I will never forget the look on my wife’s face when I compared the way my son ran the football to the great Eric Dickerson. She looked at me with a blank expression and asked, “Who? Derek Ericsson?” “No…Eric Dickerson!” She had no idea who I was talking about. I told her how Eric Dickerson was one of the smoothest runners ever to stride down the NFL grid iron, and yet, she only replied with a soft yawn. She had no knowledge of his existence. I was shocked! How can someone be so unmoved when you compare your son to someone so great?

And then I began preaching from a pulpit, and I began to see that same blank expression on the people in the pews when it came to the topic of “Holiness.” 

I can talk about how “God is Love” and people will smile and nod in approval. I can talk about how God gets angry at sin and some people will roll their eyes, some will look down in shame, I have even seen some shrug their shoulders. But when I say God is “Holy”, or even “Holy, Holy, Holy!”, the result is usually a blank stare. No response. Nothing. A yawn in the back row.

I started to ponder why this was happening and a light went on, “A disregard for God’s holiness is why the gospel doesn’t stick.” Apathy to holiness is why people seem to want more than just the story of Jesus. This is also why so many people run to politics for their salvation. No one dreads God anymore.

A true understanding of God’s holiness should cause us to stop and consider our desperate situation. We are standing on slippery ground. Scripture points out in Habakkuk 1:13 that, “God’s eyes are too pure to look on evil; he cannot tolerate wrongdoing.” God’s perfection revolts against the stain that sin can bring. Like radiation attacks cancer cells, God’s holiness responds in kind toward a soiled man.

Just contemplating Psalm 50:1-4 should be enough to shake you to your core:

“The Mighty One, God, the Lord,

    speaks and summons the earth

    from the rising of the sun to where it sets.

From Zion, perfect in beauty,

    God shines forth.

Our God comes

    and will not be silent;

a fire devours before him,

    and around him a tempest rages.

He summons the heavens above,

    and the earth, that he may judge his people.”

But no one believes this anymore. The old Jonathan Edwards sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” has been held up in mockery and then pilloried by the softer religious leadership that runs the church of today. The topics of Hell, Satan, and Eternal Damnation are something to laugh at and to move on from. Holiness is nothing but a remnant left over from the superstitious age when simplistic puritans saw sinister ghosts and goblins creeping behind every knotty oak tree while wart-nosed Salem witches roamed the countryside brewing bubbling green potions and casting spells. 

We are too smart for that now, so we yawn.

I still think C. S. Lewis described our spiritual malaise best in his famous essay, “God in the Dock”:

“The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man, the roles are quite reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge; if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God is in the dock.” 

Notice a few brilliant points: people used to admit their guilt in front of God’s searching eye, it was as if God had every right to set the rules of this game called “life.” If a man willfully broke the rules, they understood God was just to call them to account. But now we, modern man and emancipated woman – oh yes and whatever gender you so choose – get to make the rules. We get to decide what life is about. When God was in control it was about his glory and love for one another. Now that we are in control it is about our unhindered pursuit of pleasure and the equal distribution of rights, power, respect, tolerance, and economic holdings. 

We get to decide definitions, not God. So God must adjust to our creative whims. Sexual identity is a matter of how I feel in the moment, not a biological reality. We are woke now! Life is built around “convenience for me” instead of “intrinsic value” of the person. We are on the bench and God is in the dock. We are the judge and jury, God is handcuffed waiting for us to pronounce judgment on his failure to give me what I want.

That is why the word “Holy” no longer makes sense. 

While doing some research for my sermon this Sunday, I noticed something very interesting about people who saw holiness first hand: They all wanted to die, and they even recognized they deserved to die. Let me show you three times this happened:

• Job 42:5-6: Job the prophet saw God face to face, and God wanted him to answer some impossible questions. After Job realized he was a clueless imp, he said, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
• Isaiah 6:5: Isaiah the prophet saw God face to face, and God wanted to use him to tell the world to repent. After Isaiah realized he was a dirty dog, he said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
• Revelation 1:17: John the Apostle saw God face to face, and God wanted to reveal the future concerning the end of the world. After John saw him he said, “I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.”

In each of those accounts I want you to notice two things: 

(1) Dread was the natural response from beholding a Holy God. This is not a matter of persuasion, but of guttural response. When I was a four year old child I snuck downstairs while my parents where watching “The Wizard of Oz”. I happened to set my eyes on the television right when the the giant green head of the wizard spooked the lion and he ran down the hall in abject fear. I immediately ran upstairs and hid my head under my Captain Kangaroo pillow. That is called a guttural response to fear. Or dread. Each prophet, all great men of the Bible, had that response when they saw God. 

(2) Each appearance of God, scholars tells us, was Jesus himself. John 12:41 is clear on this, “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.” Who is “him”. Jesus. The prophets were terrified of Jesus. No one in our modern enlightened age dreads the appearance of Jesus. He is considered an old softy. He is spoken of with some respect, but definitely with no dread.

As a result of our lack of fear, the gospel lands on a heart barely leaving a mark, the cross sounds a silent whisper on deaf ears. The audience yawns, people want more than merely peace with God because they think they already have it. It is like most weddings that are performed these days. The vast majority of people getting married have already had sex before the ceremony. So to make the day special they spend tens of thousands of dollars on an impressive ceremony, fancy dress, expert pictures, and an award winning cake. It all needs to impress because a naked body no longer does. When our parents got married the real excitement was the bedroom on the first night of the honeymoon. That was the thrill. Now sex on the honeymoon only elicits a smile, smirk, or a yawn from a tired new bride because she has been there before.

Our lack of understanding concerning the holy nature of God has brought about the same smile, smirk, and yawn. We now have to make silly things important. We have to find new gods to be impressed by. So instead of finding an answer for our sins, we argue about secondary issues. Since peace with God is now assumed, we find new things to fear: A planet on the verge of collapsing. People being treated unfairly because they are triggered by a mean pronoun you used, or a word they don’t like. And we now fear a virus more than we do the snares and traps of Satan. 

The things that used to matter in the past mean nothing to us now. And now the things that didn’t mean too much mean everything. Because we have lost the meaning of holiness, we no longer understand dread. No wonder people yawn when they hear about Jesus hanging on a tree, to them it accomplished nothing. A fools errand. A lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

But for me, it means I can enter into his holy presence clothed in the righteousness of Christ. I have nothing to fear later because I dreaded him now. 

For those of you who don’t fear the holiness of God I dare you to read one simple passage of God’s holy word. Ask yourself while reading it, “What if this is true?” (2 Thessalonians 1:6-10)…

“God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.”

If this is true, (which I know it is), yawning is a sure sign you are dead inside.