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Commentary on "The Holiness of God"
Day 4: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - To Repent in Dust and Ashes
Day 5: Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - Depart From Me!
Overview
We will look at the lessons for both Tuesday and Wednesday, since they have a common message. Examples are given of Bible characters who were ushered into the presence of God, and there before His majesty and holiness they acutely felt their own sinfulness. In awe of God’s purity, they were driven to repentance and a renewed desire for personal holiness. The Lesson states that “these passages hint at the need of a Savior, a Substitute, Someone to bridge the gap” between a holy God and sinful men.
Observations
Overall, this series of lessons is about how we might understand God’s holiness and thus achieve it in our own lives. Lessons four and five describe Bible characters who found a renewed desire for a life of holiness after meeting face to face with the holy God. Unfortunately, these lessons give us very little on how our beholding God’s holiness can translate into becoming holy ourselves. The lesson tells us that simply by experiencing the vast gap between God’s character and our own, we will develop a greater desire to become more like Him.
Holy living needs more than our good intentions and healthy behaviors. Christian holiness is a living out of truth. However, many Christians are uncomfortable with absolute truth, and their world view resembles Hinduism. As a Hindu, one needs no solid foundation of truth, for it is not important what metaphysical beliefs you might hold, as long as you accept the “eternal way of life,” according to the Dharma. For many American Christians, the good life is lived by decent people who are in harmony with natural law, and their lives are only vaguely related to what they hold as truth. They keep their spiritual views private since dogmatic metaphysical ideas are socially divisive. It is better to have “your truth” and “my truth.” They show their virtue by living as nice, non-judgmental people who are in harmony with nature. For these Christians, holiness does not need a real, personal encounter with an objective God of truth. In contrast, the God of the Bible offers Gospel truth, a deep, solid foundation to rest on, the permanent kind that gives us unshakeable confidence.
In Romans 12, Paul sums up all the preceding chapters of Romans 1 to 11 with this phrase, “by the mercies of God.” It is that great truth that drives all the exhortations to holy living that follow in that chapter. Paul doesn’t appeal to our need for better social skills or more harmony with nature. He appeals to our desperate need to trust in His amazing sovereign grace. Our problem doesn’t begin with nature or with society, but with God. On the foundation of God’s mercies, Paul can then instruct us how live with genuine love for others: blessing our persecutors, weeping with those who weep, and never taking revenge. This all becomes possible when we have personally encountered the mercy of God. How does this happen?
The encounter begins when we are finally able to see a rather plain man, one with no great majesty or beauty. He wasn’t glamorous and wouldn’t appeal to our vanity. We wouldn’t want to look at Him; for suffering people make us want to turn away. This man’s suffering would repel us with its intensity. He isn’t the kind we would want to choose as our leader, certainly not a spiritual leader. No, rejecting this man comes quite naturally.
See the Man of Isaiah 53! He is the God none of us wanted. Even so, He bears all our griefs and carries all our sorrows. He was crushed for all the times we weren’t loving or sympathetic to others’ pain, or when we took that sweet revenge. He took all that on Himself voluntarily for unloving, spiteful people who celebrated and enjoyed their sins. That’s you and me He was thinking of that day, and He already knew us very well. He saw what we are, then took what we had coming, so we can be adopted and loved lavishly and endlessly. This was no guru of the virtuous life; this was the Man who gladly made all our problems His problems. In this man we might behold the real glory of God, and when we are able to see Him, we will want to fall down in worship Him for His mercy.
We need more than just a good example. Deep repentance springs up from the overpowering image of God’s grace in the Cross. Merely standing in the presence of someone of moral superiority may inspire envy or guilt, but it will not move us to repentance. The good-example-Jesus appeals to our pride and lets us avoid the root of our problems. We are objects of a holy God’s wrath (Eph. 2:3), cursed and sentenced to death. The Gospel is about how our substitute took our sin on Himself and paid the penalty in blood. We don’t naturally like that Jesus, He is insulting. The real Jesus gives us far more than a good example of morality. The image of Christ and Him crucified is the worst nightmare for all our vanities, and the perfect vision of God’s glory. The ugliness of the Cross is the only cure for our sickness. The ability to see it is also a gift of mercy.
A life of joyful, holy worship that is pleasing to God begins when we see Him publically crucified for us (Gal. 3:1), and we are broken to repent. We never advance past that mercy and repentance into depending on our own virtue. Grace is the foundation for holy living. Everything virtuous, moral, harmonious, or worthwhile must spring from this thought, “By the mercies of God!”
Summary
- Knowing there is a great gap between God’s holiness and our own is not sufficient to produce holiness.
- Many Christians’ virtue is much like Hindu morality, trusting in common decency and living in harmony with nature.
- The holiness of the Bible rests on a foundation of the solid truth of the Gospel.
- Paul sums up the theology of Romans with the phrase, “By the mercies of God.” All the moral instruction in the rest of Romans rests on those mercies.
- We encounter God’s mercies when we see the man who suffered the curses of our sins and we repent.
- Jesus is not a guru of the virtuous life, merely setting an example to become. The real Jesus is firstly our substitute, bearing our sins.
- Everything moral and harmonious in our lives springs from this thought, “By the mercies of God!”
Copyright 2012 BibleStudiesForAdventists.com. All rights reserved. Revised January 31, 2012. This website is published by Life Assurance Ministries, Glendale, Arizona, USA, the publisher of Proclamation! Magazine. Contact email: BibleStudiesForAdventists@gmail.com.
The Sabbath School Bible Study Guide and the corresponding E.G. White Notes are published by Pacific Press Publishing Association, which is owned and operated by the Seventh-day Adventist church. The current quarter's editions are pictured above.
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