Episode Details

Prayer

Heavenly Father, I praise and thank you for sustaining me through the night, and for giving me the gift of another day of life. I thank you for your tender loving mercies toward me, and for fresh stores of grace in Christ to meet with me this morning. As I lift my eyes to you, Lord please meet me now and feed my soul. My need is great, and without the bread of your word to feed my soul, I will perish and fail today. Please give us this day our daily bread, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. My soul looks up to you, and I pray also that you would meet with and feed your people this day. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

Reading

Isaiah 6 & Revelation 4.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”Genesis 1:1.

Meditation

As we’ve seen, the Pentateuch is a historical narrative, and when we’re reading biblical narrative we need to give attention to the people that the writer to chooses to focus on. In any narrative, historical or fictional, understanding the people or characters in the story is crucial for understanding the story itself. With this in mind, anytime a new person appears in the narrative, we should automatically ask: Who is this person? What’s their role and significance? In Genesis 1:1, we are introduced to the most important person of all when it comes to biblical narrative. We are introduced to God himself. And so before we begin to delve down into the narrative itself, we begin with this question: Who is God? In Genesis 1:1 I believe that we find at least seven key insights into the person and character of God, the first of which is the fact that he is holy – which will be our key meditation in this devotion and the next.

Genesis 1:1, with perfect clarity, reveals this singular transcendent excellence as to the nature and character of God: he is holy. Now maybe you’re thinking: what on earth is he talking about? Genesis 1:1 does not say that God is holy! Well, true enough, it doesn’t use those words, but nevertheless the concept of God’s holiness could not be clearer. Genesis 1:1 is possibly the most elegant and efficient expression of God’s holiness in the entire Bible. But let me explain what I mean by that.

One of first things that Genesis 1:1 teaches us is that there is a categorical difference between God and his creation. I trust that you can see that? On the one hand you’ve got the creation, on the other hand, you’ve got God as the Creator – those are the two key elements in the verse, and they represent a fundamental distinction. In other words, there are two categories: created being (the heavens and the earth) and uncreated being (God). This distinction in the text is basic: created being and uncreated being, God and stuff. In the beginning we have God already in existence, that is to say: he existed before the beginning!

We live in an amazing world. In this vast creation we find birds, trees, animals, fruit, people, creation, stars, suns, and supernovas. But before any of it existed, God existed. In this way we can see that God is actually separate from his creation. He’s distinct from it, he is “other”. God is uncreated, self-existent being. And, in the basic sense, that’s essentially what holiness really is. When we say that “God is holy”, what we’re saying is that he is in a transcendent category of his own. He is uncreated.

Now maybe this is new to you. I think that often when we use the word “holiness” the first thing we think about is moral purity. And while there’s an important insight there, the true essence of God’s holiness is not his moral purity. We actually have another word for God’s moral purity: righteousness. No, God’s holiness certainly includes his moral purity, and since the world fell the moral purity of God as opposed to our moral corruption is a key point of distinction. However, holiness in general is a far bigg