Psalm 25 cont.
“Good and upright is the Lord; therefore He instructs sinners in the way.”
The holiness of the Lord seems to be often overlooked, as the modern church tends to amplify His love above all else. This is why people, when great tragedy strikes, blame the Lord for their poor circumstances, saying, ‘how could a loving God do this?’ Of course, the Lord never causes calamity, nor does He cause any to suffer. He cannot, for that would be to deny His holiness, and if He were to deny His holiness, then surely He would be a vengeful, wrathful god, which simply is not the case. No no, Adonai cannot do anything evil or sinful, for that would be against His very nature, and every attribute would rebel against such wickedness. Focusing on the love of the Lord God Almighty, while that is a noble pursuit, does not paint a complete picture of the Lord of Hosts.
He is “good and upright,” in fact, “there is none good but God.” He is “holy, holy, holy,” or holy to the third, the ultimate, degree. To be holy is to be set apart, to be separate from the evil that affects all of us. For the King of kings does not have the sin nature buried within Him; He does not have the desire, nor can He be tempted, to sin. Why should we question the authority of this ultimate God? If He can do no wrong, and notice the phraseology there, He ‘can’ do no wrong, not that He chooses not to, but He cannot. Everything that He does is shrouded in His holiness, unable to do anything outside of absolute righteousness. People complaining that a loving God would never allow some of the things to happen which happen do not have a complete picture of who the Lord is. Their understanding is that everything He does should be predicated upon His love, not His holiness.
If they complain about evil in the world, do they want God to immediately eliminate all evil in the world? Then surely we should all be destroyed, for “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” If evil were to be completely and totally removed from the world, then so should we. The Lord would not eliminate one specific evil, as that evil would simply return. No, if He were to remove one evil from this world, then He would have to remove all. Every little white lie would be deserving of destruction (as they already are!) for everything contrary to the Will of God, His overarching righteousness, would be eliminated. In fact, this would indeed be the loving thing to do as well, but people don’t like to accept that kind of love. They like the silly, foolish love of two people smitten with one another, who overlook each other’s wrongdoings due to the pure fact of their love.
However, this is not the love of the Lord. He does not accept immorality or wickedness, sensuality or evil desires. The love of the Lord is predicated, as are all of His attributes, upon His holiness. His love is a holy love, His justice is holy justice, His mercy, forbearance, goodness, wrath, every attribute ultimately reports back to His holiness, for He can do nothing but be holy. Nothing can leave His holiness, even for a moment, for that would deny the bedrock attribute of His entire personhood, and therefore make Him paradoxical. The love of the Lord of Hosts, the King of Creation, is a holy, pure love. It is not clouded by foolish ideas or fancy; it is the only true love to ever exist. No other love is close in comparison with His love, for no other love is backed by the incredible holiness that sustains His love.
This love sees through the façade we put up for other men, so that we can hide our insecurity, our evil desires. He sees all and knows all; we cannot hide a thing from Him. This may sound scary, but it is a blessing indeed! For we know that we have a guardian watching over us who demands holiness and morality from us, without whom we surely would tumble into complete anarchy. He is the glue that binds the morality of the universe together, for everything and everyone will ultimately have to give an account of their deeds; whether they were according to the Will of God or the will of man. Without a Lord, a moral God, and holy God, we surely would descend into relative morality, where each man’s morality is predicated upon himself, which therefore would mean that no one could condemn anyone else’s immorality and there would be no justice.
The Lord of Hosts is both the Creator of the Universe and the glue which binds it together. Without either of these things, there certainly would be no existence, or there would be no moral existence. Everything, every action of our lives, depends upon the absolute holiness of the Lord. All that we do is because of His holiness: we owe our very lives to His perfection, we owe the salvation of our souls to the working of His Holy Son. For, again, we must rely upon the holiness of God. If Christ had been anything but perfectly holy, if He had committed even the tiniest of sins, then He could not have been the savior of the world, for He would have to repay His own sins, something that, most assuredly, is impossible. If He had not been holy, then He could not have taken both your and my sins upon His back and paid the price for our iniquity.
Therefore, we must always strive to come to a fuller and more complete understanding of His holiness. As humans, I believe, that we cannot fully understand absolute holiness, for we have no frame of reference. There is no one in this world who is perfect, and we quite feel like perfection is impossible. We are so used to living in evil that holiness seems contrary, and that exactly is why the study of the holiness of the Lord is quite important! We cannot learn without studying, we cannot know anything about anything without paying attention in class and discovering the truth hiding therein. Fortunately, we have been given incredible resources to understand the Lord! The Bible, first and foremost, as His Word, is the most important to understand Him. For who tries to know about another by reading a secondhand account? When you want to know about a historical figure, you do not read some history of a noneyewitness, no no, you read their autobiography, or perhaps a biography written by their right-hand man. Such is the way with the Lord, to discover and know anything about Him, we must know the Word, and then we can discover all there is to know in this world about the King of kings! How awesome is the Lord! Praise His Holy Name! He has given to us such incredible blessings that they cannot be numbered, nor can they be named in full!
