God is Holy

A. W. Tozer

"Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts, The whole earth is

full of His glory" (Isaiah 6:3).

What an absolute contrast the awesome holiness of Yahweh is to our human depravity. Isaiah cried out, "Woe is me, for I am ruined!  Because I am a man of unclean lips. And I live among a people of  unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts" (v. 5).

This is the feeling of every man who has discovered the white hotholiness of God. A. W. Tozer helps us understand that holiness:

Until we have seen ourselves as God sees us, we are not likely to be much disturbed over conditions around us as long as they do not get so far out of hand as to threaten our comfortable way of life. We have

learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing. . . .

God's holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God's power and admire His wisdom,but His holiness he cannot even imagine.

Only the Spirit of the Holy One can impart to the human spirit the knowledge of the holy. . . The Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth. It is possible to have some truth in the mind without having the Spirit in the heart, but it is never possible to have the Spirit apart from truth.

Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard.  He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other  than it is. Because He is holy, all His attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.

God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. . . Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. . . . To preserve His creation God must destroy whatever would destroy it. . . God's wrath is

His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. . .

God is holy with an absolute holiness that knows no degrees, and this He cannot impart to His creatures. But there is a relative and contingent holiness which He shares . . . with redeemed men on earth as their

preparation for heaven. This holiness God can and does impart to His children. He shares it with them by imputation and by impartation, and because He has made it available to them through the blood of the Lamb,

He requires it of them. . . God says, "Be ye holy; for I am holy." He did not say "Be ye as holy as I am holy," for that would be to demand of us absolute holiness, something that belongs to God alone. Before the uncreated fire of God's holiness angels veil their faces. . . No honest

man can say "I am holy," but neither is any honest man willing to ignore the solemn words of the inspired writer, "Follow peace with all men, and

holiness without which no man shall see the Lord."

. . . The broken and the contrite heart He will not despise. We must hide our unholiness in the wounds of Christ as Moses hid himself in the cleft of the rock while the glory of God passed by. We must take refuge from God in God. Above all we must believe that God sees us perfect in

His Son while He disciplines and chastens and purges us that we may be partakers of His holiness (Knowledge of the Holy, pp. 110-114).

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth with it and said, "Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is

taken away and your sin is forgiven" (Isaiah 6:6-7).