In an way easy to understand, Sproul defines and describes holiness and how God is holy in a biblical and thorough manner. This book gave me a greater sense of how much awe God ought to invoke in my heart. As we hardly understand what we are saying when we call God holy and glorious, I highly recommend this book.

Consider the raising of Lazarus from the dead. How did Jesus do it? He did not enter the tomb where the rotting corpse of Lazarus was laid out; he did not have to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He stood outside the tomb, at a distance, and cried, with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come forth!" Blood began to flow through the veins of Lazarus, and brain waves started to pulsate. In a burst of life Lazarus quit his grave and walked out. That is fiat creation, the power of the divine imperative. (10)

The Bible says, "in the beginning God." The God we worship is the God who has always been. He alone can create beings, because He alone has the power of being. He is not nothing. He is not chance. He is pure Being, the One who has the power to be all by Himself. He alone is eternal. He alone has power over death. He alone can call worlds into being by fiat, by the power of His command. Such power is staggering, awesome. It is deserving of respect, of humble adoration. (11)

The one concept, the central idea I kept meeting in Scripture, was the idea that God is holy. The word was foreign to me. I wasn't sure what it meant. I made the question a matter of diligent and persistent search. Today I am still absorbed with the question of the holiness of God. I am convinced that it is one of the most important ideas that a Christian can ever grapple with. It is basic to our whole understanding of God and of Christianity. (12)

What is the first petition of the Lord's Prayer? Jesus said, "This, then, is how you should pray: 'Our Father in heaven…'" (Matthew 6:9). The first line of the prayer is not a petition. It is a form of personal address. The prayer continues: "hallowed be your name, your kingdom come" (Matthew 6:9-10). We often confuse the words "hallowed be your name" with part of the address, as if the words were "hallowed is your name." In that case the words would merely be an ascription of praise to God. but that is not how Jesus said it. He uttered it as a petition, as the first petition. We should be praying that God's name be hallowed, that God be regarded as holy. (13)

God is inescapable. There is no place we can hide from Him. Not only does He penetrate every aspect of our lives, but He penetrates it in his majestic holiness. Therefore we must seek to understand what the holy is. We dare not seek to avoid it. There can be no worship, no spiritual growth, no true obedience without it. It defines our goals as Christians. God has declared, "Be holy, because I am holy" (Leviticus 11:44).
To reach that goal, we must understand what holiness is. (14).

Chapter 2: Holy, Holy, Holy

In Scripture, "repetition is a form of emphasis." (26)

Only once in sacred Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree. Only once is a characteristic of God mentioned three times in succession. The Bible says that God is love, love, love; or mercy, mercy, mercy; or wrath, wrath, wrath; or justice, justice, justice. It does say He is holy, holy, holy, that the whole earth is full of His glory. (26)

(the following refers to Isaiah's encounter with God where He states, "Woe to me. I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.")

Isaiah's use of woe was extraordinary. When he saw the Lord, he pronounced the judgment of God upon himself. "Woe to me!" he cried, calling down the curse of God, the utter anathema of judgment and doom upon his own head. It was one thing for a prophet to curse another person in the name of god; it was quite another for a prophet to put that curse upon himself. (28)

If there ever was a man of integrity, it was Isaiah ben Amoz. He was a whole man, a together type of a fellow. He was considered by his contemporaries as the most righteous man in the nation. He was respected as a paragon of virtue. The he caught one sudden glimpse of a holy God. in that single moment, all of his self-esteem was shattered. In a brief second he was exposed, made naked beneath the gaze of the absolute standard of holiness. As long as Isaiah could compare himself to other mortals, he was able to sustain a lofty opinion of his own character. The instant he measured himself by the ultimate standard, he was destroyed - morally and spiritually annihilated. He was undone. He came apart. His sense of integrity collapsed. (29)

Far from God seeking to destroy the "self," as many distortions of Christianity would claim, God redeems the self. He heals the self so that it may be useful and fulfilled in the mission to which the person is called. Isaiah's personality was overhauled but not annihilated. He was still Isaiah ben Amoz when he left the temple. Hew as the same person, but his mouth was clean. (33)

Chapter 3: The Fearful Mystery

Transcendence describes His supreme and absolute greatness. The word is used to describe God's supreme and absolute greatness. The word is used to describe God's relationship to the world. He is higher than the world. He has absolute power over the world. The world has no power over Him. Transcendence describes God in His consuming majesty, His exalted loftiness. It points to the infinite distance that separates Him from every creature. He is an infinite cut above everything else.

When the Bible calls God holy, it means primarily that God is transcendentally separate. He is so far above and beyond us that He seems almost totally foreign to us. (38)

Chapter 4: The Trauma of Holiness

"The disciples woke him and said to him, 'Teacher, don't you care if we drown?'" (Mark 4:38).

Their question was not really a question. It was an accusation. The suggestion was thinly veiled. They were actually saying, "You don't care if we drown." They were charging the Son of God with a lack of compassion. This outrageous attack on Jesus is consistent with mankind's customary attitude toward God. God has to listen to complaints like these from an ungrateful humanity every day. Heaven is bombarded with the repeated charges of angry people. God is called "unloving," "cruel," and "aloof," as if He has not done enough to prove His compassion for us. (51)

It is one thing to fall victim to the flood or to fall prey to cancer; it is another thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (53)

Chapter 5: The Insanity of Luther

"Let God be God." - Martin Luther (73)

Luther offers his own explanation at the paralysis that struck when he was supposed to say the words, "We offer unto thee, the living, the true, the eternal God." He said

At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, "With what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The angels surround him. At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserably little pygmy, say 'I want this, I ask for that'? for I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal and the true God." (80)

Luther examined the Great commandment, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and 'Love your neighbor as yourself'" (Luke 10:27). Then he asked himself, "What is the Great Transgression?" some answer this question by saying that the great sin is murder, adultery, blasphemy, or unbelief. Luther disagreed. He concluded that if the Great Commandment was to love God with all the heart, then the Great Transgression was to fail to love God with all the heart. He saw a balance between great obligations and great sins. (88)

Chapter 6: Holy Justice

Hans Kung, the controversial Roman Catholic theologian, writing about the seemingly harsh judgments of sin God makes in the Old Testament, says that the most mysterious aspect of the mystery of sin is not that the sinner deserves to die, but rather that the sinner in the average situation continues to exist.

Kung asks the right question. The issue is not why does God punish sin but why does He permit the ongoing human rebellion? What prince, what king, what ruler would display so much patience with a continually rebellious populace? (117)

In two decades of teaching theology, I have had countless students ask me why God doesn't save everybody. Only once did a student come to me and say, "There is something I just can't figure out. Why did God redeem me?" (123)

We are not really surprised that God has redeemed us. Somewhere deep inside, in the secret chambers of our hearts, we harbor the notion that God owes us His mercy. Heaven would not be quite the same if we were excluded from it. We know that we are sinners, but we are surely not as bad as we could be. There are enough redeeming features to our personalities that if god is really just, He will include us in salvation. What amazes us is justice, not grace. (123-124)

Old Testament history covers hundreds of years. In that time God was repeatedly merciful. When His divine judgment fell on Nadab or Uzzah, the response was shock and outrage. We have come to expect God to be merciful. From there the next step is easy: We demand it. When it is not forthcoming, our first response is anger against God, coupled with the protest: "It isn't fair." We soon forget that with our first sin we have forfeited all rights to the gift of life. That I am drawing breath this morning is an act of divine mercy. God owes me nothing. I owe Him everything. If He allows a tower to fall on my head this afternoon, I cannot claim injustice. (126)

Chapter 8: Be Holy Because I Am Holy

"Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever."

I had a hard time with that question when I was a boy. I couldn't quite put the two parts of the answer together. I was unable to see how enjoyment fit with glorifying God. I realized that to glorify God involved some kind of obedience to His holy law. That did not sound like much fun. Already I knew the conflict between my own enjoyment and obeying the laws of God. I dutifully recited the required answer even though I had no real understanding of it. I saw God as a barrier to joy. To live to His glory as my chief goal was not what I had in mind. I guess Adam and Eve had a little trouble with it too. (158)

A superficial style of nonconformity is the classical pharisaical trap. The kingdom of God is not about buttons, movies, or dancing. The concern of God is not focused on what we eat or what we drink. The call of nonconformity is a call to a deeper level of righteousness that goes beyond externals. When piety is defined exclusively in terms of externals, the whole point of the apostle's teaching has been lost. Somehow we have failed to hear Jesus' words that it is not what goes into a person's mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of that mouth. We still want to make the kingdom a matter of eating and drinking. (162)

I have never heard a sermon on coveting. I have heard plenty on the evils of whiskey, but none on the evils of covetousness. Strange. To be sure, the Bible declares that drunkenness is sin, but drunkenness never made the top-ten list. True nonconformists stop coveting; they stop gossiping; they stop slandering; they stop hating and feeling bitter; they start to practice the fruit of the Spirit. (162)

The key method Paul underscores as the means to the transformed life is by the "renewal of the mind." This means nothing more and nothing less than education. Serious education. In-depth education. Disciplined education in the things of God. it calls for a master of the Word of God. (164)

Chapter 9: God in the Hands of Angry Sinners

1. God's wrath is divine.
2. God's wrath is fierce.
3. God's wrath is everlasting (178)

Almost every natural man that hears of hell, flatters himself that he shall escape it; he depends upon himself for his own security; he flatters himself in what he has done, in what he is now doing, or what he intends to do. (179)

If we hate the wrath of God, it is because we hate God himself. (179)

We may say emphatically, "No, it is not God I hate; it is Edwards I hate. God is altogether sweet to me. My God is a God of love." But a loving God who has no wrath is no God. He is an idol of our own making as much as if we carved Him out of stone. (179)

Chapter 11: Holy Space and Holy Time

Many people in our culture think of the world as one that operates by fixed natural laws that function in a manner similar to a winding clock. All causes for all events are rooted strictly in nature, and God is left with nothing to do but to abide as a remote and distant spectator of human events. In our society, religion is limited to a kind of personal therapy for people who have difficulty dealing with the difficulties of life. Ours is a profane existence, with no sense of the presence of the holy. (206)

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