What a sublime perfection is
this! 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, Lord God Almighty! It evokes from
the church on earth her loudest strains. Let them praise His
great and terrible name, for it is holy. Holy, holy, holy
three, one Jehovah evermore, Father, Son, and Spirit, we,
dust and ashes, would adore, lightly by the world esteemed,
from that world by you redeemed. Sing we here with glad accord,
Holy, Holy, Holy Lord. Reader, seek in some feeble measure
to apprehend the nature of God's unswerving 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 impartial punishment. It is not so much
a matter of will as of necessity. But what pleasure can there be
in meditating on 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, your glorious atonement
is the mirror in which we can gaze unappalled on this august
attribute. Your cross is to the wide universe,
a perpetual monument and memorial of the holiness of God. It proclaims
as nothing else could, you love righteousness and hate wickedness. Through that cross, the holiest
of all beings becomes the most gracious of all. Now we can love
him," says the 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 until 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 rectitude
of the divine nature and the requirements of the divine law,
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, seek
that some faint and feeble emanation from this divine attribute of
holiness may be yours. Let holiness to the Lord be the
superscription on your heart and life. Abounding grace can
give no sanction or encouragement to abound in sin. His mercy,
says 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. Or, are you tempted to murmur
under the dealings of your God? What are the sorest of your trials
in comparison with what they might have been, had this holy
God left you to know, in all the sternness of its meaning,
how glorious He is in holiness? Rather marvel, considering your
sins, that your trial has been so small, your cross so light,
Blessed Jesus, into the sanctuary of holy mercy which you have
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 lie down and
sleep in peace for you alone, Lord. Make me dwell in safety. Psalm 4 verse 8