred use, not to be used in common ways. They were different because they were set apart. And in exactly the same way saints are saints, not because they live particularly holy lives, though they ought to, but because they're set apart to the service of God. It's why every single Christian, if he or she really is a Christian, is called a saint.

So when we talk about holiness, we're talking about the same thing and we're saying holiness is what sets God apart. Now what does it involve? First of all, majesty. That's what comes to the fore first of all when we read these opening verses of the psalm because majesty is the thing that's associated with a prominent and powerful ruler. It's the characteristic of kings. It links holiness to sovereignty, which is why in the psalm the stanza that begins with a statement about God's rule, verse one, "The Lord reigns," ends with a statement of his holiness, "He is holy." So God in his holiness is majestic. The description of the holy God is always a one who sits in awesome state.

Secondly, there's the element of will, which is to say a will of a sovereign personality. In other words, this majesty of God is not merely a passive thing, but this is a very active thing. God has his will set upon certain things. I suppose our best way of talking about that is personality. We talk about people who have a strong personality. You seem to know where they're going, forceful. Well if you can just elevate that to the highest possible degree beyond actually any understanding that you and I might have, that is what God is like. If you ask the question, well what is his will set upon? The answer is it's set upon being God. It's why the Bible has so much to say about the jealousy of God. It's not a bad quality in God. It's that quality in God that says, I'm God and therefore nothing else can take my place. When Satan tried to do it, Satan was judged. When you and I try to do it, we are judged as well.

That brings us to a third quality of holiness and that is wrath. We don't normally think of the holiness of God having to do with wrath, but if God's holiness involves a will which is set upon God being God and the judgment of all that tries to usurp the place of God, the judgment that's involved in the expression of the will of the holy God is a wrathful judgment. That's why when people stand before the throne of God, they're overcome with a sense of their own sin and they cry out in agony, feeling that they perhaps are about to be destroyed.

And then finally, here's where righteousness comes in. Because when we're talking about wrath, it's wrath against sin. It has to do with moral standards. We ask what is right? Right is the character of God. It's involved in his very personality, his very nature.

But you see here's where our problem comes in. That's why we have so much trouble talking about the holiness of God. The difficulty is that you and I are not holy. We're not holy even in the lesser sense of moral righteousness, not to mention the transcendent sense that involves majesty and will and wrath. We are sinners and therefore to be confronted with the holiness of God in any meaningful way is not an elevating pleasant kind of thing that you and I can boast about, "Oh, isn't it wonderful how well I know God?" It's never like that. The more you know God, the more aware you are of your sin. And that's why when the presence of God is felt in special ways as it sometimes is in worship services and certainly is in times of revivals, people are conscious of sin and they bow down in awe before God's holiness. They don't get chummy with him.

You know what happened when Isaiah had his vision of God? He didn't go away saying, this is neat, I got to see heaven, I'll go write it down. He said, "Woe is me." Woe, the very word that Jesus is used pronouncing judgment on the Pharisees and the hypocrites. "Woe is me," says Isaiah. "I am undone because I'm a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips and mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."

Habakkuk had an experience like that. He was asking God to do what was right and God said he was going to do it, it was going to involve the judgment of his own people. When God spoke to Habakkuk, he was so overcome with dread at the presence of God that he said he actually trembled. I love this verse 3:16: "I heard and my heart pounded, my lips quivered at the sound; decay crept into my bones and my legs trembled." Job said when God spoke to him, "I despise myself and I repent in dust and ashes." These encounters show that the experience of confronting the holy God is awe-inspiring, even life-threatening, which is exactly what the psalm is talking about in stanza one.

Now that raises the question, how in the world you and I are ever going to approach him? And I want to suggest that that's what this second stanza is all about. I said that the fourth element of holiness is moral uprightness or righteousness and this is developed in the second stanza, verses four and five, especially in terms of God's righteous rule among his people and over the nations. Look at it. He said to love justice, to have established equity and to have done always what is right. And therefore, we must exalt the Lord our God and worship at his footstool.

And of course how do you do that with a holy God? The answer is in that reference to the footstool. Sometimes when we read a psalm like this we pass over it lightly because what does that mean, a footstool? If we're thinking in terms of an earthly king or an earthly throne, that would be the platform upon which the throne is set. That would be the footstool of the king. But we're not talking about an earthly king, we're talking about the God of the universe. What is the footstool of God? Well the Bible answers that in different ways.

It could be the earth itself. Isaiah 66:1 says heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. Could be Mount Zion, that is Jerusalem, in a more particular way. There's several references to that in Isaiah. What I want to suggest here is that it is probably the Ark of the Covenant and that if Jerusalem is called the footstool of God it's because that's where the Ark of the Covenant rested. For example, 1st Corinthians 28:2, David, the author of many of the psalms, refers to the Ark of the Covenant as the footstool of our God.

Now why is that the footstool and why is that significant? Well I've talked about the Ark of the Covenant before. It's not a hard concept. The Ark was a box about a yard long, a foot and a half deep and wide. It was covered with gold. It contained the law of Moses, the stone tablets. Had a covering on it called the mercy seat made out of pure gold. At either end of the mercy seat there were cherubim, figures of angels that faced one another, their wings went backward and upward and just about met over the top of the mercy seat.

Now that Ark of the Covenant was understood to be the dwelling place of God. He dwelt in a symbolic way between the wings of the cherubim. So with that in mind, you can understand how the Ark would be called his footstool. That's where he reigned. And when the Ark was taken up to Jerusalem, it was understood that God in some kind of special way had come to dwell with his people figuratively but powerfully.

So that's the Ark. Now the Ark is a picture of judgment because it contains the law of God and you and I have broken the law of God. It says in this stanza that God loves justice, he's established equity, he's always done what is just and right, but you and I do not do always what is just and right. We do not love equity, we prefer ourselves before others and we certainly are not just. And the law exposes that. And so the picture of the Ark is the picture of the holy God looking down upon the law which you and I have broken and a picture of the reality and the necessity of judgment upon you and me for my sin and your sin.

But you see the Ark is also a picture of God's mercy because it was there on the covering called the mercy seat that the high priest once a year brought the blood of an animal that had been killed in the adjoining courtyard. High priest first of all made a sacrifice for his own sin, clothed himself in white raiment so he could go into the holy place and then he performed a sacrifice on behalf of the sin of the people and he took that blood into the most holy place and sprinkled it upon the mercy seat so that the blood came between the symbolic presence of the holy God and the law which we have broken.

You see now it becomes a picture of mercy because God when he looks down sees not the law which we have broken but he sees the blood of the innocent sacrifice. He knows that atonement has been made, punishment has been meted out and now God in mercy and grace, compassion is able to reach out and save and bless the sinner.

Now that's the only way that you and I can approach the holy God. If we would approach him in our sin apart from the blood of Jesus Christ what would happen? We would be consumed instantly because we're told in Hebrews our God is a consuming fire. But when we come on the basis of the shed blood of Christ we find that we can not only come but that God is there willing, loving, anxious to receive us and hear our request. So I ask the question, have you come to God in that way? If you haven't come to God through faith in Jesus Christ and his atoning death for your sins you've not really come to God at all. And one day you will have to. You'll stand before his judgment and you will be condemned.

Well the final section of this three-part psalm, which in the New International Version contains two stanzas, we break away from this picture of heaven that we've had in the first two stanzas and suddenly we're here on earth and we find the psalmist talking about some leaders of the people. He talks about Moses, Aaron, and Samuel and of their wilderness experience when God spoke to them from the cloud.

Now whenever we come to a change like that in the psalms, it seems very abrupt to us. This is not the way we would write and the scholars, many of them, the liberal ones especially, don't like it and sometimes they say, well it must be the result of some mishandling of this material. Two separate psalms, you see, that somehow got wrongly joined together. Well you might get away with that kind of an explanation once, but there's a lot of this in the psalms. And if you approach them with any kind of scholarly humility, which I admit is very difficult to achieve when you come to it, recognizing that you may actually be mistaken and God is right, you find that the psalms do this a lot and do it effectively.

What happens here, of course, this change is to remind us that it's not only the holy angels in heaven that worship God clustered around his throne calling holy, holy, holy. It's people who are called to worship God as well. Moses did it and Aaron did it and Samuel did it and not only that, God received them because they came by the blood of the sacrifice and God answered their prayers. You see, that's what it says at the end. If we will come to God in this way, we'll discover that God does two things. First of all, he answers prayer, verse six. Moses, Aaron, and Samuel called on the Lord and he answered them. And secondly, he will forgive their sin because it says verse eight, "You were to Israel a forgiving God, even though you punished their misdeeds."

Now let me wrap this up and apply it in some helpful ways. A number of consequences that flow from this. We've talked about the holiness of God and how we approach him. Let me say number one, if God is holy, we must be holy too if we're his people. That's what Peter writes about, 1st Peter 1:15, "But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do, for it is written, be holy because I am holy." In other words, holiness is not an option for Christians.

Number two, if we are not holy, and we are not, we have to flee to Christ for forgiveness and cleansing. Notice that at the end of this psalm, there's a slight change. Remember it says, "He is holy" a couple times, and you get to the very end, "He is holy" is changed to "Our God is holy." That surely is significant, isn't it? It's a way of saying God needs to be our God and the holy God becomes our God when we approach him through faith in Jesus Christ. He becomes our God by atonement for our sins and by forgiveness. So it's only the forgiven who can worship at God's holy mountain.

Number three, if we know God, we must worship him. At the beginning of the psalm, the nations are exhorted to praise God, which they may or may not do, but regardless of how the nations as a whole respond in their worship or non-worship of God, God it says is great in Zion. That means that he is great among his people. We're his people, he better be great among us and we better worship him well.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon wrote: "The ignorant forget him, the wicked despise him, the atheists oppose him, but among his own chosen God is great beyond comparison. He is great in the esteem of the gracious, great in his acts of mercy and really great in himself, great in his mercy, in his power, wisdom, justice, and his glory."

Now let me give you a conclusion that comes not from my own words but from the Bible itself, from the book of Hebrews. This is the 12th chapter of Hebrews beginning with verse 18. Author of Hebrews is wrapping all this up and here is what he says: "You," he's speaking to believers, "have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that's burning with fire, to darkness, gloom, and storm, to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words so that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them because they couldn't bear what was commanded."

God said, "If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned." The sight was so terrifying that even Moses said, "I'm trembling with fear." "No, you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that can never be shaken, let us be thankful and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire." And he really is and worshiping him is what every one of us must do.

Our Father, when we come to you, we hardly know how to come, especially when we reflect on these serious attributes or qualities that are the very essence of your nature. How can we who are not holy possibly approach the thrice-holy God? We wouldn't even dare to think about it if it weren't that you've reached out to save us in Jesus Christ. If we were coming on our own merit, it would be impossible, but we dare by your grace to believe that the way really has been made open through Jesus Christ, that his blood really has atoned for all of the sins of all who trust him and that your hands are now open to receive and bless the sinner. And to receive our worship. So Father grant that we might do that, worshiping you in spirit and in truth in a way that pleases you to the glory of our great Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

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