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In David you have done what is just and right.

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Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his footstool.

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He is holy.

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Moses and Aaron were among his priests.

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Samuel was among those who called on his name.

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They called on the Lord and he answered them.

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He spoke to them from the pillar of cloud.

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They kept his statues and decrees. He gave them.

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O Lord our God, you answered them.

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You were to Israel a forgiving God,

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though you punished their misdeeds.

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Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his holy mountain,

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for the Lord our God is holy.

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Some would call the holiness of God the attribute of attribute.

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And yet perhaps in this holy century it is in some circles

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the forgotten attribute of God.

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Did you know, however, that God is more often called holy

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in the Bible than he is called almighty?

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That's because his holiness is the fullest expression of himself.

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When God wants to underscore a promise or an oath which he gives,

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he does it by swearing according to his holiness,

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not his almightiness by which he brings the task of promise,

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not his faithfulness by which he keeps it,

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but his holiness because holiness so fully expresses his person.

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In Psalm 89 and 35, for example, God says,

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Once have I sworn by my holiness that I will not lie unto David.

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Then in Amos 4, too, the Lord hath sworn by his holiness.

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When God wants to call upon one of his attributes,

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which fully expresses his person he calls upon, his holiness,

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to have an understanding of God and his proper,

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it is important for us to balance his love, mercy, and grace,

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which are so wonderful.

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With this sobering truth of his holiness,

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as we approach this attribute this evening,

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I do so with reference because I feel unworthy to talk about his holiness.

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As we talk about it, it almost seems as though we do it in justice.

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No words can frame the thoughts that we need tonight

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as we think about the holiness of God.

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I pray that God the Holy Spirit will help us to not only understand the facts

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but the sense in our hearts what his holiness is all about.

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It is important for us to define something about holiness.

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What do we mean by this term?

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Holiness is a general term to indicate sanctity

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or separation from all that is sinful.

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The root idea behind holy or holiness is separation

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from that which is impure or morally imperfect.

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It refers, as Dr. Unger says, to moral wholeness.

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So when we talk about the holiness of God,

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what we are talking about is his entire freedom from moral evil

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and his absolute moral perfection.

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There are several things we need to say about God's holiness.

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First of all, it is fundamental to him.

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It is one attribute by which God wants his people to know him.

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I think we see this suggested at least in Exodus 19,

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if I may take you there for a moment.

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We come to that dreadful scene really before Mount Sinai

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when God deals with his people Israel.

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This is the time when he is actually married to them,

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to the covenants of the law.

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They are to set themselves apart, to consecrate themselves,

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even to the point of abstaining from marital relations

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and to the point of washing their clothes.

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In Genesis 16, on the morning of the third day,

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that was the appointed day,

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there was thunder and lightning with a thick cloud over the mountain

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and a very loud trumpet blast.

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Everyone in the camp trembled.

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Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God

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and they stood at the foot of the mountain.

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Can you imagine that scene?

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Mount Sinai was covered with smoke.

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Now Mount Sinai is no ski slope.

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It is no little hill.

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Actually Sinai is a range of mountains

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and this is one of the peaks on Sinai.

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And it says the whole mountain was covered with smoke

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because the Lord descended on it in fire.

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I can't just try to picture that in your mind.

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This mountain that seems to be engulfed with fire

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and smoke builds up until it seems it will consume all of the mountains.

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It says the smoke builds up from it like smoke from a furnace.

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The whole mountain trembled violently

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and the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder.

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This is the scene as God prepares to speak to his people.

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Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him,

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The Lord is sending you to the top of Mount Sinai

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and called Moses to the top of the mountain.

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Moses was a man of great faith and courage, wasn't he?

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And Moses went up and the Lord said to him,

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Go down and warn the people

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so that they do not force their way through

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to see the Lord and many of them perish.

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Even the priests who approach the Lord must consecrate themselves

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or the Lord will break out against them.

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Moses said to the Lord,

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The people cannot come up from Mount Sinai

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because you yourself warned us.

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Put limits around the mountain and set me apart as holy.

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The Lord is right, go down and bring Aaron up with you.

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But the priests and the people must not force their way through

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to come up to the Lord or he will break out against them.

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God put on quite a display

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as he establishes this renewed relationship with Israel.

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They've now been redeemed out of Egypt

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by the blood of the Passover Lamb.

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God with his mighty power has whet them through the waters of the sea.

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They've now come to the foot of this mountain

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and God deals with them and the first thing he does

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when he presses upon them is holiness.

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He tells them to consecrate themselves, to wash their clothes

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and not to set foot beyond the certain boundary

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that he had set at the foot of the mountain.

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He says if they dare to come any further,

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if they try to get a glimpse of what's going on here in the mountain,

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I will kill them.

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You see, God wanted his people to know that he's a holy God.

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That's why he says that God's holiness is fundamental to him.

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As there's any one attribute by which he wants us to know him,

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it is in his holiness.

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Now, the second thing I would say about God's holiness

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as we talk about identification is that

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God's holiness is essential.

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That is, it cannot be separated from God.

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There is nothing else in all the universe that is holy apart from God,

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including angels or men.

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Although there are holy angels and we are called saints or holy people,

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but we are holy because of our relationship to God,

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not because of what we are.

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Only God is holy in himself.

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There is none other as holy as he is in that same sense.

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In 1 Samuel 2, 2, there is none holy as the Lord.

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Revelation 15, 4, thou alone are holy.

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Holiness is peculiar to God.

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Any holiness that his creatures have is imparted to them.

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God alone is holy and is essential to his being.

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And finally, God's holiness is immutable.

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In other words, it's unchanging.

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God is eternally holy.

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He is not more or less holy today than he was in Moses' day.

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His holiness has not increased nor diminished from before the creation of the world.

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His holiness is unchanging.

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It is the same, always.

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Laman Strauss says this in his book on the first person.

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Holiness is that natural and essential attribute of God,

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whereby he is absolutely and essentially perfect and righteous.

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He is necessarily holy because he is holiness in the highest degree.

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He is infinitely and eternally holy.

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And in this, he is unique, different from all creatures, men and angels.

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God's holiness is not an acquired perfection.

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It is essentially God himself.

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As he was God from eternity, so he was holy from eternity.

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Therefore, he is as necessarily holy as he is necessarily God.

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He cannot be God and not be holy.

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His nature could not subsist without holiness.

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Now, God's holiness includes several elements.

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These are sort of sub-gods that we include with holiness.

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They flow out of his holiness, although sometimes we speak of them as separate attributes of God.

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Nonetheless, they belong with his holiness.

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One of them is purity.

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We speak about the purity of God.

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That is an aspect of his holiness.

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In 1 John 1.5, it says,

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God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

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Darkness there refers to moral darkness, or his moral imperfection or blemish.

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None at all in God.

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No darkness, absolute light.

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It means he is free from all defilement.

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He is pure in essence.

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That is why when any creature comes into his presence,

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he is immediately aware of sin.

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I believe the closer one walks with God, the more sensitive he becomes to his own sinfulness.

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When a person gets to the point of sensing that he has need of cleansing,

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it means he is walking closer to God.

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The further we get away from God, the more we see ourselves as passable, as okay.

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But as we draw nearer to God, and he draws nearer to us,

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there is inevitably this sense of unworthiness,

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this searching that goes on in the heart and the mind,

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this trying not to go after purity.

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We have an example of that in Isaiah 6.

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Do you know the passage, don't you?

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King Uzziah died in that same year,

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a year of great turmoil in Israel, or Judah.

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Isaiah saw the Lord, and he was seated on the throne, high and exalted.

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And if the train of his robe kills the temple, what a majestic figure that is.

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He sees the Lord, sees upon a throne, and the robe that he wears has a train

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that goes down the steps from the throne and then all the way out through the temple.

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And above him were seraphs, each with six wings.

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Someone asked me recently, do angels have wings?

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Well, yes and no.

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How's that for a good answer?

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Yes in the sense that there are some angelic creatures that do have wings.

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But technically no, because angels, as we see them revealed in the Bible,

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when they appear, appear apparently as human beings, or they can't appear that way.

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But here is a creature called a seraph, which has six wings.

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Not just two, but two.

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The seraph covered his face with two, he covered his face, and with two he flies.

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And said that there were two of them, and they were calling one to the other.

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And this is what they said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.

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The whole earth is full of his glory.

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And what was Isaiah's response?

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It was that he was brought into the presence of the Holy God,

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this pure one in whom there is no moral blemish.

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He cries out, woe to me!

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I am ruined, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips,

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and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.

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You see, as he comes into the presence of God, and he witnesses the holiness of God,

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the thing that he immediately senses is his own sinfulness and unworthiness to be there.

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That's God's purity.

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And then when we think of God's holiness, we also think of his righteousness.

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Jeremiah the prophet, chapter 12, verse 1, says,

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You are always righteous, O Lord. What that means is that God is always right in everything that he does.

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He cannot condone evil.

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God is always right, and therefore our sin has an intense and immediate effect upon him.

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That's why it says in Ephesians 4.30, And grieve not the Holy Spirit,

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whereby you are sealed under the day of redemption.

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I'm glad that he says that, that we're sealed under the day of redemption.

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A mark of ownership is upon us until that day that we are redeemed at the rapture,

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and caught away to be with the Lord.

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But he says that even though we are sealed with the Spirit of God, it's possible for us to grieve him.

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It doesn't say grieve him away, but it says it's possible for us to grieve him.

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You mean God has emotions?

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Well, God has emotions in a far more keen sense than you or me.

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He has perfect emotion.

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When you and I sin, it's not only disgraceful to us, it is grieving to God.

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It hurts God.

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The Holy Spirit within us groans because of that.

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Because he is righteous, he is holy.

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And then there's God's justice, which is also a part of his holiness.

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Zephaniah writes about this.

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Did you know that there was a book in the Bible named Zephaniah?

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Turn to it if you will.

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Now go to Matthew and just back up, and you'll get there.

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You'll come to Zechariah.

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Don't be fooled.

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It's not the same man.

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Zephaniah is a couple of books back from that.

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Zephaniah was a great prophet of God who cried out for the Lord against Judah, the southern kingdom.

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He was the great-great-grandson of King Hezekiah.

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He was a member of the royal family and a prophet of God.

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Zephaniah says this in the third chapter of his book as we divide it.

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And here he speaks to the city of Jerusalem.

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And he warns Jerusalem that because of her wickedness and her sin against the Lord, God is going to judge her.

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And that judgment came just perhaps started just 15 years or so after his prophecy.

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It was the coming of Babylon upon that nation.

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But he says in chapter 3 verse 1,

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Woe to the city of oppressors, rebellious and defiled!

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She obeys no one, she accepts no correction.

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She does not trust in the Lord, she does not draw near to her God.

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This is Jerusalem now, the Jews.

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Her officials are roaring lions, her rulers are evening wolves who leave nothing for the morning.

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The leaders who should have brought them to God were like beasts.

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Her prophets are arrogant, they are treacherous men.

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Her priests profane the sanctuary and do violence to the law.

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The Lord within her is righteous.

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He does no wrong.

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Morning by morning he dispenses his justice, and every new day he does not fail, yet the unrighteous know no shame.

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And because Israel refused God's hand of discipline, God brought that nation, the Southern Kingdom of Judah, technically into bondage to Babylon.

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God's justice was fulfilled in his people.

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His justice is what holiness demands upon sin, is punishment upon sin. That's justice.

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Richard DeHaan, in his book, I think, The Living God, says,

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God has established moral laws based upon his holy nature, and has provided just penalties for the infraction of these laws.

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It is absolutely necessary that the prescribed penalty be carried out, God's integrity at stake.

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He cannot declare a law, decree a penalty, and then refrain from administering the threatened punishment from then sin.

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God would be untrue to himself, and in a real sense, become a partner in sin, if he were to let it go uncounted.

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And so in his justice, he will not allow sin to go unpunished, and we talked about that some while this morning.

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Now let's think about the manifestation of God's holiness.

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We'll talk a little bit about what it is.

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I'm going to suggest four ways in which God has manifested his holiness.

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This is not a complete list. It's only meant to be suggested to you.

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But God, first of all, manifested his holiness in his creation.

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Now sin has affected it today, but originally God's creation was absolutely holy.

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In Genesis 1, as God created it, he said it was good.

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Why do you call it good? Because it was perfect.

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Not that everything was designed just right, it was, but it was without moral blemish.

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There was no sin in all of it. It was good in the fullest sense of that term.

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In Psalm 145, verse 17, the Lord is righteous in all his ways and holy in all his works.

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Even Satan, Lucifer, was created holy.

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In Ezekiel 28, in that passage that seems to refer to his fall, it says about him,

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you were perfect in your ways from the day that you were created until iniquity was found in you.

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In his creation, God manifested his holiness.

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Secondly, God manifested his holiness in his commandments.

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In Romans chapter 7, Paul speaks to this point.

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We'll not take time to read the link because we'll be there in a few months on Sunday morning.

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He speaks about the law and its impact. He says, the law reveals our sin.

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Then he asks the question, is the law therefore sinful because it shows our sin?

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It's not forbid, he says. He goes on to say, the law is holy and his commandments are holy.

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And so God has revealed his holiness in his commandments.

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The laws of God are a revelation of his holiness.

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Even the ceremonial laws of ancient Israel were designed to impress upon that people his holiness

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in an opportunity for a holy life.

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You go back to the book of Leviticus and the book of Exodus,

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and you read there about the washings of the priests and the way they were preparing themselves for their service.

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The way that people were to bring their offerings.

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You read about the leaven and the fact that leaven was not to be a part of most of their offerings.

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You read about the feast of unleavened bread when they were to sweep all the lemon out of their houses.

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They did not allow a grain of lemon in there during those days they observed that feast right after Passover.

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What did all that mean? That was all ceremonial. We don't do that today. That was a part of Israel.

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But all of those ceremonies, those rituals, were intended to impress upon the people God's holiness

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that he could not have sinned in his presence. And so in all of his commandments, whether it was moral law or ceremonial law,

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God intended to convey his holiness. Right is right and wrong is wrong because of God's holiness.

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An act is either in harmony with God's holiness or it violates his holiness.

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Thirdly, God reveals and manifests his holiness in his curse upon sin.

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God says, the soul that sins shall die. Man finds his little pleasures in sin, but God does never find pleasure in sin.

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In Psalm 5 verse 4, For you are not a God that has pleasure in wickedness or evil.

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God does not find the least bit of pleasure in sin. In fact, in the next verse in Psalm 5,

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it says that God hates workers of iniquity. Now it's true that God loves the world,

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but God hates the workers of iniquity. That's the other side of the coin.

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He not only hates their sin, he hates the workers of iniquity. He hates sinners in one sense.

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Not because of the sinner himself, but because of the sin that is his. God hates iniquity.

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Again, I quote Lehmann Strauss, Unlike man, God is impartial in his hatred and judgment of sin.

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We are prone to minimize the sins of our own children, of those nearest and dearest to us,

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while we discuss freely with indignation the sins of others. But it is not so with God.

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He will put to death a Nadab and an Abahyu, punish a David, pursue a Jonah,

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prevent a Moses from entering Canaan, or pronounce an anathema upon a Peter,

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and from Jesus, call him Satan. A man will never loathe cancer so much,

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until that dreaded, filthy disease causes the loss of his own eyes, arms, or legs,

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or else the life of one of his own precious loved ones.

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But God's hatred for sin is necessarily universal and perpetual.

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The fountain of holiness can never issue forth the slightest approval of sin at any time or place, or in any person.

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And that brings us to the fourth manifestation of God's holiness, and that's in the cross,

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in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is true that the cross reveals in a way that is beyond description the love of God.

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But it is equally true that the cross reveals the holiness of God.

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For there we see the penalty which the holiness of God demands because of sin.

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A penalty paid by a substitute, an innocent, holy one, who died in the place of sinners, you and me.

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It is difficult for us to grasp that transaction of the cross,

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but we have a prophecy in the Psalms that says something about this.

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Jesus quoted from the Psalms a number of times, and in the cross he quoted Psalm 22,

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where David wrote, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

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And then in verse 3 he gives the answer, Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One of Israel.

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Why was it that God turned his back on the Son as he hung up on the cross?

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It was because the Son had become sin for us, and God in his holiness had no choice but to turn away from the Son.

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I want to quote a man by the name of Charnoff, you've heard me quote him before.

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This is one of his statements about the holiness of God as it relates to the cross.

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I remind you he wrote for another century, so he's a little wordy, but if you listen you get so much from him.

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Not all the vials of judgment that have or shall be poured out upon the wicked world,

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nor the flaming furnace of a sinner's conscience,

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nor the irreversible sentence pronounced against the rebellious demons,

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nor the groans of the damned creatures,

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give such a demonstration of God's hatred of sin as the wrath of God let loose upon his Son.

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Never did divine holiness appear more beautiful and lovely

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than at the time our Savior's countenance was most marred in the midst of his dying groans.

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This he himself acknowledges in Psalm 22,

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when God had turned his smiling face from him and thrust his sharp knife into his heart,

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which forced that terrible cry from him,

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My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

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He adores this perfection, thou art holy.

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Think of it, as Jesus Christ became sin for us,

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and as he cried out in anguish upon the cross at the loss of fellowship with the Father,

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he nonetheless responded in worship by crying out, thou art holy.

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Let's think in closing about some application regarding this blessed doctrine of the holiness of God.

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My first remark is more of an observation, I guess, than an application.

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It is this that man makes his gods the opposite of the god of the Bible,

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given that the gods of man-made religions are not holy gods,

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but they are gods that in some respect, or to some degree,

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incorporate the weaknesses, or the sins even, of man himself.

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Why is that? Because man wants to approve himself in his sinfulness.

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He wants a god that will more or less have him on the back, and will not condemn him.

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That is why man's gods are so different than the god of the Bible.

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God says, you thought that I was altogether such a one as yourself, Psalm 50, verse 21.

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When man creates a god, he creates a god like himself,

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so that his conscience will not be pricked for his sin.

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But the god of the Bible is a holy god.

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Man views God as a lenient, rather generous grandfather image,

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who overlooks our minor infractions and the insignificant indiscretions of youth, as some would put it.

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But the Bible states that God is angry with the wicked every day.

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There is no peace, says God to the wicked.

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Now my second point is more of an application and an observation,

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and it is this, that sin cannot go unpunished.

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The soul that sins will die.

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The Lord Jesus Christ himself says to those who are unrepentant and lost,

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depart from me ye cursed, in everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.

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No sin will go unpunished because of the justice of God.

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As we said this morning, God's wrath is being stored up as if we were in a treasure house,

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so that when a sinner comes to that horrible and terrible day of his judgment before God,

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he will receive all that he has saved up of God's wrath.

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He will receive in full the punishment for his sin.

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Thank God that your sins and mine, that is those of us who have trusted the Lord Jesus Christ,

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were judged at the cross, so that we no longer have to face our sins.

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We will never have to stand before God and there be confronted with any sin

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that we have ever committed or thought or said.

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Our sins have all been forgiven, past, present, and future, by the grace of God.

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We will give answer for the works of our lives, the good deeds of our lives.

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Our faithfulness will be measured and tested.

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We will be rewarded at the judgment seat of Christ, but not one sin that we have committed

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can be brought forth at that time because our sins are under the blood of Christ.

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That is why we can say, as Romans 8.1 says and as Wesley's hymn says that we sang earlier,

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there is therefore now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus, that is the saved.

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A third point I would make is that God wants us to be holy people.

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1 Peter 1 is a familiar passage, I am sure, to many of you, where it speaks about God's holiness.

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1 Peter 1 verse 13.

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He says, Therefore prepare your minds for action, be self-controlled,

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2 Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.

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3 As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance.

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4 But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do.

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5 For it is written, Be holy, because I am holy.

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6 Since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially,

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7 live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear.

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God wants you and me to live a separate life.

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That is what holiness is. It is a life of separation from sin.

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It does not mean that we are to separate ourselves from unsaved people because

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we cannot do that and live in this world. We live around it. We work around it.

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We want by God's grace to build friendships with us so we can take a living into Christ.

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But we are not to partake of the lifestyle of this world.

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We are not to, as he says here, conform to the evil desires that we had when we lived in ignorance.

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That is, before we were saved.

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This is a day when so many Christians seem to feel that they need to conform to the age in which we live in order to be relevant.

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God has not called us to be relevant. God has called us to be holy.

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I would invite you to turn to Ephesians 3 as we look at a couple of other verses that deal with this same thought.

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In Ephesians 5, verse 3, he says,

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But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality,

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or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people.

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Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking which are out of place.

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This is a day in which there are so many double meanings to words.

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There are people who say things and they just twist a little bit to give it a dirty meaning.

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You can see that in the late night talk shows, as well as in the media.

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We see it around where we work. Some of us have done it.

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That's what he's talking about here when he speaks about foolish talk, or coarse joking.

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Improper kinds of things.

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There are some Christians who think that they need, in order to be transparent to a degree that God does not intend,

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to talk about every aspect of their life and to be fully open even about their sexual life, for example.

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Some of the books that are written by so-called Christian authors, which are available these days,

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that deal with this area really can have an embarrassment, I think, to the evangelical world

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because they are so blatant.

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I am not in favor of returning to the Victorian era in that sense.

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There needs to be honesty.

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When we talk about holy things, we need to talk cautiously and carefully, and not be coarse and not be obscene.

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These things have no place with God's people.

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In verse 5 he says, For of this you can be sure, no immoral, impure, or greedy person, such a man as an idolater,

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has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

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Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God's wrath comes on those who are disobedient.

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Therefore, do not be partakers with them.

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For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light, and find out what pleases the Lord.

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Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.

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For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.

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God has called us to live holy lives as his people, and we ought never to underestimate or undervalue

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the importance that God places upon a separated life.

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Finally, by way of application, I would say to you that the holiness of God demands that our approach to him be a reverent one.

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Psalm 89 verse 7, God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints, and to be had in reverence of all those who are about him.

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Psalm 99 verse 5, which we read, Exalt the Lord our God in worship at his footstool, for he is holy.

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When Moses met God for the first time on Mount Sinai, before he fell on his face,

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and before a conversation took place between God and Moses, what did God tell Moses to do?

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Do you remember? That's right.

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Take off your shoes, because the ground that you stand on is holy.

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Was the dirt holy? Well, it was because the presence of God was there, you see.

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When we approach God, it must be with a reverent attitude, remembering his holiness.

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When we come to church, we must meet together for a holy convocation. We must come together reverently.

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Now, it's not that this building itself is in some sense holy, but it is in another sense.

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Because God is here. As we come together, God is here, and therefore our meeting together is to be one of holiness.

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When we come before God in our prayer lives, we are to remember God's holiness and be reverent.

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We have an example in the Old Testament of a man who was thoughtless and careless about this matter, and who paid for it with his life.

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I think of Uzzah. Do you remember him? They were transporting the ark in a method which God had not prescribed, by the way.

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It was improper the way they were doing it. But the ox were pulling the ark on a cart, and at one point they stumbled and the cart shook.

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And this man, Uzzah, reached up to steady that ark of God, and God immediately struck him dead.

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Why was that? It says that David was angry with God about that.

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But you see, what happened was, Uzzah, who was fully aware that no one was to touch the ark, nonetheless did it in a moment of carelessness and thoughtlessness.

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You see, when we come before God, it must be with thought and with care and with reverence.

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Dr. Arthur Pink says, the more our hearts are awed by his ineffable holiness, the more acceptable will be our approach to him.

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God has called us out from the world to be his people. He has called us saints, and we are that in our position.

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Sometimes we don't live like saints, but God has called us to be saints. We are saints.

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And our need, dear people, is to be holy people.

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I'd like for us to close by singing a hymn that puts this into words.

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It's number 422, and what it says is, take time to be holy.

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We can't rush along with the world to be caught up in the fast pace of living, a pace that is thoughtless and careless, and still be holy people.

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It takes time with God. It takes quietness with the Lord.

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And what this song says by William Longstaff is that we need to take time to be holy and to speak oft with the Lord.

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Let's stand and sing it together, number 422.