Rediscovering the sheer beauty of God

I was interested to hear Matt Redman, the celebrated hymnwriter, lamenting the fact that we lack hymns on the topic of holiness. I think he’s right.

When I am searching for a closing hymn on holiness after I preach, my ‘go to’ hymn is Purify my Heart. Holy, holy, holy is the other one, but beyond that I am stuck for any clear, singable hymn that my congregation will recognise.

Perhaps I just don’t know my hymns well enough, or perhaps the concept of holiness was much better articulated in a bygone age than it is today. Either way, holiness is an idea we desperately need to recover in the church, not least with recent scandals concerning well-known evangelicals which I don’t want to rehearse here, but which should lead us to our knees with a desire for the fear of the Lord to fall upon us all and cleanse His church once again.

The problem with our approach to holiness is that it seems so unattractive. We explain holiness as a list of ‘thou shalt nots’, rather than the pursuit of a ravishingly beautiful God. Of course, practical holiness must inevitably include ‘thou shalt nots’, but it must be inspired by a deepening appreciation of the moral excellence of the Lord God Almighty.

‘Be ye holy’ lacks incentive without the ‘as I am holy.’ It is the sheer majesty and white-hot purity of the Lord of hosts that entices us to pursue holiness as fallen image bearers who have the opportunity to reflect their glorious Lord. Herman Bavinck’s Systematic Theology first introduced me to that beautiful phrase ‘the sum total of all perfections.’ Yahweh is ‘the sum total of all perfections’.

Our pursuit of holiness is our attempt to reflect the most beautiful thing in the universe, the loveliness that provokes angel chorus, the transcendence before which Isaiah fell in a heap, crying out: ‘I am a man of unclean lips.’

It is noteworthy that the Holy of Holies in the Old Testament tabernacle was decorated with the most beautiful colours – ‘blue, purple, crimson and white’, and embroidered with cherubim (2 Chron. 3:14). Those radiant colours must have shone out against the drab background of a desert and the pale-coloured tents of Israel. The colours were teaching that God’s holiness is the most desirable thing on earth, the treasure to seek above all things, as you stood at a distance and peered at the dazzling colours you could just about glimpse above the seven-foot high white perimeter fence.

What will stop you and me from becoming another Ravi Zacharias is not a series of ‘thou shalt nots’ as we search the web for some excitement on a Friday night, or ‘channel flick’ recklessly after an exhausting elders’ meeting. It is a rediscovery of the sheer beauty of God, the moral purity of the Lord Jesus Christ, the refining fire of the ‘Spirit of holiness’.

I remember reading a commentary on Galatians where the commentator wrote about ‘crucifying the flesh’. It made me analyse all my worst sins, and then try to crush those sins one by one. But that approach never seemed to work! The more I focused on the sins, the more enticing they became to me, in a Romans 7 ‘sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the law’ kind of way. But it is noteworthy that the sins of the flesh in Galatians are followed immediately by the fruit of the Spirit.

Focus on the beauty of the fruit – which is really a description of the beauty of God – and your fleshly desires will be starved of oxygen. The key to holiness is being so caught up in the beauty of God that we want that beauty for ourselves. And over time, little by little, we will find even the thought of betraying that beauty to be utterly unthinkable.

‘Be holy, as I am holy.’ Become transfixed with the ravishing excellencies of God, the total sum of all perfections, and some of His fragrance will fall on you until you utterly repudiate the ugliness from which He rescued you.