We're now about to begin our fifth session
in our study on the holiness of God, and what is ironic about this, and perhaps
even maddening to you, is that all the way up until this point in our study I have
not begun to define the meaning of the word "holy." I've used it, I've tried to
stress the importance of it, we've seen the traumatic influence it communicates,
we've seen how it relates to justice and to the potential insanity of a man like
Martin Luther, but what exactly does the Bible mean by the word "holy"? I notice in
our own language and in our own vocabulary the term "holy" seems to be used among us,
particularly among Christians, as a synonym for moral purity or for
righteousness, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it may be a little bit
misleading because in the Scriptures there are two primary or basic meanings to the
word "holy"; and I really shouldn't say two primary. There's one primary and one
secondary -- two major meanings, if you will, of the term "holy." The secondary
meaning of this word in Scripture is that which refers to personal righteousness and
purity, but the primary meaning of the word "holy" means separate, or if you
will, theological <apartite.> That which is holy is that which is other -- O-T-H-E-R -- that
which is different from something else. And so when the Bible speaks about God's
holiness, the primary thrust of those statements is to refer to God's
transcendence, to refer to His magnificence, to refer to that sense in
which God is higher and superior to anything that there is in the creaturely
realm. Again, the simplest way to discuss this is that that which is holy is that
which is different. Look through your Bible sometime and see how the term "holy"
is used as an adjective. Not only is God described as holy, we hear about the Holy
Spirit, the Holy One of Israel. We hear about holy ground, holy vessels, holy
moments. In fact, the anthropologists and sociologists have studied human experience
and noticed that all people have some sense of holy time and holy space. Think
back to your childhood, to that special place where you wanted to go when your
life was troubled -- maybe it was to your room, maybe it was to a little cozy
section in the woods or in the lawn under your favorite tree. Whenever you were
depressed or distressed or your parents hollered at you, and you wanted to go grab
the kitty-cat and go sit and cry, you went to a certain place, and that place took on
special significance to you. Every year there's one day in the year that is
special in your life. It's your birthday, where you celebrate a moment in time that
has a special importance to you; and during the course of the year, we as
people celebrate what we call what? Holidays. Now holiday means a holy day, a
day that is different from the ordinary days, that is special. It's set apart for
a particular kind of remembrance. Sacred space, sacred time, sacred things are all
a part of our lives. I remember when I was teaching a course in seminary many, many
years ago where I committed the unpardonable sin of a seminary professor.
I lost my temper with a student. I mean I ...let me be candid with you. Sometimes
you know your students say, "I don't want to ask a dumb question," and I -- I say,
"Now look, don't ever be embarrassed to ask me a question. The only dumb question
is the one you're really afraid to ask. I mean any question that you have that's
important to you, it's important to me." And I really believed that -- that I
should take seriously any question that a student raises, but every now and then,
ladies and gentlemen, you really do get a dumb question. And it is my task as a
professor to, again, treat the student with dignity. Well I had a student once
that made me lose it. I was lecturing on the Lord's Supper, and his question was
not so much a question as an expression of unbridled cynicism. He put his hand up,
and I acknowledged him. He said, "What's the big deal about bread and wine? Why do
we have to do that? Why can't we just have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and
coca-cola?" That's when I lost it. I just felt this rage just flowing up out of my
soul. He grated my sensitivity when he said that, and instead of giving a polite,
genteel, professorial response to him, I said, "You want to know why we don't have
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and coca-cola at Holy Communion? Because Jesus
never consecrated peanut butter and jelly or coca-cola." I just wanted to kill him.
Why? Because he had just profaned with his question something that was precious and
holy in my experience. But what is it that makes the bread and the wine so special?
What is it that makes any moment in history so special? What is it that makes
a piece of real estate holy ground? Why is it that Noah marked the spot where he
landed with a -- built an altar? And Abraham built an altar to God. Why is it
that we are drawn to take something that is common and make it extraordinary
because of its significance? It's not because of the intrinsic value of these
objects, but what makes something sacred, what makes something holy is the touch of
God upon it. When the one who himself is other and different touches that which is
ordinary, it becomes extraordinary. When He touches you, you become uncommon, and
so the difference between the profane and the holy is the difference between the
common and the uncommon, between the earthly and the heavenly. Not too long ago
I saw a study of phobias in the United States where the ten most common phobias
were listed -- the things that people are most frightened about. You know fear of
cats and fear of -- you know claustrophobia -- fear of crowded spaces,
and so on. Fear of death. Do you know what the number one fear of was, incidentally,
of American people -- the number one phobia? The fear of standing in front of a
group and giving a talk, like I'm doing right now. It's awful, but there is a
phobia called xenophobia. How many of you have never heard that word before --
xenophobia? Okay, those of you who don't have your hands up, I'm going to call to
ask you to give a -- well, I got a whole lot more hands up in the air. Xenophobia
is the fear of strangers or foreigners. We have a tendency to be frightened by people
whose customs are different from ours, and the supreme form of xenophobia that we
have is our fear of the living God because He is so different from us. He is high and
exalted. One of the most fascinating studies that I've ever read and I would
commend to you for your careful attention is a book that appeared early in the
Twentieth Century by a German theologian who was also an anthropologist. His name
was Rudolf Otto, and he wrote a very little book, but a book that many
theologians consider one of the most important books of the Twentieth Century.
It's a very skinny little book, and the original title was called simply "Das
Heilige," translated into the English under the title "The Idea of the Holy."
And what Otto did was this, that I found so interesting, was that he went around,
and he examined people from different cultures -- Aborigines, Europeans,
different people -- and tried to find out what they regarded as holy or sacred in
their culture. And then he did studies phenomenologically to see what the normal
human reactions are to the holy, and then after making this study he tried to
distill the essence of human experience of the holy and come up with some
conclusions. And one of the conclusions -- he used to do this by inventing phrases to
describe these things, and when -- if you would ask Rudolf Otto, "Dr. Otto, what is
the holy?" the answer he gave was this: "That the holy is the Mysterium
Tremendum." I have a Latin phrase for everything -- Mysterium Tremendum. Now what does he mean by that?
He said that the experience that we have of the holy is an experience of
something very strange and impossible to penetrate and to fathom. It is mysterious,
but it is also powerful, and this awesome, mysterious power provokes a sense of fear
within us. Listen to how Otto describes it this -- what he calls the awful
mystery. He says this: "The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle
tide, pervading the mind with the tranquil mood of deepest worship; or it may pass
over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing as it were,
thrillingly vibrant and resonant until at last it dies away, and the soul resumes
its profane, non-religious mood of everyday experience." Can you relate to
that? Everybody in this room has had those pregnant moments of awareness of the
presence of God, haven't you? They're not part of our ordinary, daily experience.
Ordinary experience even for the most devout Christian is basically profane.
We're not flooded every second in our soul with this acute sense of the presence of
God, and yet every Christian knows what it means to have the precious moment of
awareness of the presence of God. "But it's fleeting, as if it may burst in
sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead
to the strangest excitements to intoxicated frenzy and to transport into
ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror
and shuddering and so on." He describes the fact that not everybody responds in
the same way to an awareness of the holy. "Some people become whirling dervishes in
all kinds of flamboyant activity. Other people are moved to absolute silence and
contemplation." But what he detected in this study of the holy is this: that
across the board, throughout varying civilizations the basic response of human
beings to whatever they consider holy -- to be holy -- is a response of
ambivalence. Ambivalence meaning this: that we have conflicting feelings about
the holy, that there is something about the holiness of God that attracts us, but
there's also something about the holiness of God that repels us and frightens us. On
the one hand it fascinates, and on the other it terrifies. Have you ever wondered
about the way in which we sometimes like to scare ourselves -- little kids wanting
to get together and tell ghost stories? Have you seen them do that? I remember
when my son was a little boy he wanted to sleep out in the woods behind our place in
Ligonier, so one of the college students said, "I'll take you up there in the
woods." And they went up, and they pitched a tent. And they got their
sandwiches and flashlights and canteens and went up there about midnight. And at
midnight, you know, they got their bedrolls out, and my son says to the
college student, "Joe?" He said, "Yeah?" He said, "Tell me a ghost story," so Joe
started telling him about the guy who lost his liver, you know, and went around, "I
want my liver back." And everybody's heard that ghost story and so my son
listens to this, and he's fascinated by it. And when Joe finished the story, my
son looked at him and said, "Joe?" He said, "You know maybe sleeping out here
tonight isn't such a good idea." Joe said, "That's all right. You just go to
sleep." And so they were quiet for a few minutes, and my son had the opportunity to
concentrate his mind on the ghost story, on the noises of the woods and the things
that go BUMP in the night, and he lasted about ten more minutes until they were
down knocking at our back door, asking if they could come in. Do you know that
people go to Disney World in Orlando and pay money to be frightened? Isn't that
strange, that we have this dualistic attitude toward the holy? I like to
remember the old radio program -- some of you with snow on the roof will remember
those wonderful days of yesteryear when the Lone Ranger, you know, would come
riding down the road; or we listened to the soap operas in the afternoon. Do you
remember them ladies? Young Dr. Malone and Ma Perkins and Helen Trent and Argyle
Sunday and backstage wife -- Larry said to Mary, "Mary," and Mary said to Larry,
"Larry." That's what we listened to. Do you remember? Pepper Young's family -- how
many of you remember them? They were terrific. Well at nighttime you had the
adventure stories, like Superman and so on, and through the week we would have
Cops and Robbers, Gangbusters, Mr. King, Tracer of Lost Persons, and there was a
movie that was particularly scary -- or a program particularly scary -- called
"Suspense." But the scariest program of all scary programs on the radio in the
forties, ladies and gentlemen, came on Sunday nights; and the lead-in to this
radio program featured the sound of this creaky vault door opening in an echo
chamber, and it opens up, and you know your hair is standing on end before the
thing starts. And the voice overcomes with the announcer's baritone voice saying,
"Inner Sanctum," huh? How many of you remember that, okay? I mean they didn't
even have to start the story, and everybody was scared already. What does
inner sanctum mean? Inner sanctum means, literally within the holy. You see the
marketing geniuses of the entertainments world discovered somehow that the most
terrifying thing that they could come up with for people would be to expose them to
a program about the holy. See that's why we have a tendency to keep our distance, a
safe distance, from the character of God because even though we're attracted to it
on the one hand, on the other we are repelled by it. And I'm going to talk in
our next session about how that manifested itself concretely and specifically in the
work of Jesus, where people were both drawn to Him and terrified of Him. And yet
it is this element that we fear that is at the very core of the character of God, and
for us to understand it, beloved, is set forth for us in the New Testament as the
priority of learning. I asked my students in the seminary a simple question from the
Bible. I said, "Everybody's aware of the Lord's Prayer, and the Lord's Prayer can
be divided up according to literary categories from the formal address to the
petitions to the closing." And I ask my students, "What is the first petition of
the Lord's Prayer?" Do you know it? Don't answer it out loud, but answer it in our
mind? Do you know what the first petition is of the Lord's Prayer? Remember the
scene: The disciples have observed Jesus in His astonishing power, and they come to
Him. And they notice this link between His power and His devotion to prayer; and so
they come to Him, and they say, "Jesus, teach us how to pray." He said, "Okay,
I'll teach you how to pray. When you pray, I want you to pray like this: Our Father,
which art -- who art -- in heaven." Then what? "Hallowed be thy name." Now here's
the question. Is the "hallowed be thy name" part of the formal address, or is
the "hallowed be thy name" the first petition? See if it were part of the
formal address, Jesus would have said this: He would have said, "When you pray
say this: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed is your name." But that's not
what He said. He said, "When you pray, I want you to pray this: The first thing I
want you to pray for when you get on your knees is that the name of God would be
treated as sacred, as holy." Repeatedly the Bible says of God, "Holy is His name."
Another little quiz I have with my students. I said, "Suppose in this day and
age in the United States of America, where we've had such a flood and proliferation
of legislation in the land, and nobody can keep up with all the new laws that are
being added to the law books every year. Suppose somebody came along and said,
'Hey, we're going to start all over again. We're going to just throw out all the
lawyers, all the laws, even the Constitution and start fresh. But your job
it to write the new Constitution. Your job is to write the new Bill of Rights, and
the game plan is this: that all future laws in this nation's history will be
judged by their conformity to ten laws that you draw up.' So you only have ten
laws to put down on the books. What ten would you write? How many of you would
waste one of your ten by making a law against coveting? How many of you would
include in your top ten a law that children ought to respect and obey their
parents. Most of you would probably include a law prohibiting murder and
theft, but would anybody use up one of their top ten laws by saying that it's an
absolute law of the land that no one ever, ever, ever takes the name of God in vain?
Ladies and gentlemen, when God wrote a constitution for a national government
that made His top ten. Isn't it incredible? A few years ago I read a
astonishing article in "Time" magazine about an incident that took place in
Maryland. A truck driver had been arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct, and
when the police officers came to arrest him, this truck driver was so abusive that
they were furious by the time they got the guy to the station house, and they wanted
to throw the books -- book -- at him. So they got him up before the magistrate, and
they talked about all of the unkind things that this truck driver said about the
policeman on the way down. Now for the misdemeanor of disorderly conduct, the
severest penalty that the magistrate could impose was $100 fine and thirty days in
jail, but he wanted to nail this guy, to throw the book at him; and so he
resurrected an antiquated law that had never been repealed and was still on the
books in the statutes of Maryland that prohibited public blasphemy, and the
penalty for public blasphemy had been another thirty days in jail and another
$100 fine. So the judge imposed upon the truck driver $200 fine, sixty days in
jail, and this made "Time" magazine's editorial because the editor of "Time" was
outraged that in this day and age somebody could suffer the cruel and unusual
punishment of paying $100 fine and spending thirty days in jail merely for
publicly blaspheming the holy name of God. We've come a long way. Twenty-two years
ago the word "virgin" was not permitted to be uttered on the television because it
was too provocative and suggestive. Censorship has changed so much in our day
that movies may freely use erotic language, scatological language, and
blasphemous language, and that's okay. But still there are rules and regulations for
broadcast television that prohibits the use of certain prurient and obscene sexual
language, but it is still permitted on the television set to use the name of God as a
common curse word. Jesus said, "You know what I want you to pray for? I want you to
pray that my Father's name would be regarded as holy. You see, then I want you
to say, 'Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth even as it is in heaven.'
So what I want my people to be praying for is that my reign, my sovereignty, my
authority as King will be honored and recognized in this world and that people
will do my will on this planet even as the angels in heaven right now obey my will."
You know Jesus doesn't say so, but I'm convinced there's a logical progression
here. I don't think that the kingdom of God will ever come on this earth or that
the will of God will ever be done on this earth until or unless the name of God is
revered by His people. How is it possible for people to honor a king and at the same
time desecrate his name? You know it's not like the Jewish people had some name
fetish or that they believed that there was some magic associated with the
utterance of the word, but they understood this, as God understood it: that if we
have a cavalier, casual attitude toward the name of God, that reveals more deeply
than anything else we say about our deepest attitude toward the God of the
name. Let me tell it like it is. If you use the name of God as a common curse
word, you are at root a profane person. You have no respect for the holiness of
God, and I urge you to think before you let that word pass over your lips again in
a frivolous manner because God will not tolerate the desecration of His name. He
made it in the top ten, and so Jesus says that you would pray that the name of God
would be holy, that it would be treated as different, as special, as extraordinary,
as exalted because He is different and special and exalted. When we are called to
be holy, we are called to be different. We are called to bear witness to the style
that one finds in God, a style that is driven by the second meaning of holiness,
which is righteousness. When God says, "Be holy for I am holy," He is saying, "Be
different than the normal standards of this world. I want you to express and to
show what righteousness is in this land." That's the task of the Christian: to
mirror and to reflect the character of God to a dying world. Let's pray. Our Father,
again we ask your pardon for the way in which we have profaned your name in word
and in deed and in thought, and we pray that you would give us a holy respect for
you, that in our land, to some degree and by some measure, we may see the
manifestation of your kingship and your will being done. For we ask it in the name
of Christ, amen.
