Sounding Spiritual: The Hard Way

Submitted by Jack Crow on Sun, 04/08/2019 - 15:41

(See entry for Tuesday, 23.7.19.)

Here is what the above volume has to say about the holiness of God.

The holiness of God, in the general notion of it, is his moral perfection; that attribute by which all moral imperfection is removed from his nature. As it is evident that God loves righteousness and hates iniquity, the preference in the one case, and the hatred in the other, must flow from some principle in his nature, - that he is the righteous Lord, “of purer eyes than to behold evil,” one who “cannot look on iniquity.” This principle is holiness: an attribute assumed by himself, and attributed to him by adoring angels and saints. The attribute implies, 1. That no sinful or wicked inclination can be found in God. He cannot be tempted of evil. James 1.13. “He is light, and in him is no darkness,” 1 John 1.5; that is, he is holy and without sin. Tillotson says, “In him there can be no malice, or envy, or hatred, or revenge, or pride, or cruelty, or tyranny, or injustice, or falsehood, or unfaithfulness; and if there be anything else which implies sin, and vice, and moral imperfection, holiness signifies that the divine nature is at an infinite distance from it.” 2. It is something positive; and implies that he chooses necessarily and invariably what is morally good, and refuses what is morally evil. Holiness and justice seem to be in reality one: the distinction consists in this only, that holiness denotes the internal inclination of the divine will, the disposition of God; and justice the expression of the same by actions. Howe speaks of the holiness of God as “the actual, perpetual rectitude of all his volitions, and all the works and actions which are consequent thereupon; and an eternal propension thereto, and love thereof, by which it is altogether impossible to that will that it should ever vary.”

Hang on, hang on! You’ve got here far too quickly! You must have merely skimmed the above, or skipped it entirely, so that you could get on to the entertaining bits - amusing anecdotes, uplifting applications, glimpses into the lives of the great and the good, enlightening observations on current events, pictures of people and places and plants in pots - all that human interest stuff, in other words.

Well, if we want to get anything worthwhile out of this series of entries, we’re going to have to do some striving. What was it that C. T. Studd said? “What counts, costs, and what costs, counts.”

Let’s have a go the hard way.

You’re probably reading this on your laptop, so you have a dictionary and a bible just a couple of clicks away. Why not go back to the beginning, and try to get a grip on what the passage is all about?

Look at it this way: if you and I are regular churchgoers, we’ve probably sung Heber’s “Holy, Holy, Holy” more times than we care to remember. On each occasion, we have ascribed holiness to God, and to Him alone (“Only Thou art holy; there is none beside Thee”) nineteen times! What exactly were we asserting? We don’t want to end up like those poor souls who think that “Jerusalem” is a hymn, or that these are indeed “the days of Elijah”, do we? (It isn’t, and they aren’t, of course.)