The Lord - High and Holy

A friend of mine in Dubuque, Iowa will be on vacation in a couple of weeks and has asked me to preach at his church the Sunday he is gone. I am looking forward to it. About 2 weeks after that i will be in Springfield, Missouri preaching to a church that wanted to hear me. I am leaning towards telling both churches the same thing. I think my simple message is this ... that God is God and we are not God. And if we are wrong about who God is nothing else in our theology can or will be right.

So many people miss this today. I recall an article where teenagers in Christian high schools were asked how they pictured God. Overwhelmingly their response was that God was a kindly old man sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of an old style southern mansion, watching the world go by. Friend, this is not the God of the Bible. For many others, God is a lot like we are. He is a creature who has faults and learns from his mistakes. One theologian writes that we ought to consider God to be omnicompetent instead of omnipotent. He sees God as the most capable "manager" in the universe. Open theists posit a God who does not know the future and has to adjust to changing situations. One word/faith preacher believes God is just a little taller than he is based on God having a 9 inch span (the distance between the tip of your thumb and the tip of your little finger when your hand is fully spread apart). The common denominator is all this is that God is an awful lot like we are. One preacher quipped that God created man in his own image and then we returned the favor.

God is the high and holy Lord of creation. As vast as the universe is ... as vast as all the universes ever to be out there in space, God is bigger than all of them together. Yet, God is in the very room we are in and lives in the hearts of his people. He is exalted majesty. King above all kings. He is Perfect perfection. His holiness is such that sinners are blasted by the fire of His presence. He is the Absolute of absolutes. Everything He is He is in infinite quantity and quality. There is no darkness or shadow of turning in Him. He never changes or learns. He is one of a kind and no other creature in the universe is like Him. He forbids us to make images to represent Him because nothing we can picture in our minds will even begin to capture the essence of who He is. When everything we know about Him is added together there is a single word in our language to describe Him .... He is "God."

Beloved, until you get the Person of God right, none of the rest of your theology will be right. This is the first lesson of Christian theology. He is the Lord - High and Holy. He ought to be worshipped as such.