Pretty much every kid in the world, in an effort to prove their courage and strength on some distant playground somewhere, has had the experience of daring themselves to look full eyed into the sun for as long as he or she can. And in each and every case the result is the same:

Pain.

The sun is so bright that you can only look at for a limited amount of time. Very limited in fact. The moment you begin looking at the sun, you start to develop a sunburn on your eyeball. The cells of the cornea, the transparent outer layer of the eye, will blister and crack when overexposed to UV light.

In other words, the sun can actually cook your eyes in your head. Pleasant, right?

The holiness of God is a bit like that I think. Our God is “holy, holy, holy” (Isaiah 6:3); this attribute forms the umbrella over His other characteristics. In His holiness, God is wholly separate and other; His love is a holy love. His wrath is a holy wrath. His justice is a holy justice. When we look into the absolute moral and essential “other-ness” of God, we might well be blinded, forced to our knees by His brightness.

That’s exactly what’s supposed to happen. It happened to Isaiah in Isaiah 6. He came face to face with this holy God, and he was undone. The brightness of the holiness of God exposed all the darkness in the prophet, and he was left having to square himself with his extreme and utter deficiency. Whenever we come close to this God, this same exposure happens to us. We read and experience this God – the greatness of His holy love, the extremity of His holy judgment, the vastness of His holy grace – that we are left undone.

Except when we’re not. Because there is a way that we might corrupt the holiness of God.

Instead of being forced downward, facing our own shortcomings in light of God’s holiness, we might instead try and use His moral perfection as a stepladder upon which we are able to look down on others. We read the command of God to “Be holy as I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44), and trick ourselves into believing that the holiness of God gives us a leg up on the competition – a pedestal on which to stand to compare ourselves. We might easily talk ourselves into this kind of posture as we look with disdain on others, all the while using that congratulating ourselves that we may be bad, but at least we’re not “that bad.”

Here’s what the view looks like from the platform built on the holiness of God:

– Pity rather than compassion: “What fools the rest of the world is.”

– Disgust rather than love: “I can’t believe what the world is coming to.”

– Judgment rather than empathy: “That’s really what they get for making those kind of choices.”

It’s this kind of attitude that we adopt when we mistake being of the world for in the world, when we don’t remember that Jesus bought us a home in heaven but left us on earth for His glory. May God’s holiness drive us to our knees rather than to our platforms.