God's Holiness: The Sinner's Dread and the Saint's Delight
By Dustin Meadows, Guest Contributor
It takes guts to walk with the Lord. I wish guts and backbones were issued at conversion, but sadly, they aren’t. They have to be grown through the difficult process of learning to see the holiness of God from a new perspective. Here’s what I mean:
God is absolutely pure; that’s what it means to say He is holy. He is morally perfect by His very nature. This perfection means two things: first, God is completely separate from sin, and second, He must destroy sin to keep it separate from Him. He is too perfect to overlook sin or to let it go unpunished. Though we live in a time when God is being patient with this world, we know that He is storing up wrath for the day when His
“righteous judgment will be revealed…and there will be tribulation
and distress for every human being who does evil” (Romans 2:5, 9).
This is the perspective of God’s holiness that terrifies an unbeliever. They are held accountable to the law - the standard of God’s holiness - and they dread the fact that His perfect holiness requires that one day He call all wickedness to account until He finds none (Ps. 10:15). They flee from the presence of God, but there is no place to hide. His holy wrath will not stop until all sin is destroyed. Those that understand their transgression from the law are left grief-stricken in their guilt.
But, while the unbeliever dreads the outworkings of God’s holiness, the truly converted person depends on it for their very life. It is not because the wrath of God’s holiness will be poured out on wickedness in the future but because His wrath was poured out upon Christ, who bore our wickedness on our behalf (II Corinthians 5:21). This means we are no longer under the law because Christ fulfilled the law in order to make a covenant of grace between God and His people. This covenant changes everything.
A Christian should never carry grief-stricken guilt. Though this guilt can be a tool the Spirit uses to convict the unconverted sinner and drive them to repentance, the enemy uses it as a weapon against the Christian. Often, when a believer sins, they remember their lostness and their old fear of God’s holy wrath. They remember the days they fled from the presence of the Lord. They remember fearing what He might do to them. That memory sometimes paralyzes and prevents the believer from walking with God. They shrink back out of fear that He may be righteously angry with them.
In times like this, there is one weapon that gives Christians the backbone they need to fight grief-stricken guilt and change it into grace-seeking guilt; God’s perfect holiness. A believer, especially one who has sinned, trusts that just like God’s holiness will not permit Him to overlook wicked unbelievers, it also will not permit Him to overlook Christ’s sacrifice on their behalf. Instead of fleeing from Him, trusting His holiness gives them the guts to flee to Him. They approach God like David did in Psalm 51. The adulterous murderer ran to the only One who could “have mercy” on him and “cleanse” him, “purge” him, “blot out his transgressions”, and “create in him a clean heart.”
Micah’s faith gave him the guts to flee to God for refuge from his sin. In 7:1, Micah admits his sin and acknowledges that his communion with the Lord has been severed. But he doesn’t grow despondent. He isn’t stricken with grief over his guilt. His guilt was different. His guilt drove him to seek grace because he remembered God made a covenant with His people that His holiness will not allow Him to break (7:18-20). Micah shows the backbone that trust in God’s perfect holiness will create.
“I will bear the indignation of the LORD because I have sinned against Him
until He pleads my cause and executes judgment for me.” (Micah 7:9)
What a picture of the gospel! Micah depends on God for salvation, the very One he sinned against. Micah courageously sought for God, in His holiness, to remember His covenant, plead Micah’s cause, and execute judgment for, not against, him.
Surely God’s holiness is seen in His righteous wrath upon unbelievers, but when it comes to our sin, we have to fight to see it through the mercy of the cross of Christ. God will keep His covenant. His holiness demands it. Have the guts to believe it. Confess your sins. Repent. Surely He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (I John 1:9). Unbelievers have reason to dread God’s holiness, but those of us in Christ should delight in it.
Dustin Meadows has served the Lord through local churches for over 20 years and is the founder of Disciple the Nations, a Christian missions agency that partners with churches and missionaries to accomplish the Great Commission for the glory of God. Dustin loves making disciples, strengthening churches, and serving missionaries. He and his wife Candi have been blessed with four children: Zeb, Sy, Ana Grace, and Jed.