Holiness; its all of God and we’re missing it unless we acknowledge all holiness as coming only from Him. The perfect illustration in Scripture would be in the sixth chapter of Isaiah the prophet, when he had his vision of the Lord in the Temple of Heaven.
He saw the Lord sitting upon the Throne of His Glory way up high, and his beautiful robes flowing all the way down and to the walls all around. He saw the mighty and terrifying angels flying all about Him. He heard them cry “HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! is the LORD of hosts!: the whole earth is full of his Glory!” and felt the posts of the great Temple entrance shake at the thunderous shout of their unearthly voices. He saw the blazing light emanating from the Holiest of ALL in the face of Almighty God penetrate through the swirling smoke….
Here was the BEAUTY of HOLINESS ETERNAL. Only in this LIGHT could Isaiah know how wicked his sins were. “My lips are polluted! I even came out of a people of polluted lips!” he says in verse 5. In the sin-crushing presence of the HOLY ONE, he knew he was utterly wicked and useless and he knew what the just sentence against him must be: Death. He lamented, “Alas! … I’m a dead man…”
Then appears the unspeakable mercy of God in verse 6: One of the angels takes Holy Fire from the Holy Altar and touches Isaiah’s lips with it, saying that they were no longer polluted. He explains that his iniquity was now taken away and his sins wholly cleansed. Now he was HOLY, and it was even God who worked that holiness in him. As a “dead man” he could not make himself holy. No, it was ALL of God.
Brothers: All Isaiah could do back then, is all we can do now: He could seek God’s face for a revelation of His Holiness. He could confess the utter sinfulness of his darkened heart in the presence God’s Holy Light, and then he could seek God for the grace to do the only sensible and reasonable thing left for him to do: He could offer up his whole life to God.
The apostle Paul saw this clearly, coming to the same conclusion in Romans 12. He exhorts us to do likewise:
If we present our “bodies, (Paul says), a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God”; if we reject the intense pressure to conform to the world’s ways of thinking and doing; If we rather submit ourselves to God, He will do the work of transforming us (Rom. 12:2.) The word “transform” is the same word as used to describe our Lord when He was “transfigured” on the mount in Matthew 17:2:
“And [He] was transfigured [transformed] before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.”
Paul alludes to the same thing happening spiritually to those who believe in 2Cor. 3:18
“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed [transformed] into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
We submit to God, He transforms us.
