Panorama of Holiness
"...the greatest thing we can do for ourselves and the rebellious, unholy world around us, is to lift up Jesus, not only in our teaching, but in our lives. A clear picture of Him, alive in us and showing in the way we live with God and our neighbor is what the world needs today."
Introduction
Text: "...but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy.'"
I would like you to consider a gallery of mental pictures with me. If I had actual paintings or photographs, I would place them in frames up front here for all of you to look at as I speak. Since I don't have actual pictures, I'm going to need your special attention and powers of imagination as I try to paint each of them in your minds. As I describe each one, I want you to keep in your mind the word "holy."The first picture is taken in a GARDEN – in fact, the very first garden ever planted on earth. Things like sickness, death, violence, and divorce don’t exist here in this garden. It is the beginning of man’s time and the great metropolis’s of the world have not yet been built. It is the cool of the day and there is a rustling on the trail just ahead of us. Suddenly, out into the clearing, steps a man and a woman – naked as the day they were born. No, I guess we can’t say "naked as the day they were born" because they weren’t born. They were created - full grown. Anyway, their nakedness doesn’t seem to bother them. At the moment they seem to be enjoying themselves. As they approach our position, unaware that we are watching, we notice that they are not talking only to each other. There is a third person involved - Someone we can’t see. We can only hear His voice. In truth, they are talking to God. Openly, without apology, without even a hint of fear or confusion – as we might talk with a friend. And He is talking back to them.(1)
Do you have the word "holy" in your minds? Good.
The second picture is of a MOUNTAIN. A multitude of people, perhaps as many as a million and a half of them, is traveling through the Sinaiatic desert. They camp out at the base of a large mountain jutting up out of the desert floor like and angry fist. A thick cloud lays up against the mountain, encircling its upper portion, right up to the peak. It has been there for several days. Two days ago the order went out across the camp: "Consecrate yourselves. Wash your garments. Forego all sexual relations. Be ready on the third day." A boundary has been set around the base of the mountain that is not to be violated by man or beast on penalty of death. It is now morning of the third day. The people, washed and ready, wait expectantly to see what will happen next. There is a storm atop of the mountain. The distant flash of lightning and it’s answering thunder roles down from the peak. Then suddenly, the mountain is on fire. Thick, black smoke ascends like the smoke of a furnace. The mountain shakes and quakes, breaking huge rock formations loose from their hold. These come crashing down into the foothills. Then a very loud trumpet blast splits the air – a near deafening sound that causes all of the people to step back, grab their ears, and tremble in fear. Some of them retreat to their tents. The warning goes out again: "Do not break through the barrier lest you perish!" In the distance, their leader, a former shepherd named Moses, is seen climbing up toward the peak once again.(2)
Are you still thinking of that word "holy"?
The third picture is of a THRONE ROOM. Actually it is that of the vision of a man named Isaiah, the son of Amoz. The Lord is sitting on His throne, lofty and exalted. The train of his robe fills the temple He is in. Six winged Seraphim stand above Him, calling out to one another, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts! The whole world is full of His glory!" The massive building shakes, loosening the door sockets and thresholds as these angelic beings speak. The whole temple fills with smoke. In the corner, or wherever he stood in this vision of the Holy God of Heaven, Isaiah cries out, "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."(3)
The fourth picture is that of a GRAIN FIELD or, at least an incident that happened in a certain grain field someplace in Palestine. All of the farm implements and animals in the region have been put away since 6PM the night before. No one is out and about traveling. All business in the vicinity has ceased. Thirteen men are standing at the edge of the grain field, plucking the heads of the mature wheat, rubbing them in their hands, blowing away the crushed chaff, and eating the kernels. Nearby a group of "holy men" are standing, observing the whole thing, whispering to one another in agitated tones. Finally, they approach and ask one of the thirteen men, the rabbi, Jesus, what He thinks He is doing, allowing His disciples to work on the Sabbath. They’re referring to the hand-rubbing. Everyone knows, they inform him, that such activities are strictly forbidden in the tradition of the elders. A discussion ensues. The name of David is invoked. Something about him entering the house of God and eating the consecrated bread. Then a pronouncement is made by Jesus about being Lord of the Sabbath.(4)
Are you still keeping the word "holy" in your mind?
The fifth and final picture is that of a DINNER. In the picture, a gaudily dressed woman is bent over the feet of a certain reclining houseguest, a young rabbi named Jesus. She is weeping. Things are not going the way she intended. Her purpose originally was to do what the master of the house had been too status conscious to provide – the cleansing and anointing of his guest’s feet. Pulling out a vile of costly perfume, the most expensive item she owned, she broke it open, intending to use it’s contents to honor Him. Now though, overwhelmed by the realization of her own unworthiness and sordid reputation in the presence of this one who seemed so pure, all she can do was weep. With no towel to wipe away the evidence of her shame, she has unbound her long hair and is attempting, to little avail, to wipe away the unexpected tears. Responding to the looks of disgust on the faces around Him, the young rabbi, Jesus, engages them in a soul-rending dialog. At the end He says to the woman there, still at His feet, "Your sins have been forgiven."(5)
All of these pictures, diverse as they might seem at first, do have something in common. It is that word "holy" I asked you to remember. The picture of the garden, the mountain, the throne room, the grain field, and the dinner all say something about holiness.
Now I have a few questions for you, then I’ll continue my message. There are no trick questions and you can be assured that I won’t embarrass you in your response.
Which picture most clearly conveys the idea of holiness to you, and why?
Which conveys the idea of holiness least effectively to you, and why?
If you used the word "ugly," which picture would you attach it to?
If you used the word "beautiful," which picture would you attach it to?
(Get brief answers. Don’t comment much on any of them.)
Let's look at these five pictures in more detail.
I want to assign a name to each one, just as any good painter or photographer might do. I’m going to call the first one, the garden:
1. Natural Holiness.
Holiness in the Garden of Eden was a given. It was the S.O.P. of life in that beautiful place. There was no need to maintain a separated position from sin because there was no sin. Adam and Eve were innocent. Holiness was their way of life and because of it, they walked in the closest fellowship with God that mankind has ever known.
What a glorious existence that must have been! I’ve called it "Natural Holiness" because that’s really what it was. Their nature was pure. Their ways were right. Their thoughts and intents were holy. It was beautiful! There could be no more desirable state from man’s point of view. That is probably true from God’s point of view, too, given His pronouncements that it was "good" so many times in Genesis.
There was one thing that wasn’t right though. The man and his wife had no choice. I don’t pretend to know all of God’s reasons for what He does, but it seems to me that the issue of choice was very important to Him.
Over the years I’ve thought about that issue and the best way I’ve found to explain it is this: Would you want to be married to your spouse for life if you knew they married you only because they were forced to due to a lack of choice? What kind of relationship would it be if you knew your mate married you only because he or she had no choice? Wouldn’t you rather know that, out of all the other possibilities available to him or her, they had chosen you? Good relationships are based on the freedom to choose. I suspect it might be the same with God. There had to be a choice.
Thus, God placed the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden. Eve ate from it and shared it with her husband with her and he ate. They made their choice and suddenly everything changed. The Garden of Eden became "The Garden of Weedin'." Death became reality as did all the other side effects and consequences of sin. The natural holiness, inherent in man before the fall, was now gone. Fellowship with the Holy God, was broken. Man hid himself - first in the bushes and later in every conceivable selfish pursuit. He knew that he was now UN-holy. So thoroughly did man hide that he nearly forgot his Maker.
I’m going to call the second picture, the mountain:
2. Terrifying Holiness.
The unholy gap between God and man had widened by the time the mountain picture was taken. It had become so bad that "the world that was" had to be destroyed. God started over with a devout man named Noah who had made some right choices. Soon however, the descendants of Noah were far away from God again.
In that troubled time, God chose Abraham, a man who was again making some right choices. After Abraham, God worked with his descendants, promising to make them a great nation if they would set themselves apart and be a holy nation unto Him.
His appearance on Sinai, amid all the smoking and quaking showed the Israelites how serious God was about holiness and how far they had fallen from it and from Him. They were adrift. They didn't remember Him very well. They needed a standard to live by. God gave them His law. If they would keep it they would be holy. He would call them His own. Yet they didn’t keep it. For 1500 years they failed to keep it.
Was God surprised? Not at all! He knew they couldn’t keep it. In fact, we read in Galatians 3:19 that the law was given "for the sake of defining transgression."(6) Romans 5:20 says the law came so that transgression would increase! Sinai quaked and smoked and God gave His law, not to make man holy, but to show him how unholy he really was!
Here is a question for you: Why didn’t God send Jesus to Adam and Eve in the garden as a remedy for their sin? Why did he wait so long? I believe it is because man, ever the one to want to do it himself so he can be independent of His maker, had to be taught his need for God. That’s what the mountain was all about – to show man that he could not abide God’s holiness without God’s help. Finally, after 1500 years of Israel’s history under the Law of Moses, man was ready to listen to the only real remedy there was for his unholy condition.
You might at first say that Sinai was a picture of God’s holiness, and, in a certain sense, it was. But when you consider it further, you realize that it was really intended to be a picture of man’s extreme unholiness.
People today often mistakenly believe that if they could just make people understand and keep God’s laws, they will be holy. The mountain and its subsequent history shows us that, without help from God, man can never be holy!
On the third picture, the throne room, I suggested to you, we might inscribe the caption:
3. Awesome Holiness.
As Isaiah watched in his vision, described in Isaiah 6, he was overwhelmed by the awesome holiness of God. The temple. The train of His robe. The seraphim and the smoking and the shaking. Then, amid this awesome display of purity, with the words "Holy, Holy, Holy" reverberating and shaking the walls so hard that the door sockets were coming loose, he suddenly remembered his own sinfulness. He responded with the only words a human can have when he or she fully understands the vast difference between the holy nature of God and his or her own sinful nature:
"Woe is me, for I am ruined!"
Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.
For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.’
I wonder. Have we realized our true unholiness? Have we seen yet that, no matter how good we might think we are in comparison to other human beings, when you put us in the throne room with the Holy God of Heaven, we are ruined? Isaiah was no spiritual slouch! Yet in that throne room with God, he realized his unholiness. Do we?
Moving on now to the fourth picture, the grain field, I would affix the caption:
4. Contrived Holiness
In a very human effort to play down or deny the not-so-dirty-little-secret of his own unholy nature (the thing that Isaiah saw so clearly in his vision of God) man has often tried to contrive a righteousness or holiness of his own rather than face up to the truth of God’s standard. Once contrived he often displays it before other men to convince himself and others of his great concern for holiness.
That’s what was behind the incident with the disciples rubbing out the grain on the Sabbath. It’s why the religious leaders were so incensed with what Jesus was allowing His disciples to do.
You see, these leaders were very concerned for the things of God. Just ask them! Just listen to them pray loudly on the street corners, lengthen the tassels on their garments and broaden their phylacteries (the little leather "scripture boxes" they wore around their heads.) Notice that they reserved for themselves titles like Doctor of the Law and Pharisee (which meant "separated one" or "holy one")
They multiplied laws upon top of laws to be sure that no one ever transgressed the law of God – so many laws that by the time Jesus came on the scene, they no longer understood very much about God's intentions for them.
You couldn’t thresh grain in the Sabbath. That was work! You couldn’t eat an egg on the Sabbath because you might make one of your chickens work! You couldn’t build a fire because someone my err in chopping wood on the Sabbath. You couldn’t walk over 7/8ths of a mile. You couldn’t tie a knot. That was work! (The only problem with that one was that your wife couldn’t get dressed on Saturday because it took knots to tie her clothes up. You couldn’t have that so the whole subject of "legal" and "illegal" knots had to be introduced.) On and on it went. Jesus called them hypocrites, not because they were so diligent but because they weren’t even keeping all their laws themselves!
"They tie up heavy loads, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger," Jesus said of them.
He called them whitewashed tombs and dirty dishes that were only clean on the outside. What an ugly picture!
That’s what’s wrong with a lot of well-intentioned attempts at "holiness" today. Such efforts usually amount to a contrivance of rules designed by their originator to keep us holy. This is often expressed in a written or unwritten "list" against which we may compare our lives or, more commonly, compare the lives of others. Those who consider themselves the most "holy" set themselves up as wary watchdogs over all the others.
Don’t get me wrong. The items on these lists can be good things to practice. But they can’t make us holy because they usually don’t require the participation of a converted heart.
Paul said it this way in Colossians 2:20-23: "If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, ‘Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!’ (which all refer to things destined to perish with the using)-- in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men? These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence."
Why are such contrivances of no value against fleshly indulgence? Because they seldom require participation of the heart and they often cause us to have an elevated and inaccurate assessment of our holiness.
I recall a certain lady with this kind of concern for holiness. A well known preacher’s wife showed up in services one day with a bit of mascara on her face. This paragon of holiness cruised right over and confronted here with these words: "Why don’t you wash your face, you witch!"
Is this true holiness or the proverbial "holier-than-thou"?
What took place in that grain field on that day so long ago didn’t die with the Pharisees and Doctors of the Law. Their "contrived holiness" is still the goal of many today and it is usually as ugly.
Finally, I would caption picture number five, the dinner, as:
5. Inviting Holiness
Someone might be inclined to ask where the holiness is in the picture of Jesus letting a sinful woman (probably a prostitute) anoint his feet. "I thought holiness meant separation from sin! What’s He doing letting this woman, a notorious sinner, touch Him?" That’s what the dinner guests were saying among themselves. Is that what you were thinking?
Just in case you don’t see the holiness in the fifth picture, let me show it to you. It’s in Jesus and before the end of the story, it was in this sinful woman.
Perhaps you thought the clearest picture of holiness was the second one of the mountain or the third one of the God in His temple. Think again. Everything about Jesus was and is holy.
He was conceived by the Holy Spirit.
He was called "the Holy Offspring" by the angel Gabriel.
His presence on earth was foretold by holy prophets.
As the firstborn of God he was "holy to the Lord."
His Sonship was validated by the Holy Spirit (in the form of a dove.)
Early on he was recognized even by the demons as "the Holy One of God."
He was said to be "full of the Holy Spirit."
David foretold his coming as God’s "Holy One."
He was called by Peter "the Holy and Righteous One."
The early Christians called Him God’s "holy servant Jesus."
God the Son is not one bit less holy than God the Father! In fact, they are so close that Philippians 2:6 says they are equal.
God on the mountain. God in His throne room. Jesus touching a sinful woman? Why do they look so different?
The answer is that people in the Old Testament didn’t fully understand God. They weren’t ready for it yet, back then. It had to wait until the "fullness of time." (Galatians 4:4) As John put it in John 1:18: "No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him." That implies that He hadn’t been fully "explained" before.
Folks, that is our Holy God in the picture, touching the sinful woman - the same God who caused the mountain to quake and the temple to shake and fill with smoke! That is God reaching out to touch the contrite heart of this sinful woman. That is what God the Father has wanted to do all along. It was there among the Old Testament people, too. They just didn’t see it because of their stubbornness. Jesus words show it as He wept over Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling."
"But that woman wasn’t holy!" someone objects. "How can you say this is a picture of holiness?"
That’s right she wasn’t holy – but neither were any of the others in the room that day, except Jesus. Not one of them, in spite of their pretensions and inflated pronouncements and self-assessments, should have been in the company of a Holy God! And the woman, yes, she was unholy, too – when she came in. But she was holy when she left the room that day because Jesus forgave her. Just like the publican who was unwilling to lift his eyes toward heaven, but kept beating his breast and saying, "God, be merciful to me, the sinner!" Just like Mary Magdalene whom He delivered from seven demons. Just like Peter who shamefully and faithlessly denied Jesus three times. Just like Thomas who doubted him. Just like Paul who persecuted Him. Just like the millions who have been attracted to Jesus in the intervening two millennia since He walked this earth. Just like you. Just like me.
We read in 1 Chronicles 16:29, "Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness."
The very same command is repeated in Psalm 29:2 and Psalm 96:9: "Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness." Holiness. It’s a beautiful thing! At least it is supposed to be. In the garden, it was natural, but taken for granted and therefore, too short-lived. At the mountain it was terrifying. In the throne room that Isaiah saw, it was awesome and painfully revealing. In the grain field, among those trying to manufacture holiness by their own efforts, it was ugly and a miserable failure.
In Jesus, though, holiness is beautiful. It’s attractive. That’s what made Jesus so attractive to so many people!
"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself." (John 12:32)
My friends, the greatest thing we can do for ourselves and the rebellious, unholy world around us, is to lift up Jesus, not only in our teaching, but in our lives. A clear picture of Him, alive in us and showing in the way we live with God and our neighbor is what the world needs today.
Jesus reveals to us what men and woman in past times – most of them anyway – failed to understand – the picture of a holy God, reaching out across the gap of unholiness man has created, and inviting him back into fellowship. He, Jesus, is "the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature."(7)
Look at the holy Jesus reclined there at the table, showing mercy to this sinful woman anointing his feet. That’s our God, my friends. That’s our holy God!
Footnotes: Use your "back" button to return to your place.
1. This picture based upon Genesis 1-3
2. This story told more fully in Exodus 19
3. This account is based on Isaiah 6:1-5
4. See Matthew 12:1-8
5. Luke 7:36-50
6. Galatians 3:19, see marginal reference in NASV.
7. Hebrews 1:3
Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.
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All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.
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