What effect should the holiness of God have on our lives? Today, R.C. Sproul explains that the Lord desires for His people to reflect His holy character to a lost and dying world. Request the new 40th-anniversary edition of R.C. Sproul’s book The Holiness of God, plus lifetime digital access to both the classic teaching series and the extended teaching series, with your donation of any amount: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3885/donate Meet Today’s Teacher: R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was known for his ability to winsomely and clearly communicate deep, practical truths from God’s Word. He was founder of Ligonier Ministries, first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine. Meet the Host: Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of ministry engagement for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, host of the Ask Ligonier podcast, and a graduate of Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. Nathan joined Ligonier in 2012 and lives in Central Florida with his wife and four children. Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
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.
What is the meaning of holiness, and how should understanding it change the way that we live? Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and welcome to the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind. By God's grace, as our minds are renewed, our lives are transformed. Things we once delighted in become sins we now seek to mortify. Things we once hated or found boring we now love and find joy in. Today, R.C.
Sproul will consider the meaning of holiness and the impact that should have in the life of a Christian. But before you hear the final message that will feature this week from Dr. Sproul's popular series, The Holiness of God, don't miss your opportunity to own a special 40th anniversary edition of this series' companion book, The Holiness of God.
This is a limited edition title available to mark four decades since this book was first published. and to thank God for the impact that this teaching has had on countless Christians around the world. Respond before midnight tonight with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org to secure your copy. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the meaning of holiness.
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 meanings of the term holy.
The secondary meaning of this word in Scripture is personal righteousness and purity. But the primary meaning of the word holy means separate. or if you will, theological apartheid. 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. But 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 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 earthy and the heavenly.
Not too long ago, I saw a study of phobias in the United States where the 10 most common phobias were listed, the things that people were most frightened about. Do you know what the number one fear 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.
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 20th 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 20th century.
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 if you would ask Rudolph Otto, Dr. Otto, what is the holy?
The answer he gave was this, that the holy is the mysterium tremendum. 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 is 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 a tranquil mood of deepest worship.
where 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 that precious moment of awareness of the presence of God. But it's fleeting. He says,
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 boards, throughout varying civilizations, the basic response of human beings to whatever they consider 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. And 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 the 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 about the guy who lost his liver, you know, 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, I may be sleeping out here tonight. This is 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 10 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 in 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 story, 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 program, particularly scary, called Suspense. But the scariest program of all scary programs on the radio in the 40s, ladies and gentlemen, came on Sunday night. 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's standing on end before the thing starts, and the voiceover comes 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 entertainment world discovered somehow that the most terrifying thing they could come up with Poor 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.
And for us to understand it, beloved, is set forth for us in the New Testament as the priority of learning. I ask my students in the seminary a simple question from the Bible. I say, 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? Don't answer it out loud, but think in your own 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. And he said, okay, I'll teach you how to pray. When you pray, I want you to pray like this. Our Father who art in heaven, then what? Hallowed be thy name. Now here's the question. Is the hallowed be thy name part of the form of 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 this, suppose in this day and age, in the United States of America, where we've had such a flood season, and proliferation of legislation in the land that 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 gonna start all over again. We're gonna just throw out all the lawyers, all the laws, even the Constitution. I'm going to start fresh. But your job is 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. 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 10 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 10. Isn't that incredible?
A few years ago, I read an 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 hook at him.
So they got him up before the magistrate and they talked about all the unkind things that this truck driver had said about the policeman on the way down. Now, for the misdemeanor of disorderly conduct, the severest penalty that the magistrate could impose was a $100 fine and 30 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 of the statutes of Maryland that prohibited public blasphemy. And the penalty for public blasphemy had been another 30 days in jail and another $100 fine. So the judge imposed upon the truck driver $200 fine, 60 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 a $100 fine and spending 30 days in jail merely for publicly blaspheming the holy name of God. we've come a long way.
22 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 purient 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 will be regarded as holy.
He said, 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 is 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 a 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 from 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 righteousness. the character of God to a dying one.
That's a convicting message, isn't it? How easily we can fail to mirror and reflect the character of God. This is Renewing Your Mind on this Friday, and we're closing a week celebrating four decades since R.C. Sproul's book, The Holiness of God, was first published. Who do you know who needs to hear these messages?
Share the Renewing Your Mind podcast with them by searching for Renewing Your Mind wherever you listen to podcasts and encourage them to go back and listen. Or you can request a copy of the Holiness of God for them by responding today at renewingyourmind.org with a donation of any amount or by giving your gift when you call us at 800-435-4343.
You'll receive this special 40th anniversary edition of the Holiness of God, plus we'll unlock lifetime digital access to both the original and the extended editions of the Holiness of God teaching series. Whether you prefer to watch, read, or listen, there's a resource here for you in this anniversary resource bundle. But don't delay, as this is while supplies last.
and this offer ends at midnight tonight. Call us at 800-435-4343, visit renewingyourmind.org, or use the link in the podcast show notes to secure the special 40th anniversary edition of The Holiness of God. And thank you for supporting this daily outreach of Ligonier Ministries. We've spent this week reflecting on God's holiness.
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