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“Be Ye Holy for I am Holy“

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Be Ye Holy for I am Holy

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 13, 1953

Now, the Apostle here exhorts us. I like, exhort, better than command, though it is a command. He here exhorts us to holiness of life, and he bases his exhortation upon two great facts. One is the character of God, and the other, the command of God. He says simply that God’s children ought to be holy because He is holy. That’s the character of God. Then he says God’s children ought to be holy because he commanded them to receive this in the Spirit, which you could not now understand or receive, things being what they are.

Now, that’s a paraphrase of what our Lord said, certainly, but it’s a fair statement of the meaning of His words. And now Peter comes along in obedience to and in line with these teachings of our Savior, and among other things, he commands us to be holy. And because this is an apostolic injunction, we who claim to be apostolic Christians dare not ignore it.

And when I use the word, dare not, here, I do not mean that I forbid it. How could I forbid you to do anything? I do not mean the Church forbids it. How could this Church forbid anybody to do anything and make it stick? I only mean that morally we do not dare ignore this commandment, be ye holy.

We have to deal with it some way or other. We dare not ignore it. Ignoring it is the way that it is dealt with by most Christians. We read it and then ignore it. But we dare not, and we dare not accept it as optional. It is not that we go to the Bible and say, now I am going to look this over, and if I like it, I’ll buy it, in the language of the day. But if I don’t, there’s no harm done. This is not something optional which I may do or not do at my own choice.

This is an apostolic injunction to commandment, to holiness of life, and I dare not overlook it. Then it is not something which I can judge the wisdom of, or the appropriateness of, and then weigh it in my own balances and decide just how far it applies to me. It doesn’t have to apply to me. I can walk out on it. God has given us all and each one the right to make our own choices. So we don’t have to bow our neck to this yoke, and we don’t have to apply it to ourselves. If we don’t like it, we can turn our backs on it.

Once Jesus said to his disciples, except ye eat my body, my flesh, and drink my blood, there is no life in you. And they looked at each other and walked away from him. And He said, will you also go away? And Peter gave the answer that I must give this morning. Peter said, Lord, if we wanted to go away, where would we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. Those were wise words indeed by the man of God.

So, I say that we do not need to listen to the apostolic injunction. We do not have to obey it. There’s only one place where the Bible is, but there are a million places where it isn’t. And you can always find a place where it isn’t. There’s only one kingdom of God, but there are lots of other places. And if we don’t like it, it’s always possible for us to reject it.

But I say, Lord, how could we reject it? Where else would we go? If we refuse these words, where will we turn? If we turn away from Thy authoritative word, to whose authority can we turn? Eisenhower’s? The Pope’s? To where shall we turn? What great man, and I do not speak slightingly of these great men, but any great man in whatever field, could we turn to him? Who is he? He’s a man with his breath in his nostrils. Would it be to some great school of learning? Could we go to the university down here on the midway and say, I’m looking for a professor to show me the way, to help me? He couldn’t help you; he must be himself, helped.

So, I say, therefore, we dare not ignore this. And I have explained what I mean by dare not. We dare not accept it as optional, and we dare not judge of the wisdom of it and make our choice as to whether it’s worthy of our obedience. To do so is to jeopardize our souls and to earn for ourselves severest judgment to come.

Now, I want to point out to you that the doctrine of holiness has been wounded in the house of its friends. Whenever Satan has reason to fear a truth very greatly, he counterfeits it. And wherever he can, puts it into such a bad light that the very persons who are most eager to obey it are frightened away from it.

I think it would not be hard to make a case for that statement and to prove it if I wanted to do it and show how he was afraid of the virgin birth, so he has done everything possible to reduce Jesus Christ into one more, being one more man. He was afraid of the bodily resurrection, so he has done everything he can do to take the weight and pressure off of the doctrine of the bodily resurrection. He will allow Jesus to rise from the dead in spirit, but he’s afraid when we say he rose from the dead in person and in body.

He’s afraid of the second coming of Christ, so he has done everything he can do to becloud the doctrine of the second coming of Christ, and so with every doctrine. The ones he fears the most are the ones he parodies, and pawns his parody off as the real thing, and frightens away the serious-minded saints.

Now in evangelical circles, the doctrine of holiness has been identified with a specific school of theology. Having their own terminology, and their own system of metaphysics, and their own phrases, they’ve copyrighted the term holiness and claimed it exclusively. And it has been thus betrayed by its friends. Because I hesitate to say that some who call themselves by the name of holiness have allowed the doctrine to harden into a theory which has become a hindrance to repentance. And they invoke this doctrine to cover up frivolity and covetousness.

I have had occasion to mingle somewhat with those who have taken out the copyright on the word holiness. And while I have found some good people among them, I have found just as many good people among the fundamentalists, and the Calvinists, and those who don’t believe what they believe quite. So that they are what they are, obviously, in spite of their copyright doctrine, not because of it.

While there are few that are, I believe, worthy, I have found a great deal of frivolity carried on in the name of the deeper life, and a great deal of worldliness that has been sanctified, accepted, taken in, and given a place in the sanctuary. And the results, of course, have been that honest, serious persons have shied away from the whole thing.

Someone told me of hearing a man stand in a pulpit the other, some while back, and said, I was sanctified 15 years ago, and I want to tell you, my friends, that I have never sinned since. Now maybe he hasn’t, but if he hasn’t, he’d be the last one to know it. If he was a holy man, instead of a holiness man, he’d never have made a crack like that. Maybe he never sinned since. That could be possible, I suppose, theoretically. But he would not find it out. Other people might be saying it, but he would never have said it. He would rather have knelt and said, thou art in heaven, and I am on earth. Oh, God forgive my confusion of faith. He’d never have said, I haven’t sinned in 15 years.

So that some serious-minded people have been driven away from the whole idea of holiness by those who have claimed it, and then have lived frivolous, worldly, and conceited lives. But we dare not be frightened away by this. We are under the holy authority of the apostolic seed.

We have been told by a holy man of God, and we have been ordered by God himself to be holy. And therefore, regardless of how badly wounded the doctrine of holiness has been, we must not let it die, and we must not assume that we have no moral obligation to this truth. The doctrine is highly important to God.

It must be highly important to God, because I have personally counted in an exhaustive concordance and have found that the word holiness occurs 650 times in the Bible, or the word holy, holiness. Then I have not counted in my, the King James, the other word sanctify and sanctified, which is the same word, exactly, only in our English different, so that the count would no doubt jump up nearer to a 1,000 than 650 times.

Now, this word holy is used to describe the character of angels, and of heaven itself, and even of God. It is written that the angels are holy, and those angels who look over the battlements to gaze down upon the scenes of men, mankind, are called the watchers and holy ones. And it’s written that the angels are holy, and then heaven itself is said to be a holy place, and that no unclean thing can enter in. And God is described in the term by the adjective holy, Holy Ghost, and Holy Lord, and Lord God Almighty, Holy Lord God Almighty.

Those words are used of God throughout the Bible, showing that the highest adjective that can be ascribed to God, the highest attribute that can be ascribed to God is that of holiness, and that in a relative sense, the angels and heaven itself partake of the holiness of God. And then again, its absence is given as a reason for not seeing God. I know the grotesque interpretations that have been given to the text, without holiness no man shall see the Lord, but because some people, in order to support their patented theory, have misused the text, that is no reason for my throwing the text out.

Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord; that does mean something, and what it means ought to disturb us until we have discovered what it means. And then having discovered what it means, we have met its conditions.

Briefly, I want to tell you the meaning of the word. In the Bible it means moral wholeness, actually means, kind. Holy, means kind, merciful, godly, pure, blameless. It means kind. It means merciful. It means godly. It means pure. And it means morally blameless. But in all this, it’s never to be thought of in the negative–never. It’s always to be thought of in a positive, white intensity of degree. For it is written that God is holy. It means that God is kind, merciful, pure, blameless, in a white, holy intensity of degree.

And when used of men, it means the same, certainly not the same degree as God, not absolute holiness, but it means an intensity of a degree of holiness that is not negative, but positive, and it means that it can be tested and can be trusted. A holy man can be trusted, and a holy man can be tested. Some people’s piety will not stand up under tests. Some of us are afraid.

Once when God was taking Israel through a certain section, he went ahead of them and warned them. He said, now don’t take them this way because there’s a fight on over there, and they’re so green that they’ll run away if they see the fight. The Lord steered them around a battle, lest they all get excited and flee in disorder into the wilderness. He knew their weakness and steered them around it.

So, there are those of us who are holy, but we’re afraid of the tests that will prove whether we’re holy or not, and we can’t trust ourselves. But a holy man can be trusted, and a holy man can be tested. And wherever there is a breakdown of holiness, there is a proof that there was never any real degree of holiness there in the first place.

Now, not only this moral wholeness, there is one great religious thinker who’s just gone, a German, a Lutheran man, who’s dealing with the question of holy, and the idea of the holy has greatly intrigued me, and I believe also instructed my heart.

And this man says that the word holy, as originally used in Hebrew, did not have, first of all, the moral connotation. That is, when it says that God was holy, it did not mean, first of all, that God was pure. That was taken for granted. It did mean that later. It did come to mean that, as I’ve explained. But that he says the root, original meaning of the word holy was something other than, something that lay beyond, something strange and mysterious and so different from, and awe-inspiring. And that is in the Word too. You’ll find it there. So that when we talk about the holiness of God, we talk about something heavenly and awful and mysterious and fear inspiring.

Now, this is supreme when it comes to God, but it is also marked in men of God, deepened as men become more like God. This sense of the other world, this mysterious something that rests on men, that is a holiness.

Now, if they should have that and not be morally right, then I would say it was a counterfeit of the devil. But when they are morally right and are walking in all the holy ways of God, and then in addition to their good, righteous living, they also have this mysterious quality that they had come down from another world and carried upon them the fragrance of a kingdom that is supreme above the kingdoms of this world, then I’m ready to accept that as being of God. Moses had it when he came down from the mount, you’ll remember. He had been with God forty days and forty nights there in the wilderness.

And as the colored preacher said in that sing-song oratory that they love, he said, Moses went to nobody knows where Moses had gone. And Moses was away forty days and forty nights, and nobody knew where Moses was. And Moses came back and then everybody knew where Moses had been.

Now, that’s what I mean. He would have been on the mountain, and nobody knew where he was. But when he came back, everybody knew where he had been. He came down with this heat lightning playing over his countenance, this strange something that you couldn’t pin down or identify, but it was there.

Now, that mysterious quality there has all but forsaken the earth in our day. The philosopher I refer to that theologian had to invent a term for it, he called it the numinous. And that word numinous has now gotten into all the books. But he invented it to mean that overplus of something that is more than righteous, but is righteous in a fearful, awe-inspiring, wondrous, heavenly sense, and glowing with a mysterious fire.

Now, I say this latter quality has all but forsaken the earth. God has been reduced to our own terms. And we are now told to gossip the gospel and sell Jesus to the people. And it’s been reduced, I say, to a place where men may be righteous. I don’t say that they’re not, but I say that we miss and lack that quality, that overtone of something.

Now, this mysterious fire was in the bush, you’ll remember. Fire doesn’t frighten people. A small fire doesn’t frighten people. It’s only when it gets out of control and your loved ones or other humans are there that it becomes a portentous and fearful thing. No one’s afraid of fire.

And yet here was a man who knelt beside a bush where a small fire burned and hid his face, for he was afraid. And there was that quality that was mysterious. And later in the mountain yonder, I repeat, when, with the voice of the trumpet, Moses shook until he said, I am fearfully afraid and quake.

And then that Shekinah that was over Israel, of all the figures in the Bible—and this is more than a figure, it’s a symbol—of all the symbols in the Bible, I know no other that is so satisfying, so deeply satisfying as the symbol of the Shekinah. I use it often and often refer to it in my preaching and praying because it to me sums up wonderfully this holiness of God present.

There was that cloud hanging over by day, plainly visible, that mysterious cloud not made of water vapor, not a shadow cast somewhere, but a mysterious cloud. And at night, as the light of the day faded away, that cloud began to turn incandescent. And when the darkness had settled, it shone brightly like one vast light hanging over Israel.

So, every tent in that diamond-shaped tent city was lighted fully by the strange Shekinah that hung over. Nobody had built that fire, nobody put any fuel to that fire, nobody stoked that fire, nobody controlled that fire. It was God bringing himself within the confines of the human eye and shining down.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have lived then, to take your little baby by the hand when he was big enough to toddle, and say, I want to show you something wonderful, I want to show you something, look, look at that, and have the little lisping fellow say, what is it, mama? And you say, that’s God, that’s God.

Moses, our leader, saw that fire in the bush. Later Moses, our leader, saw that fire in the mountain. And now since we’ve left Egypt, that fire has hovered over us now all these years, maybe ten, maybe twenty, maybe thirty years, that fire is there.

But how do you know there’s a God, mama? There’s the fire. There’s that mysterious over-plus from another world that has no connotation of morality, particularly, that’s all taken for granted. It has only a connotation of the reverent and solemn and awe-inspiring and terribly different and wonderful and glorious.

And that was there, and then it was in the temple when they had built the temple, when Moses had built the tabernacle and when the temple was built, and then when the fire came down at Pentecost, it was that same fire again, and it sat upon each of them, and it rested down upon them with an invisible visibility, a visibility that was yet not exactly visible and certainly would never have photographed if they’d have had cameras, but it was there. It was a sense of being in or surrounded by this numinous, this holy element. And so strong was it that in Jerusalem the Christians went on Solomon’s porch, and the people stood off from them as wolves, they say, stand off from a bright campfire, and looked on and it said they durst not join themselves to them.

Why? Had there been any prohibition? Was any man standing there with a sword saying, don’t come near? No, they were praying people, humble, harmless, undefiled, clean, and completely harmless as far as the crowd was concerned, but the crowd couldn’t come. They didn’t rush in and trample the place down. They stood away from Solomon’s porch because there was a holy quality there, they couldn’t come up to.

And when Paul was explaining the mysterious fullness of the Holy Ghost in the book of Corinthians, he said, some of you, when you meet together and you obey God and God speaks, there is such a sense of God’s presence there that the unbelievers fall on their faces and go out and report that God is with you indeed.

Now, that emanates from God, as all holiness emanates from God. My dear people, if we are what we ought to be, if we may see to it that our conversation, the whole sum of our lives, beginning with the inner life, becomes becoming more and more God-like and Christ-like, less and less like the things of this world, more and more like the things of the world above, I believe there will be upon us something of that.

I have met a few that have had this on them, and I don’t hesitate at all to say to you that it has meant more to me than all the teaching I’ve ever had, all the Bible teachers that I ever have thought, and I thank God for every one of them. I stand indebted deeply to every Bible teacher down the years. But they did little but instruct my head, but the brethren who had this strange thing on them instructed my heart.

Some weeks ago, there appeared an article called “The War of the Ages” in the “Alliance Weekly.” It was sent to me by the widow of my friend Emil Sywulkaof East Africa. I knew Emil Sywulka when I was a young fellow. I have mentioned it before, certainly in my preaching I have not overlooked it. But I knew him, a long, lean, rather homely, serious-faced man who smiled infrequently, but when he did it was like the coming out of the sun after a storm. He had this in marked degree.He had it so completely that he was the dean of his field.

Over in Keswick I talked to three missionaries. Day after day I talked to them, as we ate and as we walked together and as we had our services together.These missionaries knew this man, and they told me of this serious-minded, long, lean fellow with the unpronounceable name, who walked with God so perfectly that there was something on him. They said there was something different, Mr. Tozer, and now say what you will, this man had something different.Personality? Absolutely none. He was without it.

But now in his seventies, on an old motorcycle, he’s chugging over the rough way, and suddenly the motorcycle goes out of control and Emil falls beside the way, and they picked him up.He died shortly after of a heart attack. It wasn’t an accident, but he died in the harness, died with his face toward the light. He took with him that old, tired body, I suppose, and they laid that away in Africa, and his spirit went to God.

But he left behind him a sense of the numinous, a sense of this mysterious, awe-inspiring presence that comes down on some people and means more than all the glib tongues in the world. I’ve gotten so I’m afraid of a glib tongue.

I’m afraid of the man that can always flip his Bible and answer your question. He knows too much. I’m afraid of the man who has thought it all out and has a dozen epigrams that he can quote; that he’s thought up over the years and settled everything spiritual. Brethren, I’m afraid of him.

There is a silence sometimes that’s more eloquent than all human speech. Sometimes there is a confusion of face and a bowing of the head that says more divine truth than the most eloquent preacher can say. And so, he says, Be holy, as and for I am holy.

First bring your life morally into line that God may make you holy, and then bring your spiritual life into line that God may settle upon you with the Holy Ghost, that there may be upon you that quality of the wonderful and the mysterious and the divine. You don’t cultivate it, and you don’t even know it, but it’s there. And it’s this that the Church of our day lacks.

Oh, that we might seek to cultivate the knowledge of God, that we might seek to become more God-like, and then without cultivation and without seeking, there would come upon us this that gives our witness meaning, this sweet, radiant fragrance.

Haven’t you noticed that in some churches it’s felt very strongly? But you say you don’t go by your feelings, do you, Mr. Tozer? Sure. Quote me on that if it’s worth it. Feeling is an organ of knowledge, and I don’t hesitate to say so. Feeling is an organ of knowledge.

Define love for me. You can’t define love. You can describe it, but you can’t define it. And a person or a group of people or a race that had never heard of the word love and didn’t know what it was, all of the dictionaries in the world couldn’t teach them what love is. But just let some old freckled-faced boy with big ears somewhere and his hair a bit awry, let the feeling of it come to his heart, and he knows more than all the dictionaries can tell you. Love can only be understood by feeling it.

And so, it is with the warmth of the sun. Tell a man who had no feeling it’s a warm day, he wouldn’t know what you meant. But take a man who is normal out into the warm sun, and he’ll soon know it’s warm. You can know more about the sun by feeling than you can by description.

And so, there are qualities in God that can never be explained to the intellect but can be known by the heart. So, I do not hesitate to say that I do believe in feeling. I believe in what the old writers called religious affections. And we have so little of it because we’ve not laid the groundwork for it. The groundwork of repentance, and obedience, and separation, and holy living.

And if we lay the groundwork, thus you will find there will come to us this sense of the otherworldly, this presence of God that will be wonderfully, wonderfully real. So that when sometimes as a religious prayer cliche, we pray the little expression, O God, draw feelingly near, we’re not too far off.

Some would wave us off on that and say you’re off the track. I’m not sure. O God, come feelingly near. He came feelingly near to Moses at the bush. He came feelingly near to Moses on the mount. He came feelingly near to the church at Pentecost. And He came feelingly near to that Corinthian church when the unbelievers went away awestruck to say God’s in the middle of them. God is with them. Oh, how we need this in our day.

Let’s pray. O Son of God, Most Holy, that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. O Holy Thing, born, crucified, risen, enthroned, we beseech Thee that Thou would rebuke all the unholiness in us that would grieve Thy Spirit from us.

Rebuke, we beseech thee, all of the flesh and of the mind that is even negative, and that thus hinders the operation of the Spirit. Oh, we beseech Thee, let the Shekinah be seen today. Let it hover over each habitation, showing that the Lord is nigh.

We beseech thee, may we go away from this place, serious, if need be; perturbed, bothered, until we have done something with this injunction, and have sought to be holy as Thou art holy, and have tried by surrender and faith to purify our hearts unto obedience. Grant, we beseech Thee, to answer all this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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“The Believer’s Walk”

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The Believer’s Walk

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
December 15, 1957

In the first of the two Thessalonian epistles, chapter four, Paul says, furthermore, we beseech you brethren and exhort you by the Lord Jesus, that as ye have received of us, how ye ought to walk and to please God so ye would abound more and more. For ye know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, even your sanctification. that ye should abstain from fornication. That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor, not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God. Let no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter, because that the Lord is the avenger of all such. As we also have forewarned you and testified. For God has not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness. And he therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God, God who hath also given unto us His Holy Spirit.

This is only a little section of a letter written by a man named Paul, an apostle to a church in the city of Thessalonica, a Greek city, to a new church, relatively new. And these persons to whom he wrote, were good Christians. That is, the church was good. There are seven things said about the church, said about the Thessalonian Christians by the man Paul. For Paul was always very careful never to deliver a 100% condemnation. He always wove into his condemnation some complimentary remarks about their spiritual lives. He knew that if you are too hard on people, you discourage them. If you’re not hard enough, you let them go to sleep. So he tried to keep them awake and still not be too hard on them. He said this about them, that they had abandoned idolatry. They were by nature, rather by culture, they were idolaters by religion. But they had now abandoned this. They had turned to God from idols, and they had turned to the true God.

I have said many times, I suppose I will not say anything this morning I haven’t said many times. I’ve said many times that God never recommends vacuum. If He takes you out of a place, it’s in order that He might take you into a place. He never takes you out and leaves you. If He says, turn away from that, He says that in order that He might say, turn unto this. So they had turned away from idols and turned to the true God. They were not left in the middle in a state of of unanimous indecision, I think I heard it call last week on the board. They were unanimous only in their indecision. But that would be a frightful place to leave a man. But they turned to the true God after turning from idols. And in their faith, they worked and hoped and loved and labored. And they received the gospel in power, Paul said, with much assurance, which he took as a proof of their election of God. And they were actively missionary-minded, for they send out missionaries and supported them. They had continued true under persecution, which is a good test of a Christian, and they were living in expectation of Christ’s return.

Now those seven characteristics of the Thessalonian Christians, were enough for them to get into any church in Christendom and to be taken further as an example of other churches. And still Paul was not content. He commended them for what they were, but he also urged the sacred duty of their being holy people, holy beyond the call of duty, holy beyond the current mores, holy beyond the standards of their time. And he warned them as I warn you, that nothing else is enough. If we do not seek and pursue purity of heart, which results in personal purity of life, nothing else is enough. Now, Paul said that he had taught this to them. And he had taught them what he called righteousness and true holiness. There is such a thing as righteousness that is not true holiness. But there is righteousness and true holiness.

Now, Christ personalized righteousness when He came. And He took it out of the realm of what we now call ethics, or have always called ethics, and taught that righteousness was simply to please God. We need not know what righteousness is, but we do need to know that if we please God, we’re doing righteousness. John said, that if we kept the commandments of the Lord, He would hear our prayers, and then added, and also if we do the things that are pleasing in His sight. Not that the keeping the commandments of the Lord was not pleasing in God’s sight, but it was not enough. There has to be an affection shown toward God.

It’s the same as rules in a household. The average household has rules and you keep those rules, and you see that the children do, and everybody takes it for granted. But that’s not enough. You could come, your children could come into your household and watch not to break the rules, and yet never do or say anything affectionate to show that they really loved you. It isn’t enough that I keep the laws of the New Testament, the commandments of Christ, that I am to do this and do that and refrain from this. That’s not enough. That must be, but Christ personalized all this and made it to be the result of a spontaneous, loving, relationship toward God.

And the church of Christ is righteous when she does those things which she knows to be pleasing in the eyes of her righteous Savior, and goes beyond mere keeping of rules, however important they may be. And Paul lays many of them down. We can talk about grace all we want to and freedom all we please. We’ve got to throw a lot of the New Testament out if we reject commandments and rules, for there are a lot of them here. But keeping to those rules is not enough. There must be added to this, or perhaps I should say, that we keep them because they are to us the mind of our Lord, that we do the things that are pleasing in His sight.

Philosophers analyze righteousness, but Christians obey and are righteous because they do the things that are righteous without knowing why they’re doing them. We’re now in time of analysis. Somebody referred once in my hearing to the paralysis of analysis. And now in seminaries and Bible schools, they analyze till they’re paralyzed. They stand halfway between two extreme views of things and can’t make up their mind which and split hairs and divide them until there’s no spontaneity left. We scarcely know which side we’re on at all. Well, that’s not a Christian’s approach. If a Christian knows that the Lord wants it that way, he wants it that way whether he knows why or not.

We might and I think it wouldn’t hurt us if we studied into the why of things. Why is it wrong to steal and why is it wrong to lie? There are good, sound philosophic reasons underneath it all. But that isn’t the reason that Christian stops lying. He stops lying because he knows lying displeases his Lord. He allows these scholastic hair splitters and casuists to write their long commentaries on why it’s wrong to steal. And if you steal with a certain high principle in mind you’re doing right, and why it’s wrong to lie. And in some quarters, they even have taught their their devotees that you can lie provided you say instantly afterward, Lord, I didn’t mean that. They even say that you can go to court and lie in court, if after you have told the lie in court you say to God, now God excused it, that doesn’t count. Now, that’s actually in print. I can show you where it is. That’s real. That’s real. That’s Jesuit casuistry. The hairsplitting of morals.

Is it ever wrong to tell a lie, or is it ever right to tell a lie? Is it always wrong to lie? Well, the hairsplitters give good reasons why sometimes a lie is a good thing. For instance, they’ve argued if you know that somebody is very sick and that a shocked would kill them, you can lie to them. I wouldn’t do it to save anybody’s life. But I wouldn’t shock them either. I believe God would help a man or woman out so that he would neither need to lie nor kill anybody by shocking them with the news of their friend’s death or accident. I believe it entirely possible to preserve the righteousness of truth and at the same time not give anybody a heart attack.

Well anyway, the Christians who teach morals from that cold standpoint, sit around and talk by the hour about, can you do this, or is it wrong to do that, and just how far can you go in this direction? That is a proof of the lack of spirituality. Paul said that we were to do these things in Jesus, because we do the things that are pleasing in His sight. And Jesus said, thou hearest Me always because I’m always doing what’s pleasing to Thee, pleasing in Thy sight.

Of course, we have rules at our house. We always had. When we were bringing up the boys, I used to say to them, now boys, if you were on a basketball team, there’d be certain things that you wouldn’t be permitted to do. There would be certain rules. And if you played on the Sox or Cubs, there’d be certain things that they’d say, now, you can’t do this. And I said, at home, it’s the same. There are certain rules that you keep, and that’s it. When we have our grandchildren out to the house now, there are certain rules or things they can’t do. We rarely ever have any trouble with them. But there are things they can’t do. But the beautiful part about it is, when they go beyond the call of duty and respond to your affection in a way. My little boy Paul, excuse the expression, for he laughs at me, whenever I mention the word Paul, he leans against the wall and says, now, I’m in for it because he knows what I think of this little blonde boy. But he’s a good little fellow and keeps rules more or less, but four years old. One day, I patted his little head and whispered in his ear, you’re a good little boy. And he patted my arm and said, you’re a good grandpa too.

Well, you know, I haven’t got over that yet. That’s been months ago. And that wasn’t keeping rules. That was a response. That was a response that was something out of the heart, spontaneous. Nobody had taught him to say that. And he didn’t have to say it. And it’s exactly so here. Righteousness and true holiness is the spontaneous response of the heart to the love of God. Of course, it takes certain directions, and so, Paul wanted to lay those directions down for us. And he pointed out the importance of a holy walk. He said, this is the will of God, even your sanctification, to be devoted to God’s uses. Of course, that’s one and the primary meaning of the word “sanctified.” But it also means to be cleansed for that purpose.

Those who don’t believe too much in cleansing, argue that sanctify means to set apart for sacred uses. But I have one question which I want to ask you. Can you conceive of God setting anything aside for His sacred use that wasn’t first cleansed? Can you conceive of a priest in the Levitical temple standing and singing or offering incense from a vessel that was dirty that needed to be washed? No. They believed in washings and washings says the writer of the gospels for the Jews will not eat until they have washed their hands. They’re always keeping clean. Their idea of a sanctified vessel was a vessel that was as clean as it could be made, and then dedicated to God. It had those two connotations. Not one, but two. I can’t think of a holy God using an unholy vessel. I can’t think of a holy God eating out or wanting his people to eat out of a vessel that’s dirty.

Now, this is neglected in our day, and we want to talk about it a little. It’s not denied I think, that Christians should be holy, but not too much has been said about it. And most I think, that most of our preaching after we’ve got the sinner in, we can’t be rough on him. But after we’ve got him in and he’s joined and got baptized, and has gotten into our fellowship, then after that, most preaching consists of telling them how nice they are. At least, that’s what I hear when I listen on the radio. Most all that is telling people how nice they are.

Well now, we want to do that, as I pointed out that Paul does and Jesus does in these seven letters. But they also, we must shout aloud, that He that saith, He abideth in Him ought also to walk even as He walked. That it is the will of God that we should be a holy people. And in this particular chapter, Paul talks about one kind of evil which our missionaries tell us sometimes creeps right into their churches and I’m afraid in our own churches, too. He talks about, he said that everybody should be freed and delivered from fornication.

Now, the damning effect of impurity will never quite be known in this world. We’ll never know until the judgment, until we know as we’re known, the ravages of impurity are greater than that of any disease, greater than the ravages of any of the great killers. And the victims of this, of these sins, are found by millions in hospitals and insane institutions and institutions for the blind. But the most deadly effect of sin is always in the heart of its victim. Never forget that.

A man may, as has happened some times, a man may get drunk and fall into fire. I knew a man that His neck was all burned. He said, years ago, he’d become a Christian. And he turned around and showed me the scars on his neck. He said, I worked in a factory where there were blazing fires. And he said, I’d get drunk and stagger around and even at my work and fall in and have to be dragged out. He said, that’s the result. Well now, that was bad because it had burnt him. It might have killed him, but it burnt his neck and left great, ugly scars there. But those scars didn’t represent the real deadly result of his sin which happened to be drinking. But something inside the man was suffering. Something inside the man was getting sore, shriveling, cracking, splitting, dividing, withering, dying. Thank God, our Lord Jesus Christ got a hold of that man and saved him, saved him, wonderfully saved him.

Incidentally, I might as well carry on that little story. This man was named Jim Terwilliger. And he was about that high and about that thick through. And I knew him when he was in his 70s. He had been saved when he was 56. And that dear man of God, here’s how he was saved. He was dead drunk lying on a couch. His wife was kneeling at his head, and his Christian doctor kneeling at his feet praying for him. He said, he heard a voice say, wake thou that sleepest and rise from the dead, then Christ will give thee light. And he stood and wept as he told his story. He said, I woke up completely cold sober and thoroughly converted and born again.

Now don’t ask me about how it happened. That’s not the way the little book tells you. That little book you get three for a quarter on how to win souls, and what to say to them and what to say next. That isn’t the way they do it in the little books, but that’s the way the Holy Ghost did it, brother. This man lived with a Christian wife, and he was drinking and disgracing himself, like an old pig. But she had gotten ahold of God and that physician had gotten ahold of God. And here was a man that came bouncing out of a dead drunk, cold sober and converted. From that time on to the end of his life, he did nothing but weep and sing and shout and praise God and testify to what the Lord has done for him. Don’t ask me to explain that. I can’t. That isn’t found in any of the books. That was just done.

Now, dear people, the worst part of any sin is what it does inside of you. A real estate man cheats a widow. The widow suffers. Her children suffers. But that’s not the worst. The worst thing is what happened to the man. Emerson said, the thief always steals from himself. And when I cheat anybody of anything, I’ve cheated my own soul and done my self harm. Always remember that the great evil of sin is internal, that it’s what happens inside.

Sometimes in an accident, there will come bearing on a stretcher, somebody in shock. And they will feel the arms, the legs and say, well, there are no broken bones, no broken ribs, but there’s internal injuries. And you die from those internal injuries, not from broken legs. And it’s the internal injury of sin, iniquity. What’s happening to these people? I don’t even get indignant anymore when I hear about them, these people that that live like animals. And their concept of home is like animals. I don’t even get angry anymore or indignant. The world is that way, and that’s the way it is until the Lord either comes and burns it with fire, or until He takes His people away or sends a revival or somehow changes things. But the terrible part is the cancer eating inside the heart.

Now, we live in in a Sodom today. Our American civilization is a Sodom. That is why when I hear speeches from in Washington talking about our American way of life and the free peoples of the world and all that. I know what they mean, and I know what they think they mean and don’t. There are no free peoples. And there are no righteous nations. And the best nations have, oh, so much for which to repent. If America hopes to be preserved on the strength of her righteousness, she might just well prepare herself for annihilation. No nation is righteous. We’re living in a Sodom.

I know it’s easy to make charges from the safety of the pulpit. I know that, and I know how hard it is to prove them because sin is a slippery as an oil eel. And I know that the attorneys for the defense are very, very many, and very learned. You can get books now showing that sodomy is perfectly normal, and that it is simply one person’s way of responding. That while naturally, and the majority don’t respond that way. Man falls in love with a woman. That’s that seems to be the majority, but occasionally, the Sodomite man falls in love with a man. Paul describes it in Romans 1. Back in Genesis, the city of Sodom was destroyed because of it.

Now, we have attorneys for the defense, teaching in our institutions of higher learning in the land supposed to be Christian, writing very carefully thought out and learned books to show that sodomy is not a sin, and that it ought not to be called a sin. We ought to stop that old 17th century view of it. It is simply another person’s way of responding to a situation. And though, God Almighty sent fire on Sodom, and though Paul warned in Romans 1 of the ghastly result of this kind of thing, our students in their universities now are hearing that it’s all right. Maybe not the most to be desired, but nothing wrong if that’s the way you feel about it.

Well, this Sodom can defend its ways all right. And those who would escape the fire though, they can’t stand on the street corner and argue. They can’t sit in a class or somewhere and read a book showing that Sodomy is all right. Escape to the hills said the angel. Escape to the mountain said the angel. Escape for thy life said the Holy Ghost. And Lot got up and escaped and went leading his wife. I’m thinking of the artist’s pictures of it. I suppose he led her. She looked back and he tried to drag her with him. But she said, I want to catch that late TV show. I can’t leave yet. So she turned to a pillar of salt, still back there.

Old brother Cout. Do you remember him?. Brother Cout, still the same old Bernard Cout. He’s got adenoids you know, and that old ex-missionary. God bless him. He’s one of the sweetest old saints I know. He said the other day in a sermon, two shall be grinding at the mill. One’s taken and the other left. Two shall be sleeping in a bed, one taken and the other left. Two shall be watching television, both left. Well, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t press it like that. There was one in my hotel room in New York. And when I wasn’t busy, I watched it to see what was on. I wouldn’t go that far, but I think you ought to give that a bit of thought anyhow. That was the theology of good Brother Cout from up in the hills.

Well, Saddam can defend itself all right. And the thing to do is not argue or split hairs, but get out. Separate yourself severely and radically from sin of every kind, and regard it with horror and detestation, says the Holy Ghost. He that despises, despises not man but God that called us unto holiness. Any young man or woman that travels the sleazy way of borderline impurity does so at his own terrible risk. And whoever defends evil, defends what God has severely condemned. And whoever despises holiness, despises that upon which God places such high value.

And after all friends, spirituality isn’t what you eat or don’t eat, where you go or don’t go. Spirituality is thinking about things the way God thinks about them, seeing them through God’s eyes, appraising them with God’s standards, that spiritual spirituality. And holiness isn’t don’t wear gold, don’t wear a tie. I think you can doll up and look like a Christmas tree and hurt your Christian testimony. I don’t doubt that at all. That can be done. I think a lot of Christian women do it. And I think that preachers sometime get so much automobile out ahead of them. That it’s a testimony. It’s not for God, but for somebody else, and I think I know who.

But holiness doesn’t consist in having or not having doing or not doing. It consists of thinking about it the way God thinks about it. Judging it the way God judges it. Responding toward it the way God responds. Reacting from it, as God reacts from it. Loving it, as God loves. Hating it as God hates it. And doing the things that are pleasing in His sight. And surely that will include holiness of life and righteousness of walk, which Paul calls here, righteousness and true holiness. May God grant that we have more than the new birth. May God grant that we have more than the knowledge that we’ve been born again. Let us go on unto perfection.

And let us seek as the days go by, in our living, the way we handle our money, the way we treat our friends, the way we live in our homes, the way we conduct our business, the way we think when we’re free to think the way we want to think. That in all that we will be exemplars of righteousness and true holiness. For he that despises, despises not man but God. May God grant that the words of Peter be fulfilled in us, be ye holy, for I am holy, words spoken first by God and quoted by Peter, be holy, for I am holy.

A yearning to be holy is about all I’d want to know that anybody had, and I’d call him my Brother. Are you longing to be holy? I wouldn’t ask that you would know all the different views and the different theological hairsplittings. All I’d want to know is, within his heart is a great longing to be holy. That, it seems to me is more valuable than all the fine churches and all the well-bound Bibles. God grant that we have it. All right.

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“The Holiness of God”

Sunday evening, November 16, 1958

Message #9 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

I am to speak tonight on the holiness of God and I want to read some passages. Exodus 15, and who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness? Job 15, Behold, He puteth no trust in His saints, yea the heavens are not clean in His sight. Job 25, behold, even to the moon and it shineth not, yea the stars are not pure in His sight. How much less man that is a worm and the son of man which is a worm. Psalm 22, Thou art holy, O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel. Proverbs 9:10, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy is understanding. Isaiah 6:3, One cried unto another and said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.

They say that when Leonardo da Vinci painted his famous Last Supper, that he had little difficulty with any of it except the faces. Then he painted the faces in without too much trouble, except one. He did not feel himself worthy to paint the face of Jesus. He held off and kept holding off. Unwilling to approach it, but knowing he must. And then in the impulsive carelessness of despair. He just painted it quickly and let it go. There’s no use he said, I can’t paint Him. In speaking on the holiness of God, I feel very much the same way.

This last week, I rather suffered through this and wondered why today and tonight I was able to get around at all. But I think that same sense of despair is on my heart. There isn’t any use for anybody to try. If it’s an orator, he can play his oratorical harp, but it sounds tinny and unreal. And when he’s through, you’ve listened to music, but you haven’t seen God. I suppose that the hardest thing about God to comprehend is His infinitude. I know that intellectually; that’s the hardest thing to grasp. But you can’t talk about the infinitude of God and not feel yourself a worm. But when you talk about the holiness of God, you have not only the problem of an intellectual grasp, but you have a sense of personal vileness which is almost too much to bear.

Now, the reason for this is that we are fallen beings. We are fallen spiritually, morally, mentally, and physically. We are fallen in all the ways that men can fall, being what they are. And we are all, and each of us, born into a tainted world. We’re born into a tainted world and we learn impurity from our cradles. We nursed it in with our mother’s milk. We breathe it in, the very air. Our education deepens it and our experience confirms it, evil impurities everywhere, and everything is dirty. Even our whitest white is dingy gray and our noblest heroes are soiled heroes, all of them.

So, we learned to excuse and overlook, and not to expect too much. We don’t expect all truth from our teachers. And we don’t expect all faithfulness from our politicians. And we quickly forgive them when they lie to us and vote for them again. And we don’t expect honesty from the merchants. And we don’t expect complete trustworthiness from anybody. And we managed to get along in the world only by passing laws to protect ourselves; from not only the criminal element, but from the best people there are who might in the moment of temptation take advantage of us.

So, fallen man, being born in this kind of world, living here, breathing it in; and gets into his pores, gets into his lungs, into his nerves, into his cells, until he has lost the ability to conceive of the Holy. But I would speak of the holiness of God, or of the Holy, or of the Holy One. We cannot comprehend this; and we certainly cannot define it, because holiness means purity. But that isn’t enough. Purity merely means that it’s unmixed. There’s nothing else in it, but that isn’t enough. We talk of moral excellency, but that is inadequate. For we say to be morally excellent is to excel somebody else in moral character. But, about whom are we speaking when we say that God is morally excellent? He excelled somebody. Who is it that He excels? The angels, the seraphim I suppose?

But that isn’t still enough. We mean rectitude. We mean honor. We mean truth and righteousness. And we mean all of these–uncreated and eternal. God is not now any holier than He ever was, or He, being unchanging and unchangeable, can never become holier than He is and He never was holier than He is and He’ll never be any holier than now. And it means self-existence, for He did not get His holiness from anyone, nor from anywhere. He did not go off into some vast, infinitely distant realm and there absorb His Holiness, but He is Himself the Holiness. He is the Holy. He is the All Holy. He is the Holy One. He is holiness itself, beyond the power of thought to grasp, or of word to express, beyond the power of all praise.

Now, language can’t express the holy, so God resorts to association and suggestion. He cannot say it outright, because He would have to use words that we don’t know the meaning of. And we would then, of course, take the words He used and translate them downward into our terms. If He were to use a word describing His own holiness, we could not understand that word as He uttered it. He would have to translate it down into our unholiness. If He were to tell us how white He is, we would translate it into terms of dingy gray.

So, God cannot tell us by language, so I say He uses association and suggestion by showing how it affects the unholy. Moses at the burning bush, there before the holy, fiery Presence, knelt down, took his shoes from off his feet, hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God. Then, here is this 19th chapter of Exodus, later, where Moses, the Lord said unto him, lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud that the people may hear when I speak with thee and believe thee, forever. And the Lord said to Moses, go unto the people and sanctify them today and tomorrow. Let them wash their clothes and be ready against the third day, for the third day the Lord will come down in the sight of the people. And thou shall set bounds unto the people round about saying, take heed to yourselves that ye go not up into the Mount or touch the border of it. Whosoever toucheth the Mount shall be surely put to death. There shall not a hand touch it, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through, whether it be a beast or man, it shall not live. When the trumpet soundeth long, they shall come up to the Mount. Moses went down and sanctified the people.

You see, he did the best he could. He went down and tried to whiten up a little their dingy gray. And it came to pass on the third day, in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud upon the mount and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud so that all the people trembled. Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God and they stood at another part of the mount. Mount Sinai was all together under smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire. And the smoke thereof ascended as of the smoke of a furnace and the whole mount quaked greatly. When the voice of the trumpet sounded long and waxed louder and louder, Moses answered God, spake and God answered him by a voice and the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai on the top of the mountain. And the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mountain. Moses went up, and the Lord said unto Moses, go down, charge the people lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze and many of them perish.

Now there was an effort on the part of God, all this trumpet, the sound of the trumpet and the voice of words, and the fire and the smoke and the shaking of the mount. It was an effort for God to say, by suggestion and association what He couldn’t say in words.

Now, there are two words for holy. There are more than two, but there are particularly two words for holy in the old Bible, in the Hebrew Bible. And one word is used almost exclusively of God, the Holy One. It’s rarely used ever of anything or person except God, the Holy One.

In that passage in Proverbs 9:10, the knowledge of the Holy that I read in your hearing, where it says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy is understanding. This intrigued me. In fact, the book that I’m going to write on the attributes of God, devotionally considered, is to be called The Knowledge of the Holy.

Well, I have been greatly fascinated by this, that it should occur in our Bible, that this word, that we should have it in the abstract, the Holy, rather than the Holy One. And yet, the Jewish Bible says, the knowledge of the Holy One. And in thirty-three of Proverbs, that is the thirtieth chapter, the third verse where he uses also the knowledge of the Holy; it says, the knowledge of the Holy One, or the All Holy. And though the King James translators called this the knowledge of the Holy, they used exactly the same word more than forty times and translated it the Holy One, the Holy One of Israel. So obviously, this is God. And yet, there is a vagueness enough about it that the translators felt free to put this into an abstraction, to make it abstract and call it, the Holy.

Now, there’s another word; and that’s not used of God very often. I think it is not as high a word. It is used of creative things often. It is something that, so to speak, is holy by context or association with this other holy. That is, we hear of holy ground. And when it says, this is holy ground, or holy Sabbath or a holy city or holy habitation or holy people or holy works or holy arm, it’s not the same awesome, awful word that he uses when he says the Holy or the Holy One.

Now, in the New Testament, and I have not read from the New Testament tonight. But in the New Testament, we have a word of course, it’s a Greek word. And we have talked, he talks there about God being holy; be ye holy, for I am holy. And I noticed one thing about that Greek word; it is that a definition of it is, awful thing. Now think of that. Take and set that word “thing” in capital letters, the awful THING. That’s one meaning of the word holy, the Holy One.

Now, let’s talk a little about the Holy One and His creatures. For you see, the presence of this Holy One allows only holy beings. In our humanistic day, our day of watered-down Christianity, our day of sentimental Christianity, that blows its nose loudly and makes God into a poor, weak, weeping old man. In this awful day, that sense of the holy isn’t upon the church. I was just talking with Brother McAfee and talking about Brother Matier being interested in European missions. Somebody else comes interested in the Hebrew who was working with the Jews. Somebody else working with the mountaineers. Somebody else is concerned with memorizing Scripture. Somebody else with foreign missions.

And I said, well, everybody seems to have something that he feels is tremendously important. And maybe it could be that the constant preaching that I do on the person of God, that I too, should be seeing only a part of the great truth, that there’s more. But I said this, if you’re going to be narrow, then I think we ought to be narrow on the right thing. And therefore, if I’m going to emphasize God and the holiness of God, and the awful, unapproachable quality that can be called that awful Thing. That One, that Holy, I say that I am on the right track. It isn’t all, but it’s something we’ve almost lost in our day. The thing is important, depending upon how much we have lost and how much of it we need. And we have lost the sense of the Holy One, almost all together.

Take over in the book of Revelation, that seventh chapter. Look, it says that, the seventh chapter, yes, the angels stood around about the Throne, and about the elders and the four beasts and they fell before the throne on their faces and worshipped God saying: Amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and power and might be unto our God forever and ever. And one of the elders answered saying, what are these which are arrayed in white robes, and whence came they? And I said unto him, sir, thou knowest. He said to me, these are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore, are they before the throne of God and serve Him day and night in His temple. And He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.

Now, there is God. There are people in the presence of God, but they’re there in the presence of God by a technical redemption. You see, what I worry about in this hour, is that we’re technically Christians and we can prove it. We can prove that we are Christians. We are Christians technically. And anybody can flip open a Greek lexicon and show you that you’re a saint. But I’m afraid of that kind of Christianity, because if I haven’t felt the sense of vileness by contrast with that sense of unapproachable and indescribable holiness, I wonder if I have ever been hit hard enough to really repent. And if I don’t repent, I wonder if I can believe. 

Now, we’re told, just believe it brother, just believe it. Now, come on, let me take your name and address here. What’s your name? Yes. What church would you like to go to? We have it all fixed up my brethren. But I’m afraid our fathers knew God in a different manner than that. Bishop Ussher used to go out by the river bank and kneel down by a log and repent his sins all Saturday afternoon, though there probably wasn’t a holier man in the region around about. He felt how unutterably vile he was. He couldn’t stand the dingy gray which was the whitest thing he had, set over against the unapproachable, shining whiteness that was God.

Go to the book of Isaiah and you’ll see the fiery burners there. With twain he covered his feet. There in these creatures before the throne, there wasn’t any of the flippancy that we see now. There wasn’t any of the tendency to try to out-hope hope and be funnier than a clown. There was a sense of Presence and these holy creatures, for they were holy creatures, they covered their feet. Why? They covered their feet in modesty, and they covered their face in worship, and they used their other wings to fly. These were the seraphim. They’re called fiery burners.

Then there’s Ezekiel 1 and 10. And we see there creatures coming out of a fire. Now, God speaks of Himself often as fire. Our God is a consuming fire, it says in Hebrews and in Isaiah 33 these words: Who among us shall dwell with the Devouring Fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings. And this is sometimes used as a text, who of you is going to go to hell? But my brethren, if you will read it in its context, this does not describe the hell. This is not hell at all. And if you will go to almost any of the commentators, they will say this is not hell, because the next passage says that he that hath clean hands and a pure heart and doesn’t lift up his soul unto vanity and answers the question, what is this devouring fire?

What is this everlasting burning? It is not hell, but the Presence of God. Who among us shall dwell in the fiery burning? Do you not know that if you were enabled to do it, fire can dwell with fire. And you can put the iron into the fire and the iron can learn to live with the fire by absorbing the fire and beginning to glow in incandescent brightness in the fire. So, we dwell in the fire. These creatures in Ezekiel came out of the fire having four faces. And they went straight ahead and they let down their wings to worship, and at the word of God’s command, they leaped to do His will; these awesome, holy creatures, about which we know so little and about which we ought to know more.

Then there was God when He spoke to Moses out of the bush. There was the God when He went with them in the pillar of fire. What was God saying? For it says in the 13th, I believe, of Exodus where it says that the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light by day and by night. And He took not away the cloud, the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, that He might lead them in all their journeys.

My friends, this was God dwelling there in that awesome fire. It was God dwelling there. And then when the tabernacle was made and the cherubim of gold overshadowed the mercy seat, what was it that came down between the cherubim wings. What was it that only one man could see and he, once a year with blood, did not dare go in? I wonder how many high priests ever looked at the Shekinah? I wonder, that high priest with all the protection of the atoning blood and the commandment of God; when the priest pulled away the veil, the great, heavy veil it took four men to part the great tapestry they pulled apart.

And this man went in trembling, into the Presence. I wonder if he ever dared to look at the fire. I wonder if being a Jew as he was, and worshipping the great God Almighty, the Holy One of Israel, I wonder if there was a high priest, one in twenty, that ever-dared gaze on that Fire. He was not told he couldn’t, but I wonder if anybody ever dared do it. I noticed that the very seraphim covered their faces. Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look upon God. And John fell down when he saw the Savior and had to be raised up again almost from the dead. And every encounter with God has been such that men went flat down and went blind. Paul went blind on Damascus Road. What was the light that blinded them? Was it the cosmic ray coming down from some exploding body or from two colliding galaxies they tell us about? No, no. It was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The God that dwells in the bush. The God that dwelt in the Shekinah between the Presence, between the wings of the seraphim.

And what was it that when they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came a sound from heaven as the rushing of a mighty wind, and a fire appeared and sat as a tongue of flame upon each one of them? What did that mean and what could it mean but that God was branding them in their foreheads with His fiery holiness to say, your Mine now. The church was born out of fire, my brethren. She was born out of fire as the creatures in Ezekiel 1 came out of fire. The church was born out of fire, but we have gray ashes today. But we are to be men and women of fire, for that is our origin.

And hear these last words, these words that tell us how God shall someday untune the sky, the heavens and the earth are reserved unto fire. The heavens shall pass away with a great noise and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; and the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved. What fire is that? Is that to be the atomic fire, the fire of a hydrogen bomb? Don’t allow yourself to be fooled by the scientists. Don’t allow your spiritual perceptions and concepts to be dragged down to Oak Ridge. Don’t think in terms of the scientist. That awesome fire out of which the seraphim moved, and that fire that dwelt between cherubim and that blazing Light that knocked Paul flat. That’s the same fire that shall dissolve the heaven and the earth. The awful presence of that Holy Thing, that awful Thing! Don’t accuse me because I say “Thing,” because I know it’s a Person. He is God, the Holy One of Israel, but there’s something about Him that is awesome and awful, so that one of the definitions, I repeat, of the word that we have in the New Testament is the Awful Thing.

Now, the Holy One and the sinner, the Holy One and the sinner, oh, man, oh, man, sinner man, you’re going to decide when you’ll serve Christ? You’re going to make the decision? You’re going to push God around? You’re going to accept Jesus or not accept Jesus, receive him, or not receiving, obey him or not obey Him? You’re going to go proudly down the aisle, with your chest out? You’re going to lay your head on the pillow tonight with a heartbeat between you and eternity? And you’re telling yourself, I’ll decide this question. I am a man of free will. God isn’t coercing my will. No, no, but I have words for you. Listen, art Thou not from everlasting, O Jehovah, my God, mine Holy One. Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on iniquity, Habakkuk 1:12,13, art Thou not from everlasting, O Jehovah my God.

But they say now, are your problems too much for you? Jesus will handle your problems. Are you trouble mentally? Jesus will give you mental peace. And do you have trouble getting on in the office? Jesus will help you to get on in the office. All of this is true, but O friends, how far it is from biblical religion. There was God in the midst. And what was it that gathered the people together in the book of Acts? They ministered unto the Lord and fasted and prayed. And there in the awesome Presence they heard the voice of the Holy Ghost say, separate me Barnabas and Saul.

Now, we’re thrown back on our planning and our reasoning and our thinking when the Great and Holy God is in our midst. So, I would recommend that you remember these words: Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil. If you have evil in your life, evil in your heart, evil in your home, evil in your business, evil in your memory unconfessed and unforgiven and uncleansed, remember that it is only by the infinite patience of God that you are not consumed. For our God is a consuming Fire. And it’s written here, holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord. Now, look at them come. See them. As they come from everywhere, these teachers with their dingy gray interpretations; pulling this down and explaining it away and saying, see note on such and such, pulling it down and destroying it. But it stands my brother, holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

Now, if you can interpret that neatly and go home without being bothered, I wonder if your eyes have ever gazed upon that Awful Thing. I wonder if you know, have, or do have the knowledge of the Holy. I wonder if that sense of the overwhelming, crushing holiness of God has ever come upon your heart. It was a common thing in other days when God was the center of human worship. When we came to Him and worshiped God, it was common for men to kneel at an altar and shake and tremble and weep and perspire in an agony of conviction, and they expected it in that day. We don’t see it now, because the God we preach is not the everlasting, awful God, mine Holy One, who is of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look upon iniquity. And we use the technical interpretation of justification by faith, and the imputed righteousness of Christ to water our spirit, the wine of our spirituality down until we’re what we are. God help us in this evil hour.

And so, we take into the presence of God this tainted soul. We come into the presence of God with our concept of morality, having learned it from the books, and gotten it from the newspapers, and gotten in school. We come dirty with everything that we have dirty, and our whitest white, dirty, and our churches dirty, and our thoughts dirty. We come to God dirty and do nothing about it. If we came to God dirty, but trembling and shocked and awestruck, and would kneel in His presence and at His feet, and cry like Isaiah, I am undone. I’m a man of unclean lips. Then I’d say, all right, I can understand. But, we skip into His awful Presence. And somebody who is dirty comes with a book “Seven Steps to Salvation” and gives seven verses underlined and gets a fellow out of his problem and out of his trouble.

Dear God, that’s why we’re going down each year. Each year, more Christians, more people going to church, more Christians, more people going to church, more church buildings, more money and less spirituality and less holiness. And we’re forgetting that without holiness, no man shall see God. I tell you this standing here tonight, that I want God to be what God is. And I want God to remain what God is, the impeccably holy, unapproachable, Holy Thing, Holy One, all Holy One. I want him to be and remain the Holy in capital letters. I want Him to be that and I want His heaven to be holy and I want His throne to be holy. And I don’t want Him to change or modify His requirements. Even if it shuts me out, I want something holy left in the universe.

You can join almost any church now. I’ve heard recently of a certain church, well, it’s a Baptist church. They’re not all true Baptist churches. I have preached to some pretty strict Baptist churches, and I am more or less of a Baptist myself, and that, the baptistry back there. But I’ll say this to you brother, that this particular Baptist church and they tell me there are many of them. They say now at the closing hymn, we open the doors of the church; and they can come and anybody can join. A gangster can join. I say never, never, never, never, never! For if they can’t get into heaven, they oughten to get into our churches.

And the problem with us is that we let our churches stay dingy gray instead of pleading for holy whiteness. And as soon as anybody begins to plead, we Christians ought to be holy, somebody comes along and says, now my brother, don’t get excited about this, and don’t become a fanatic. For don’t you understand that God understands our flesh and He knows we’re but dust. Oh, He knows where but dust, but he says, Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look upon iniquity. And without holiness, it’s impossible to please God.

Thomas Binney wrote this, I think it’s one of the most awesome, wondrous things ever written. “Eternal Light, Eternal Light, how pure the soul must be. When placed within thy searching sight, it shrinks not but with calm delight, can live and look on Thee, the spirits that surround thy throne can bear the burning bliss. But that is surely theirs alone for they have never, never known a fallen world like this. But how shall I, whose native sphere is dark, whose mind is dim, before the Ineffable appear and on my naked spirit bear the uncreated Being? How shall I, whose native sphere is dark, whose mind is dim, before the Ineffable appear? And on my naked spirit bear the uncreated Being. That fiery Being out of which come the holy burners who sing Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.

How can I bear it? And you don’t know when all your religious helps, all your marked Bibles, all your jolly Christian friends, all your ham eating, sweet potato eating, joke telling banquet, cheery Christians. I eat ham too incidentally. I’m not against ham, but we make banquets and tell jokes and have one-man bands, but one of these times each one of us will be called before the Ineffable to appear, and on our naked spirits bear the uncreated Being. How are we going to do it? There is a way for man to rise to that sublime abode, an offering and a sacrifice, a Holy Spirit’s energies, an Advocate with God. These, these prepare us for the sight of Holiness above. The sons of ignorance and night can dwell with the Eternal Light through the Eternal Love.

I think that’s one of the greatest things ever written by a mortal man. We don’t sing it much. It’s too awful. We’re afraid of it. Spirits that surround thy throne, seraphim, cherubim, angels, archangels, principalities, power, unfallen creatures. They can bear the burning bliss. But that’s because they never, never have known the fallen world like this. But how can I? It isn’t enough for somebody to mark a New Testament and rub my nose in it and try to comfort me. No, I don’t want to be comforted! I don’t want to be comforted. I want to know what it will be like in that hour when I leave my wife and my children and my grandchildren and my good friends and my fifteen-year, warm friend, McAfee and all who’d give blood for me. I’ve got them here in this city that would give blood for me. I can go to cities all over the United States and up in to Canada and they would give blood for me. But there is not a one of them that can help me in that awful hour when I appear before the Ineffable, and the uncreated Being impinges on my naked spirit. Then, I want to know.

Well, we can. There is a way. It’s through the offering and the sacrifice of the Advocate with God. But, don’t take that lightly. Don’t take that lightly, my brother. Conversion used to be a revolutionary, radical, wondrous, terrible, glorious thing. But there’s not much of it left. It’s because we’ve forgotten that God is the Holy One of Israel.

Let’s pray. O God, time is running, flying like a frightened bird. The bird of time is on the wing and has a little way to flutter. The wine of life is oozing, drop by drop, and the leaves of life are falling one by one. And soon before the Ineffable every man must appear to give an account of the deeds done in the body. Let’s pause now for pleas in our prayer and remain in an attitude of prayer. And I’ll finish praying by praying for somebody if they want me to. Who would say Mr. Tozer, I’m troubled to about this and I may have made some sort of religious profession, but oh I want to know that I’m shielded by the Advocate, by the blood. I want to know that by the grace of God and the indwelling Spirit, I can bear the burning bliss. I want God to do something new for me to revive my spirit, to change my dingy gray to white, to make me sick of compromise, weary of this checkered living. Pray for me, Brother Tozer that I might become a holy man, a holy woman indeed, by the blood of the Lamb and the fiery purgation of the Holy Ghost. Pray for me. Who will say, pray for me. When we pray, we’re going to have this understanding with you, that you’re going to do something about this. But you’re not going to say, well, the pastor prayed for me. You’re going to thank God and you don’t expect Him to answer, but you’re going to work with Him in cooperation, surrender, confession, if necessary, restitution, straightening out of your life, determination that you’re going to cooperate with God in all this.

Let’s pray. Father, we pray for these friends who asked us to pray. Dear Father, we pray that Thou through thy Son, Jesus Christ, will help every one of these, that they might drive a stake down and say as Israel said when she crossed the river, this is a marker I crossed here, something really happened. Oh, we pray that this decision made tonight may not be a careless decision, but that it may be a determination that’s as big as life and as strong and deep as all their faith, that they will, they will seek to meet all requirements that they may in that day, rise to that sublime abode that the sons of ignorant in light and night may dwell with the Eternal Light because of Thine eternal love. Grant this. Then for those who didn’t, some who didn’t but should have, O Father, keep upon us a sense of holiness, that we can’t sin and excuse it, but that repentance will be as deep as our lives. This we ask in Christ’s name. Amen.