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The Holiness of God Paperback – July 1, 2000
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTyndale Momentum
- Publication dateJuly 1, 2000
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.4 x 8.1 inches
- ISBN-100842339655
- ISBN-13978-0842339650
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
When I first heard R. C. Sproul’s teaching on the holiness of God, it brought me face-to-face with the awful splendor of God’s majestic holiness in a new and fresh way. I was smitten with the realization that holiness is not merely a peripheral attribute of God; it is at the core of all He is and does. I realized then that this was precisely the message the church of our generation urgently needed―and still needs today. Nearly a decade after I first heard this series, the message still challenges my thinking and rekindles my heart. John MacArthur, Pastor of Grace Community Church
From the Back Cover
Encountering God's holy presence, R. C. Sproul argues, is a terrifying experience and the only way to cure our propensity to trust in ourselves and our own righteousness for salvation. In The Holiness of God, one of the classic theological works of our time, you will gain a better understanding of how having a biblical picture of God's holiness is foundational to God-honoring theology and Christian living.
Product details
- Publisher : Tyndale Momentum; Revised edition (July 1, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0842339655
- ISBN-13 : 978-0842339650
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.4 x 8.1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #8,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #39 in Christian Apologetics (Books)
- #42 in Christian Discipleship (Books)
- #285 in Christian Spiritual Growth (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Dr. R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was founder of Ligonier Ministries, an international Christian discipleship organization located near Orlando, Fla. He was also first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Fla., first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine. His radio program, Renewing Your Mind, is still broadcast daily on hundreds of radio stations around the world and can also be heard online. Dr. Sproul contributed dozens of articles to national evangelical publications, spoke at conferences, churches, colleges, and seminaries around the world, and wrote more than one hundred books, including The Holiness of God, Chosen by God, and Everyone’s a Theologian. He also served as general editor of the Reformation Study Bible.
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So what’s the problem? The problem is not so much in what was done, but in what was omitted. It seems that Evangelicalism has become so comfortable in the presence of God because, after all, we do now have access through Jesus Christ, that we are setting ourselves up for distortions which have the potential of actually, through sheer trivialization, changing our understanding of the gospel itself into something foreign to the pages of Scripture.
We certainly do have access, because of Christ, into the presence of the Father, and the apostle Paul does encourage us to enter boldly into His presence. But we often take this as license to do so in a cavalier manner as if we were marching into the boss’s office on blue jean Friday. We become, in Sproul’s words, “Unitarians of the Second Person of the Trinity.” And this is to show a total disregard for that attribute of God’s character which the Bible elevates above all the others.
The Hebrew practice of repetition functions as the English practice of underscoring, or using boldface or an exclamation mark. When Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say unto you,” by His use of repetition He wants us to pay special attention. When it comes to the attributes of God, there is only one that is elevated to the third level of repetition, and that is “holy.” God is never described as “love, love, love” or “mercy, mercy, mercy.” But He is described as “holy, holy, holy.”
Well, what is holiness? We tend to think of it as “moral purity,” and while this is one of its meanings, when applied to God, Sproul teaches us that a more primary meaning is that of “otherness,” and of “transcendence.” We do have points of similarity with God because we are made in His image, but nevertheless the reality that the difference between us and God is not merely one of degree but also one of kind must never been forgotten. When we are called to be holy, we are called to be not only morally pure but also to be “other”, to be “set apart” for God’s special purposes.
Sproul gives example after example of Biblical characters who had encounters with God. And their experiences had something in common – a sense of crisis. Indeed, in Isaiah’s case it was actually a sense of personal disintegration as he encountered the blazing glory of the Holy One. To be sure, God acted in mercy to restore each of them, but the point is that His mercy, His grace, and the rightness of His judgements was magnified to the nth degree in the understanding of these restored sinners after their traumatic encounter with His holiness.
A proper response to the holiness of God is not quaking in servile fear, at least not for the one who is in Christ, but it should involve reverence and a hushed sense of awe when coming into His presence. And this ought to be foundational to our posture before God. You cannot ignore that without distorting your portrayal of God. If you downplay God’s holiness, He will inevitably become more like us. If He becomes more like us, the concept of His righteous wrath against sin becomes unintelligible. Our own sinfulness, the idea that every one of our sins is an act of cosmic treason against God, becomes trivialized.
We may continue to use the words, but they are emptied of their Biblical meaning. We may even continue to use the language of “substitutionary atonement,” but it will be reduced to a slogan. I know this from experience, because as a young man I would in my prayers hurriedly thank God for sending Jesus to die for my sins. And I felt guilty for saying it so abruptly because I knew that I didn’t really mean it, not in the depths of my soul, but I knew that I had to say it.
I would argue that a trivialization of the holiness of God puts us on the road to religious pluralism because it brings God down and it raises man up. It becomes intelligible to speak of “good” people who, though they have never heard of Jesus, will likely end up in heaven. This is because our default position is to conceive of a God closer to what you would expect to hear from Oprah – God as a kindly grandfather who loves everybody as they are – than to what the Bible itself says, that God is a consuming fire.
I am convinced that inerrancy is the watershed issue of the day in the church today, much as the person of Christ was the watershed issue of the early church and the work of Christ was that of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, the holiness of God is a chronic issue that is constantly with us and likely lurked in the background of each of the firestorm issues listed above. And this is because our default position as fallen human beings is Pelagianism, the belief that we can get to heaven simply by living good lives. The holiness of God flies in the face of this self-assurance, and so we shield ourselves from it. We are uncomfortable in the presence of the Holy and so we like Peter in the New Testament, say “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.”
There is a sense in which the unbeliever should be made to feel profoundly uncomfortable in the presence of God, and we don’t help, in this regard, when we bend over backwards to make our churches “comfortable” to seekers. We have removed the pulpit and replaced it with a stage, the sanctuary has become the auditorium, and the congregation has become the audience. In short, as Sproul points out, we have lost our sense of sacred space and sacred time.
The old cathedrals that in our day may be more museums than centers of worship nevertheless do invoke such a sense. They cause one to whisper and hush simply by their scale and loftiness. They help to bring one into contact with the holy, with the “other”, in a way that we have forgotten when the minister greets the congregation as if he were welcoming them into his living room. Now we don’t need cathedrals to create sacred space and sacred time, but we ought to be aware that we are entering the house of God and act accordingly.
R.C. Sproul has helped the church in many ways throughout his career by making complex issues accessible to lay people. But if I had to single out one issue, I would say without hesitation that his legacy is a burning desire to reawaken the church to the holiness of God so that our worship and everything about our Christian lives may take on a new depth, a new richness, and a new urgency as with reverence and awe, we live every moment before the face of God.
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Dr. Sproul does not shy away from difficult passages in the bible. He is a great teacher. Like Paul, he predicts what questions people would ask, asks them for us and answers them. We realise that why we find those questions so difficult to accept is because we have a wrong concept of God. He skilfully breaks down our preconceptions and exposes our sinful nature! Ouch! Then he shows us the holiness of God.
This topic is significant as I agree that the holiness of God is often misrepresented and/or misunderstood. Today's churches may care more about making God accessible than manifesting His holiness. If I may say so, sacred place and sacred time has been desecrated in our culture today. As we gather for worship, we are not taught that we come into the presence of God. We downplay the church building, taking that church is the people and not the building, so we lose that visual effect of sacred place to assist us. We further make it difficult for ourselves when we call Sunday service family service rather than worship service. This just shows where our focus is or what we think we gather on Sunday is for. When we put fellowship above the encounter of God in a worship service, I fear that God may really have departed from us. We like to challenge traditions, and we do not believe in structures. We believe we can reinvent our service format to suit our time and taste at the expense of the wisdom of past saints. It is easier to feel that God is our pal than God is God in awe and reverence and fear - which sounds like distance and old-fashioned. But I would argue this is the right response when we encounter our Holy God! God is unchanging, and why should our reaction be any different from the prophets in the OT? I don't know how it comes about, but we have adopted such a causal attitude towards God that should make us cringe. We have lost the sense that God is infinitely different from us - He is not our pal! Dr. Sproul talks about the threshold as a place of transition. We have totally lost that - we stroll from the outside world into church service seamlessly without any transition or any mental preparation. The pendulum probably has swung too far to the other extreme from the olden days when we reserved the best suits for Sunday. It is hard to say where to draw the line but beach wear of T-shirt, shorts and flipflops to preach from the pulpit in the weather of this country probably has gone too far.
This book is very helpful to recapture for us who God is, which we don't easily get represented at modern Church. It terrifies me to think if we have not seen the holiness of God in our worship, have we profaned God? There is not a neutral ground, is there, if we think about it? If we do not see worship demonstrated for us in corporate worship, what hope do we have in our private worship and relationship with God? This book is what everyone who goes to church should read if we wish to put God back in His rightful place in our life.
This book had a great impact on a friend and myself; I therefore recommend it to anyone !