Exodus 19 paints an awe-inspiring picture of God’s presence on Mount Sinai—a thick cloud, thunder and lightning, the mountain trembling and wrapped in smoke as God descends in fire amid trumpet blasts. The people of Israel are instructed not go up on or even touch the mountain and are told that if they do, they will die. Moses brings the nation of Israel out of their camp to stand at the foot of the mountain and meet God and they tremble in his presence. At the end of chapter 20, they beg Moses, “You speak to us and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.”
Moses comforts the Israelites telling them not to fear and that God is testing them so that the fear of him may be before them that they may not sin. (Exodus 20:20) It is a kindness of God that he shows his people his holiness. When we see God for who he is, we learn to fear him as we ought and to live in light of that.
God’s holiness shows us our own sinfulness. In him, we see complete perfection and our inability to meet that standard. God is so completely set-apart that he cannot allow sin into his presence, and not even his servant Moses, who was allowed to go up to Mount Sinai, was allowed to look upon his face. Isaiah, in the throne room of God cried out, “Woe is me!” because God’s holiness confronts our own unholiness and unworthiness. As John Calvin observed in his Institutes, “[M]an is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s majesty.” In the presence of a holy God, our sins are exposed for what they are, insults to the God of the universe, and we can neither hide them nor excuse them.
God’s holiness is impossible to exaggerate, and we will never take our sin seriously enough without being captivated, awestruck, and overwhelmed by how holy he is. God never has and never will cease to be the God who makes the earth shake, who dwells in unapproachable light, and who can allow no sin in his presence. Because he is holy, he calls us, his people to be holy. (1 Peter 1:16) Not to make ourselves holy—that is something we are unable to do—but to be holy.
We are made holy by the blood of Jesus and declared righteous in the sight of God, but our struggle against sin lasts for our entire lives, and it is a struggle in which we must persevere. John Owen famously exhorted, “be killing sin or it will be killing you.” We must never deceive ourselves into thinking that harboring sin does not do violence to our souls. Our struggle against sin is described in Scripture as a war, and just as an army cannot harbor as friends the soldiers of the army they are fighting against, so we cannot shelter our sins and expect there to be no consequences. Doing so is an expression of unbelief. When we shelter rather than kill our sin we act as if God is not who has revealed himself to be—we act as if he is either unable to see our sin, and thus not really all-knowing, or as if he does not care about our sin, and thus not holy, righteous, and just. Because God is who he says he is, we ought to fight daily to kill our sin.
We do battle against sin, not out of hopelessness, but because of the hope of what awaits us at the end. The author of Hebrews calls us back to the picture of God’s presence on Sinai and contrasts it with Mount Zion. At Mount Sinai we see the fire and smoke and a God who is so holy we cannot help but be terrified in his presence. At Mount Zion, we see a God who is no less holy, but his people enter and dwell in his holy city because we have been made holy by the blood of Jesus. Rather than a mountain that must not be touched, we are invited to a mountain where we may dwell with God and our sin will be gone forever. Because this glorious reality is what we are looking forward to, let us strive to live holy lives worthy of our calling. (Ephesians 4:1)
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