Holiness Lost

 

The Bible tells stories about people who “experience” the actual presence of God, and in all cases, they fall down. They can’t help it. It’s not that God knocks them down. He doesn’t do that to innocent people. They fall down because He is holy.

 

The Bible says that one day everyone who has ever lived will fall down before Jesus Christ. For some, it will come as a real shock. As Dallas Willard puts it, “Reality is what hits you when you’re wrong.” None of us is completely right in our view of God, and we are perhaps most wrong in our mis-understanding of his holiness.

 

We human beings lost our view of what holiness is in the beginning when our first parents decided to turn away from Him and take His place of authority in their lives. And we, as their individual offspring, have affirmed their decision, making ourselves our own gods, bowing to our own self-interest in place of the One who deserves worship—the one Who is the source of life.

In a comment on an internet site in Quora, under a discussion of freedom and death, one person says: 

 

I believe that death holds more freedom than life. We live in a world where we have no choice but to participate in activities that benefit others more than it does ourselves. The idea of not knowing implies endless possibilities. 

 

I assume this writer feels that at least one of the “endless possibilities” that agnosticism affords us is the freedom to live only to benefit ourselves—to reign over our own lives. That, to some, might seem to be the essence of happiness. But all of our human experience shows the opposite is actually true.

 

We all bend toward the desire to do life our own way, rather than the way the Creator designed us. But the Bible says living our lives without reference to God leads to death, not freedom. We destroy ourselves physically, psychologically, and spiritually when we turn our backs on Him. We cut ourselves off from the source of life and we are lost.

 

This state-of-affairs is illustrated in contemporary art. Our lostness is reflected in images that include all the symbols of death and darkness. We wear those symbols on our clothing; we ink them on our bodies; we express them in our song lyrics. And in an unholy world we earn Grammy awards for them.

 

But we are self-destructing. Anyone with eyes can see it. We live in a “fuck you” world. It’s an agony that we, as a culture, have turned our backs on God and so lost any real sense of what holiness is like. It’s a huge loss.