He doesn’t consume us, even though that is what we deserve. Instead, Jesus comes down to us and consumes all our sin by taking it on himself.
The scene of Moses and the burning bush is teeming with meaning for us, for the church. Right there, in middle-of-nowhere Horeb, a humble sheep herder, who once strolled the halls of the Pharaoh’s palace, is met by none other than the holy God of the universe. It’s a scene that’s echoed later, when another of God’s servants is told to remove his shoes in the presence of divine holiness (Josh. 5:13–15). Joshua, Moses’s successor, is preparing the people of God to occupy Jericho and the rest of the Promised Land after crossing the Jordan River. But before that conquest can begin, God visits Joshua in the form of a man who is the leader of Yahweh’s army, which, of course, is unmistakably Jesus. When Joshua finally realizes who he is talking to, though, he is visibly moved and deeply affected. In both instances, however, God shows up to speak to his servant, and when he does so, that place is suddenly made holy.
This is what God does: he occupies all manner of unremarkable and insignificant things and sets them apart for himself.
But what does that mean? Why is the ground considered “holy”? After all, there was nothing inherently sacred about the dirt underneath Moses’s and Joshua’s feet; it was just plain old dirt. There was nothing special about the soil Moses was standing on, but the presence of holy Yahweh turned that ordinary clay into sacred space. This is what God does: he occupies all manner of unremarkable and insignificant things and sets them apart for himself. He makes things holy just by showing up and filling those things with his presence.
Holiness Means More Than You Think
“Holiness,” of course, is a subject that pervades the rest of Scripture, but what does “holiness” mean? How can a loaf of bread be holy? What’s more, how can we be holy? More often than not, we think about “holy” or “holiness” in terms of purity, as referring to things that are clean, pristine, virtuous, and morally upright. And while holiness does include these concepts, properly speaking, it means “to be separate” or “set apart.” Closely related to this is the idea of being consecrated or sanctified, both of which convey the notion of being set apart for something. Thus, bread can be holy when it is “set apart” for some sacred purpose, event, or meal. Scripture goes on to describe and even proscribe the sanctifying of everything from utensils to food to our bodies.
Holiness, though, is not a comfortable subject, so much so that I fear we are almost afraid to talk about it, even among fellow church-goers. And I understand it, to a point. We are at pains not to be accused of being “holier than thou,” or legalistic, or hypocritical. Neither are we interested in being seen as stuffy or emotionless. Somewhere along the way, we’ve equated “being holy” with “being a buzzkill.” Consequently, the church, by and large, has egregiously relaxed what it means to be holy and, at the same time, what it means to worship and serve a holy God.
He Isn’t Safe, But He Is Holy
It’s no coincidence that the Lord appears to Moses in the form of fire (Exod. 3:2). This wasn’t merely God’s way of getting Moses’s attention, although it was that. Fire or “flames of fire” are motifs that occur repeatedly through Scripture to represent God’s holiness and his “otherness.” After Adam and Eve sinned, the unholiness that they perpetrated was such an affront to the holy God that they were banished from the Garden and exiled by order of a “flaming sword” (Gen. 3:24). Late in the Exodus narrative, when Yahweh descends on Mount Sinai, it’s in a ball of fire that envelopes the whole mountain “in smoke like the smoke of a kiln” (Exod. 19:18). When King Solomon finishes his prayer of dedication over the newly constructed Temple, fire shoots out of heaven and fills the Temple with God’s glory, prompting every onlooker to fall to their faces in worship (2 Chron. 7:1–3). When the sons of Aaron conducted “unauthorized” and unseemly worship in front of the Lord, they were swiftly devoured by fire, which came from God, leading him to remind everyone, “I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified” (Lev. 10:3).
Our God is actively holy. His whole being radiates with an “unapproachable brightness” (1 Tim 6:16).
In other words, much like fire itself, the holiness of God isn’t to be trifled with (Isa. 10:16–18). After all, one of the most vivid descriptions of God is that he is a “consuming fire” (Deut. 4:24; 9:3; Heb. 12:29), which reminds us that this isn’t merely one of his attributes, nor is it a dormant or passive part of his nature. Rather, our God is actively holy. His whole being radiates with an “unapproachable brightness” (1 Tim 6:16) that burns, exposes, and purifies all that is unholy. As the Lord later reveals to his people, he cannot tolerate unholiness or anything that is unclean. “I am Yahweh,” he tells them, “and I am holy” (Lev. 11:44–45).
Holiness isn’t so much something he has as it is who he is. He is the “holy, holy, holy,” the one who is separate from all that is marred by sin and death, because he is entirely other. He is the perfect one, whose entire being is eternally flawless. He is so holy that the only way we can even get close to capturing how holy he is, is by saying it three times in succession (Rev. 4:5; Isa. 6:3). And the only appropriate response to holy Yahweh is to fall down in worship in front of and confess your unholiness, which is precisely what Moses, Joshua, Isaiah were compelled to do (Exod. 3:5; Josh. 5:14; Isa. 6:4–5). Consequently, whenever we walk through the doors of the church, we ought to be filled with a similar awareness that “Yahweh is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him” (Hab. 2:20).
Losing Sight of the Holy God
Why do we see what we see in the church today? Why are there “Toy Story Sundays,” church leaders dipping their hands in the offering plates, and pastors sleeping around, among countless other salacious scandals being perpetrated under the banner of Christ? Well, yes, because we are all sinners, but also because the church doesn’t take the holiness of God seriously enough. We don’t tremble at the thought that when we come together as the Body of Christ on Sunday mornings, we’re gathering to commune with the holy, holy, holy God. The Isaiah caught a glimpse of this in the Temple, and the one John saw blazing with fire, is the same one who meets us through his Word every time it’s opened. Neither are we consciously thinking about the fact that every person around us, if they know Jesus, is endowed with and indwelled by God’s Holy Spirit. The holiness of God, which came down like fire during Solomon’s prayer of dedication in the Temple, is the same holy presence that resides in us (1 Cor. 6:19–20).
Belonging to the church, therefore, doesn’t mean that we have achieved some sort of specialized “holy status” or that we’ve attained some higher level of holiness. Belonging to the church means that we are clinging to the mysterious announcement of the gospel that says that God “chose us in him [in Christ] before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4). In eternity past, before any blade of grass was on Earth or any of the stars were put in place, God made a decision about you to make you holy, just as he is holy. And if that isn’t enough to move you, this same “holy, holy, holy” God is the one who reveals himself to you through the Word and invites you to put your faith in him. He doesn’t hold you at arm’s length, nor does he isolate himself from us who are unholy in every way. Instead, God’s holiness “comes down” (Exod. 3:7–8).
The Holiness That’s Given to Us
There’s something supremely profound about the image of a bush burning but never burning up, especially if we see it as a revelation of who God is. The holy God, whose holiness is a consuming fire, appears to Moses “in a flame of fire” in a bush that burned but wasn’t “consumed” (Exod. 3:2). The consuming fire doesn’t consume the shrub. This, of course, is an exquisite picture of Jesus, the one who is God’s holiness come to us in the flesh, in the garb of a servant and the likeness of humanity (Phil. 2:7). In Christ, the holiness of God appears in a form that we can draw near to. He doesn’t consume us, even though that is what we deserve. Instead, Jesus comes down to us and consumes all our sin by taking it on himself. Our unholiness deserves to be punished, but the surprise announcement of the gospel is that God’s Son has taken that punishment for us. This is how we are made holy: “By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Heb 10:10–14).
He doesn’t consume us, even though that is what we deserve. Instead, Jesus comes down to us and consumes all our sin by taking it on himself.
The seventeenth-century Puritan theologian John Flavel famously put it like this: “Christ is so in love with holiness that at the price of his blood he will buy it for us.” [1] Accordingly, “being holy” isn’t about something we produce, but about Someone we belong to. “We receive our holiness,” Sir Walter Marshall once wrote, “out of His fulness by fellowship with Him.” [2] “Holiness,” Chad Bird concurs, “is always a divine gift, never a human achievement.” [3] It’s not a lifestyle of incessant box checking so much as it is living faith in the it-is-finished-ness of the cross. Indeed, there is nothing we can do or accomplish that we can merit the status of holy in the eyes of God. Rather, before him, all we can do is fall prostrate in light of his blinding impeccability.
Made Holy by the Holy One
This is precisely what’s prefigured for us in Isaiah’s magnificent vision (Isa. 6:4–7). Even though the prophet’s impurity and sin are fully exposed for all to see, the angel offers him a solution by taking a “burning coal” from the altar and pressing it upon Isaiah’s lips, putting in stark relief the breathtaking reality that the burning holiness of God is that by which we are purified, sanctified, and made holy. The prophet’s ruin is seared, and his guilt is taken away by a gracious deployment of God’s white-hot holiness, which burns forever and never burns out. This, we could very well say, is what the revelation of Scripture motions towards — namely, how a holy God embraces and enters into covenantal relationship with unholy people. Or, to use the apostle Paul’s language, how the God who is just justifies the ungodly (Rom. 4:5).
The scene at the burning bush reveals to the church that who God is, where God goes, and what God does is always contoured to holiness. His grace is holy grace. His love is holy love. His mercy, patience, kindness, and forgiveness are extended to unholy creatures like you and me without diminishing in the slightest the holiness that is intrinsic to him. Holiness is who he is, and holiness is what he gives to us through the person of Jesus. Every Sunday is an occasion to “exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy” (Ps. 99:9). Every time we gather, we are on “holy ground,” not because our building is special or because we’ve achieved a status of holiness on our own, but only and ever because the holy God is present in us and with us through the Word and Spirit of Christ.
[1] John Flavel, The Fountain of Life: A Display of Christ in His Essential and Meditorial Glory (London: Religious Tract Society, 1836), 52.
[2] Walter Marshall, The Gospel-Mystery of Sanctification (New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1859), 56.
[3] Chad Bird, “May 23,” Daily Grace: The Mockingbird Devotional, Vol. 2, edited by CJ Green (Charlottesville, VA: Mockingbird, 2020), 160.
