Most of the people in our auditorium this afternoon are children of God; born again souls. We were dead in trespasses and sins, but the Lord, in His grace, resurrected us to eternal life. And for those who are not born again Christians, we yearn for your salvation, because we know there is nothing better than to live under the wings of our Lord Jesus Christ. So here we are – most of us are rejoicing in God’s blessings and anxiously awaiting an eternity of even more.
I have a question for those of you who have been saved for a number of years – For you who have a little theology under your belt to go along with the practical aspects of being God’s children: “What is the best way to MEASURE the salvation that you have been given?” There may be many ways to WEIGH that blessing, but what is the very best? We might talk about the depths of the sin, depression and corruption from which the Lord has saved us. Or we might describe the heights of joy and gladness we have experienced, perhaps comparing it to earthly joys we have had. Paul talks about the length, breadth, depths and heights of Christ’s love, and we might use those to measure our salvation. “Greater love, hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” And then there is the crucifixion – the suffering and agony Jesus endured to save us – physically and spiritually. I’m sure we could probably come up with some other yard-sticks to measure our salvation. And certainly some of these are better than others.
It is like trying to use your eye to measure a hundred yards. Some people are really good at determining distances – “I think that’s about the length of a football field.” But to use a yard-stick would be more accurate. And yet a wooden yard-stick wouldn’t be as good as a measuring wheel, or a hundred foot tape measure. I have seen people use digital GPS receivers to compute the twenty-seven feet between corn hole boards. But is GPS better than a pre-measured twenty-seven foot length of chain?
Now go back to my original question: “What is the BEST way to measure our salvation?” For next few minutes let me take you to one measurement which I think may be the most accurate of all – let’s use the holiness of the God who has saved us.
The Bible abundantly declares the holiness of God – the Lord’s infinite righteousness.
In our text Moses asked: “Who is like unto thee, O Jehovah, among the gods? Who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praised doing wonders?” The Psalmist exhorted, “Exalt Jehovah our God, and worship at this holy hill; for Jehovah our God is holy.” Isaiah shared with us what the Holy Spirit revealed about the throne room of Jehovah, where the angels shouted back and forth, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory.” Habakkuk exposes what the holiness of God means when he said in worship – “Lord, thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity…”
In that statement from the prophet Habakkuk, we can begin to see the enormous value of salvation from sin. God is so holy, so pure, so infinitely righteous that it is impossible for Him to even look at sin. It is not that He doesn’t ENJOY looking at sin, there is a sense wherein the Lord cannot, even for a moment, contemplate our sin. It may be simplistic to say, but that is one reason why the sky turned black when Christ hung dying on the cross. Our sins were laid upon Him. “He bare our sins in His own body on the tree” – I Peter 2:24. And His Heavenly Father, was forced by His holiness to turn His back upon the eternal son.
The holiness of God cannot coexist with sin – sinners like us have no approach to God. But it is not just like oil and water or two magnets, pushing each other away. The holiness of God demands that sin be judged – punished. Sin cannot approach God, and God cannot tolerate sin. Logically speaking, that makes salvation impossible, barring something miraculous in the Lord Himself. The holiness of the Lord is perhaps the most precise measure of the value of our salvation.
Jehovah’s holiness is metaphorically described as HIGH – extremely high.
Often, very often, the Bible calls the One who has saved us – “the Most High God.” For example, Melchizedek is described as a “priest of the most high God.” And he looked at Abraham, saying, “blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth. And blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.” Asaph uses that description, and Daniel really loved it, often speaking of Jehovah as the Most High God. There is nothing and no one higher – farther above us – than the Lord our Saviour.
God’s lofty exaltation expresses both his sovereignty over the earth and over all the gods of the heathen, but it also implies His inaccessibility. Particularly is this true of sinners. Known assassins cannot come into the presence of the King, especially with a big bulge under their coats. It is true that God’s seat is “a throne of grace,” and it is encircled by the rainbow of His promises. But it is also true that it is “high and exalted,” and he Himself is the “the high and lofty One.” Yes, He condescends to meet with contrite, sin-confessing sinners, but it is only “from afar” that He knows the proud and arrogant sinner.
Of course, this “high” exaltation of God is not literal, and can’t be measured with ranger-finders and drones carrying GPS equipment. The Biblical writers use “height” simply as a symbol of the transcendence of the Lord. In other words, “the high and lofty One” suggests God’s otherness – His uniqueness. But that uniqueness is not the kind that is on the other side of a great, impenetrable wall. When thinking about our holy God, it is better to look up rather than down or any other direction. In our salvation, God’s infinite, inaccessable elevation was overcome by His grace toward us.
In addition to His highness, the Bible suggests that the holiness of God speaks of DISTANCE.
Not only is the One who has saved us, infinitely “high above” us, but He is also very, very “far away.” Yet it isn’t a distance measured in miles or light years – some sort of quantity; it is a distance of quality. Over and over again, the Bible tells us, “Do not come any closer,” as when Moses tried to approach the burning bush. When the Lord was giving His law to Moses, He made Israel put up some sort of fence around Mount Sinai to keep anyone from getting too close. And when God graciously let Israel build the Tabernacle as a place where they could focus their worship, He kept the people, and even the priests, from entering into its inner sanctum without a specific invitation.
Another notable example is when David was joyfully bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. Foolishly, and unbibically, the king had prepared an ox cart to carry the Ark. When the oxen, pulling the cart, stumbled over a rock or into some pot hole, and the Ark tottered just a bit, a fella named Uzzah put out his hand to steady it. Instantly that well-meaning man died. II Samuel 6:7 says: “The anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.” There was nothing wrong with Uzzah’s desire to protect the Lord’s property; his heart was in the right place. But he simply got too close to the holiness of God, and the anger of God was ignited.
There is nothing inexplicable about God’s wrath against sin; its explanation is in His holiness. Sin and the righteousness of God are more than light years apart; they are separated by infinity. On the last day – the day of God’s judgment, those who have not found refuge and cleansing in Christ will hear those most terrible of all words: “Depart of me.”
The Lord is at such a distance from us that no high-speed means of transport can take us to Him. There are no human devised carriers capable of bridging the great gulf that is fixed between us and the Lord. We cannot go from where we are to Him. It is pointless to even try. Only God’s precious saving grace can reach out from His holiness to us in our sinfulness. Salvation from sin begins in God’s holiness and by grace reaches across the infinite gulf to where we are. To think of man reaching towards the Lord is spiritually inconceivable.
Another illustration of God’s holiness is FIRE.
A campfire may intrigue us, and a burning building might delight a mentally unstable pyromaniac. But as rule, uncontrolled fire is terrifying. Burning clothing or a grease fire in the kitchen send most people into a panic.
The Bible says that “God is light,” AND “our God is a consuming fire.” Both pictures discourage too close approach; they both prohibit approach. Bright light is blinding; our eyes can’t endure much brilliance. And the heat of a fire shrivels up and destroys everything it touches. Those who deliberately reject God’s way of deliverance from sin have “only a fearful expectation of judgment and fire that will consume the enemy of God.” “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
Think back on your life: How many years was it after your birth into this world before the Lord saved your soul? Were you in your twenties, or perhaps your thirties, when you were born again? Even if you were saved when you were in you teens or younger, it is a fact that you lived every day of your earlier lives on the brink of falling into hell, “where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” In order to save you, God pulled your soul as a brand plucked out of the fire – Zechariah 3:2.
I know most of us picture the flames of hell and the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, as God’s punishment for those who reject Christ. We think of those two as some external decree of God – something sin forced God to do. But there is a sense in which the fires of hell not only represent, but actually are, expressions of God’s holiness. It might be accurate to say that a soul burning in the lake of fire is actually being eternally consumed by the holiness of the Lord.
If you are a child of God, you have been saved from the punishment of the holiness of the most high God. Measure your salvation by this standard.
I could go on, but I’ll stop with one more reason God’s holiness should be the measure of salvation.
It is a vivid – negative example. Picture a prosperous modern church. Its doctrinal statement shows that it believes all the major doctrines of the Bible. It has taken a stand against the corruptions of modern society – drugs, alcohol, immorality, etc. And yet it still reaches out into the community to help the displaced and the needy. It supports missions at home and abroad. But this apparently good church, filled with true believers, has grown lax in its love for the Saviour. And its outward obedience to the precepts of the Word isn’t a real reflection of holiness; it is all a veneer. This church is filled with hypocrites, just as the world likes to declare.
Revelation 3:14 describes a church like that. Christ says to the Apostle John, “Unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.”
In thinking about some of your experience, isn’t vomiting one of the most violent things to rock human body? I remember a Wednesday evening about 55 years ago, when I had to run out the side door of the church, because I was ready to violently retch up my supper. My body was so disgusted with something I had eaten that it refused to keep it down for another minute. I don’t know if those bushes at the side of the High Street Baptist Church survived, but I know I might have not, if I hadn’t vomited up that rancid bologna.
What does the holiness of God think about the sins of even those who profess to believe on Christ? He says, “I will spue thee out of my mouth.” If you want to picture God spitting out something that was distasteful to him, I’ll let you do it. But to me, He was ready to “involuntarily” vomit that deteriorating church out of His mouth. The picture is shocking, but its meaning is clear. God cannot tolerate or digest sin. The holiness of the Lord is so thoroughly incompatible with sin, that He naturally but violently reacts to it. Our sins aren’t just distasteful to the Lord, they are disgusting; they are an absolute abhorrence to Him. They are so repulsive that He must rid Himself of them. They make the holy God vomit.
Of course, this is only an illustration, only a divine ANTHROPOMORPHISM.
The Triune God doesn’t have a stomach, throat or body, by which to throw up that which disgusts Him. And Jehovah doesn’t live in some holy palace on the other side of universe, or above the clouds. But these things are given to us in order to illustrate how very different the Lord is from us. They reveal some of the roadblocks between ourselves and God’s forgiveness of our sins.
And this brings us to the great philosophic question Apostle Paul addresses in the Book of Romans. How can a God so holy that the slightest sin makes Him “throw up…” How can the God who is so holy that He cannot even look on sin… How can the Saviour, break His own holy law to touch and save a leprous sinner like me? Paul answers that question in Romans 3: He tells us: the righteousness of God has been declared and witnessed by God’s law and His prophets. “Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.”
How should we as Christians measure the value our forgiveness and deliverance from our wretched sins? We should see its value in how the demands of the infinitely holy God were infinitely met by holy Son of God. “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins… that he might be (both) just, and (yet) the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” In order to be gracious toward me, the Lord had to descend from the heights of His holiness… He had to leave the holiness of Heaven to meet me on this accursed earth. He had to pass through the fire to save me from its flames. He had to overcome His own aversion to my sin. And yet He did all those things and so much more.
How should we value our forgiveness and deliverance from the punishment of sin? Perhaps the best measuring tool should be His own perfect holiness. “Praise ye the Lord. For his merciful kindness is GREAT toward us: and the truth of the LORD endureth for ever. Praise ye the LORD.”