God’s command, “Be holy as I am holy,” is inspiring. Imagine God looking at you and saying, “You can actually be holy as I am holy.” But it’s also unsettling. Do we really want to have the effect on other people that the vision of God had on Isaiah and even the seraphs?
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings. With two wings, they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” At the sound of their voices, the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”
As soon as Isaiah came into the presence of the Holy One, he came undone. Do we want to be holy in such a way that others cower in our presence? Do we want people to point at us and praise us the way the angels covered their faces, peeked out from behind their wings, and called to one another as if to say, “Do you see who that is? God is holy, holy, holy; the whole earth is full of his glory!” Does being holy as God is holy mean that people will notice us and talk about us this way? What does it mean to “be holy as God is holy”?
Because we’re not sure what it means to be holy as God is holy, we sometimes come up with holiness substitutes—ways of trying to make it look as if we are moving toward holiness, but it’s not real holiness. In the church I grew up in, people frequently used these phrases: “A worn out Bible is not owned by somebody whose life is worn out”; “If somebody has a Bible that is falling apart, his life is rarely falling apart.” This meant that if you read your Bible a lot, it would naturally be tattered and torn. So when I received a brand new Bible at thirteen, I sat in the back seat on the way to church roughing up the cover and trying to curl the edges to make it look worn. Eventually I left it in the car because I preferred to go into church without a Bible than to go in with one that looked pristine and unused.
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