Too Big for Our Britches!

Understanding the holiness of God is probably close to impossible. Let's face it, comprehending anything about God is far above our abilities. A. W. Tozer (along with the help of the prophet Isaiah) does manage to help us understand just unholy we really are:

"The Moral Shock suffered by us through our mighty break with the high will
of heaven has left us all with a permanent trauma affecting every part of
our nature. There is disease both in ourselves and in our environment.

The sudden realization of his personal depravity came like a stroke from
heaven upon the trembling heart of Isaiah at the moment when he had his
revolutionalry vision of the holiness of God. His pain-filled cry, 'Woe is
me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in
the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eys have seen the King,
the LOrd of hosts,' expresses the feeling of every man who has discovered himself under his disguises and has been confronted with an inward sight of the holy whiteness that is God. Such an experience cannot but
be emotionally violent."

I have felt for some time that we do not take God's holy nature very seriously and would much rather think of Him as a benevolent grandfather than as the Almighty Creator of the universe. We create worship services that are meant to give us good "feeling" and we candy-coat the need for us to approach God with a contrite heart!

My fear is that we have trivialized our access to the throne room of God and turned our worship services and sanctuaries into theme parks with lots of rides for our kids and shows to entertain us and concessions for when we get hungry. We have been told to “…approach the throne of grace with confidence.” (Hebrews 4:16) However, there may be times that we may be just a little too bold for our own good...a little too big for our britches!

Tozer gives us a good reminder that our access must never be taken for granted. However, I do strongly believe that we do have that access! It's just not necessarily on our terms as we would like to think. It is God who reaches down in His omnipotence to our humanity, not the other way around. I am reminded of a quote from an article written by Shirley Guthrie's He says,

"But God’s transcendence means more than distance from us, his ‘beyondness’ or
‘aboveness’ in relation to our knowledge and experience and language. God
is so transcendent that he can transcend even his transcendence! He who is
above space and time cannot be excluded from space and time as if they were
impenetrable limits for him.”

Thank God for His "Holy" but loving transcendence!