On Thy Holiness
“Thou only art Holy.” — Rev. xv. 4.
Wha.t an awful perfection is this! It denotes the burning Purity of Jehovah. It would seem to form the loftiest theme for the adorations of saints and angels. They cease not day nor night to cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!” It evokes from the Church on earth her loudest strains — “Let them praise His great and terrible name,/97’ it is holy
“Holy, Holy, Holy Three!
One Jehovah evermore!
Father! Son! and Spirit! we
Dust and ashes would adore.
Lightly by the world esteem’d.
From that world by Thee redeem’d,
Sing we here with glad accord,
Holy! Holyl Holy Lord 1”
My soul! seek, in some feeble measure, to apprehend the nature of God’s unbending hatred at sin! It is the deep, deliberate, innate opposition of His nature to moral evil, which requires Him to hate it, and visit it with condign punishment. It is not so much a matter of will as of necessity.
But what pleasure can there be in the contemplation of so awful a theme! The contemplation of a God “of purer eyes than to behold iniquity” — “in whose sight the heavens are not clean!” — Jesus! thy adorable atonement is the mirror in which we can gaze un appalled on this august attribute! Thy cross is to the wide universe a perpetual monument and memorial of the Holiness of God. It proclaims, as nothing else could, “Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness!” Through that cross, the holiest of all beings becomes the most gracious of all. ^’ Kow, we can love Him,” says a saint who has entered on his rest, not only although He is holy, but because He is holy.”
Gaze, and gaze again on that monumental column till it teaches the lesson, how vain elsewhere to look for pardon! — how delusive that dream, on which multitudes peril their eternal safety, that ‘’ God will be at last too merciful to punish!” Surely, if any less awful vindication could have sufficed, — or had it been compatible with the Divine attributes to dispense pardon in any other way, Gethsemane and Calvary, with all their awful exponents of agony, would have been spared! The Almighty victim would not have voluntarily submitted to a life of ignominy and a death of woe, if, by any simpler method. He could have “cleared the guilty.” But this was impossible. If He was to “save others. Himself he could not save!”
Believer! let the attribute of Holiness be the superscription written on your heart and life. Abounding grace can give no sanction or encouragement to abound in sin. “His mercy,” says Bishop Reynolds, “is a holy mercy which knows how to pardon sin, not to protect it: it is a sanctuary for the penitent, not for the presumptuous.”
My soul! art thou tempted to murmur under the dealings of thy God? What are the sorest of thy trials in comparison with what they wight have been, had this Holy God left thee to know, in all the sternness of its meaning, how “Glorious He is in Holiness?” Rather marvel, considering thy sins, that thy trial has been so small — thy cross so light!
Blessed Jesus! into this sanctuary of “holy mercy” which thou hast opened for me, I will flee. I can now “give thanks at the remembrance of God’s holiness!” Deriving, even from this august attribute, one of the “songs in the night” —
“I WILL BOTH LAY ME DOWN IN PEACE AND SLEEP; TOR THOU, LORD, ONLY MAKEST ME DWELL IN SAFETY!”