The Trauma of Holiness
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We spend our entire lives bailing ourselves from the true character of God because our natural bent, our natural inclination, beloved, is to hide ourselves from Him because we know instinctively that as soon as the holy appears, it exposes and reveals anything and anyone who is not holy by virtue of that standard.
How often do you think about the holiness of God? When was the last time you heard a sermon on it? As you heard yesterday, God's holiness in Scripture is elevated to the superlative degree. Yet we often prefer to speak about His love or grace. But why? This is the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and I'm glad you're with us as we hear messages this week from R.C. Sproul's classic series, The Holiness of God, and celebrate this year's 40th anniversary of that book's first publication. Today you'll hear why we tend to shy away from God's holiness, as Dr. Sproul considers the trauma of holiness. But before he does, remember you can request a limited edition 40th anniversary copy of The Holiness of God when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. But when the prophet Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, he cried out, Woe is me, for I am undone. Here's Dr. Sproul to explain why. Now think of Isaiah.
I can't imagine that there was any human being running around in the Jewish nation at that time who, humanly speaking, was more righteous than than Isaiah. Isaiah was about as righteous as human beings could be found, and he has this glimpse of the holiness of God, and the first thing he does when he sees the holiness of God is that he cries out in terror, and the old King James Version records his words as saying this, "'Woe is me!' for I am undone. Now, I know that nobody talks like that anymore. Nobody says, woe is me. The word's kind of antiquated. The expression is an archaism. It's like somebody saying, forsooth, or alas, and alack. Nobody talks that way unless you have some Jewish friends. Sometimes when things go wrong, they'll say, oy vey ismir, which is the Yiddish rendition of the same verbiage here, woe is me. But for the most part, We don't hear people talk like that in our culture.
And so translators in trying to communicate the Word of God in modern verbiage will do away with some of this archaic language. But when we do that, sadly, we're in danger of missing another one of those semi-hidden gems of biblical literature. There is a reason why Isaiah used the word woe. In the Old Testament, a prophet was a human being who was anointed by God to be a spokesman for God. The simple definition that distinguished the prophet from the priest in Israel was this, that it was the task of the priest to speak to God in behalf of the people. It was the task of the prophet to speak to the people in behalf of God, so that when the prophet uttered his message, he wouldn't preface his statement by saying, in my humble opinion, or it is my judgment that, or I think that perhaps this may be the case. That's not how they addressed the people. You know what they did. When they gave their message, they prefaced their words by saying what?
Thus saith God. the Lord, because they understood that they were vessels of divine announcements. Now, again, the literary form that was common to the prophet of Israel was the form that we call the oracle. You've heard, I'm sure, of a Greek oracle, the Oracle of Delphi, who would give these announcements about the future. Well, among the Jews, the oracular literary device, the oracle, was of two types. There were oracles of of weal and oracles of woe. Now, that means simply this, that there were announcements that came from God that were good news, and there are announcements that came from God that were bad news. An oracle of weal or an oracle of prosperity used a word that was important to this oracle among the Jews to introduce the good news, and it was the word blessed. Jesus obviously uses the form of the oracle self-consciously as a prophet when he gives the Sermon on the Mount.
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