Broll as we continue our study of the holiness of God we remember that we have been looking carefully at the record of Isaiah's call to the office of Prophet and how that God gave him the unspeakable privilege of peering behind the veil and seeing the Magnificent vision of the Lord exalted on his throne in the heavenly sanctuary surrounded by the Seraphim which angelic hosts repeatedly cried one to another holy holy holy is the Lord of Hosts we've also seen the traumatic reaction and response that Isiah himself had before the presence of God how that he
pronounced an Oracle of doom upon himself saying woe is me for I am undone now what I would like us to consider further is the whole question of the traumatic impact I said traumatic not dramatic the traumatic impact that the holiness of God has upon human beings we understand that trauma is usually associated with some kind of injury either physical injury or psychological injury that leaves some form of wound or scar or paralysis in its wake well what we experience in our reading of Isaiah's response to the holiness of God the trauma that befell him
we must understand that that kind of trauma was not uncommon but that throughout the biblical history when people came close to the manifestation of God it was a dreadful frightening devastating experience for them John Calvin at the beginning of his famous Institutes of the Christian religion when he was talking about human responses to the holiness of God made this observation which I would like to read for you briefly Calvin says this hence that dread and amazement with which as scripture uniformly relates holy men were struck and overwhelmed whenever they beheld the presence of God then
he goes on to say men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God but Calvin says here in elsewhere is that we go through life living for the most part on a horizontal plane we make the sometimes fatal error of judging ourselves by ourselves and judging ourselves among ourselves which standard of judgment the scripture says is not wise Calvin says we indulge in self flattery considering ourselves as only slightly less than demigods until our gaze is turned toward heaven and just as
it's impossible for us to look unveiled into the direct brightness of the Sun without doing injury to our eyes so when we turn our gaze heavenward and look to the kind of being God is it is a damaging experience to us at least psychologically as Calvin said we are devastated by the contrast that clearly exists between the holiness of God and our own unholiness and this is trauma now I remember at the very beginning of my teaching career I was teaching at a Seminary on the campus of Temple University in Philadelphia and one of my
courses I was required to teach was a course on atheism and what I did in that course with my students was have them read the primary sources of some of the most formidable atheistic thinkers in Western history they had to read the works of Feuerbach and of Nietzsche and of Kaufman and of Marx and Sartre and Camus and others and we saw as we read the works of these atheists that in the 19th century there was a common strand among the scholars who were speaking to the question of atheism they were not so much busily
occupied with an attempt to prove that God does not exist that was tacitly assumed they were saying well now that we know that there is no God after the Enlightenment now we're left with this piercing question since there is no God how can we account for the almost universal presence of religion if God doesn't exist and human religion is not a response to the existence of God why is it that man seems to be incurably not only Homo sapiens but homo religiosa that man in all of his cultures is involved in some kind of religion
so the question was simple if there's no God why is there religion and so many of these scholars in the 19th century tried to give a credible explanation for why religion was ever invented I think most of us are familiar with the comment attributed to Karl Marx which he really borrowed from somebody else namely that religion is the opiate of the masses what did he mean by that opium is a narcotic a narcotic is something that dulls the senses and what Marx was getting at was that people turn to religion to ease their pain that
people are looking for a crutch to help them navigate through the troubled world in which we live to ease the pain to dull our sense of being alone in an indifferent universe well all kinds of people as I said try to give explanations for religion and there's a common thread that runs through them and that is a psychological explanation for the origin of religion and one of the most popular and most famous was that argument offered by Sigmund Freud and here's how it goes Freud as a psychiatrist believed that man has a very strong powerful
psychological feeling of fear that we're afraid of lots of things things that threaten us and there are all kinds of things in the world in which we live that represent a clear and present danger to our well-being other people who could rise up in anger and attack us physically try to murder us either on an individual basis or on a grand scale in warfare that strikes terror into our hearts but in addition to the human sphere of fear and danger there's also the impersonal realm of nature particularly in previous ages that did not have the
protection against the forces of nature that we enjoy in this world when people were much more exposed to the vagaries of the storm and to the famine and to the flood though these things still may strike terror into us where this Jesus like cholera or the plague could come in and wipe out entire populations life seemed to be more fragile and nature seemed so threatening to our humanity one of the tasks of science that we perceive in our day is somehow to tame those unruly forces of nature such as the hurricane or the tornado or
the flood or the fire and so Freud explained it in these terms he said that we have learned how to deal with threatening people we don't always do it successfully but if somebody manifests anger towards me and comes towards me in a hostile posture there are ways that I have learned to try to disarm them and alleviate their hostility I may for example praise them say wait a minute why would you be angry with me I'm president of your fan club you know I love you I praise you for your honorable character you're targeting me
incorrectly or I may simply try to negotiate with them the killer comes and points the gun at me and I say wait a minute you don't want to kill me for the 10 dollars that I have in my pocket I have much more at home or in the bank let's make a deal if you spare my life I'll pay you ten thousand dollars I can try to bribe him or to negotiate with gifts and offerings or I may just simply appeal to his human sense of Mercy and get down on my knees and beg and
plead for him to spare my life we've seen those kinds of reactions these are some of the techniques that we've learned on how to deal with threatening persons at a personal level and Freud said the dilemma that ancient man had was how do you negotiate or bargain with or plead with cholera or the plague or a tornado or a flood or an earthquake these forces of nature that are clear and present dangers against us are impersonal they don't have a year's the year they don't have hearts to which we can appeal they have no emotions
and so Freud said the way religion emerged was this the first thing that ancient man did was to personalize nature that is that human beings invented the idea that the storm was inhabited by some kind of personal spirit there was a storm God there was a God in the earthquake a God in the fire and there were gods who were related to various sicknesses diseases came through bad spirits or demons that way we can now apply the techniques that we use with personal hostile forces to the impersonal forces the impersonal forces of nature now we
can plead with the storm God pray to the storm God make sacrifices to the storm God and do all those things repent before the storm God do everything that we can to appease the anger of the gods in order to remove the threat so that's what Freud said is the driving psychological force for the origin of religion we're by nature that is basically impersonal is now personalized and sacralized that is it is made sacred and we then begin to worship the moon or worship the earthquake or worship the storm as many religions in fact have
done I'm fascinated by Freud's explanation there for the origin of religion because it's possible suppose there were no God it would certainly be a reasonable explanation for how people could become religious it is possible theoretically that there could be no God theoretically and that there could still be religion we know that we are capable of fantasy we know that we are capable of using our imagination to create belief in things that don't really exist in fact the Bible is replete in its criticism of false religion that does precisely that particularly with respect to the worship
of idols imagine it imagine how foolish human beings can be for a person to go into his studio into his workbench take a solid block of wood or stone and work meticulously with his tools to shave away and to shape that amorphous piece of wood into a beautiful statue of an animal or of a person and then carefully to sand it to polish it and perhaps sustain it and then when they're done sweep up all of the sawdust from the floor and carefully put the tools back in the cupboard and then when you're all finished
get down on your knees before this block of wood and start talking to it and asking it to protect you and to deliver you and to provide food for you and to treat it as a deity when you just made it yourself out of a piece of wood or a piece of stone and then the Bible actually pokes fun at idolatry in it's crass form for people who actually will do that take something that is impersonal and treat it as if it were a sacred person that's what idolatry does no I think Freud has demonstrated
that it is possible for people to invent God if there were no God that's one thing to say that a person was capable of committing a crime but that doesn't prove this person actually committed the crime you can have me motive and opportunity and be innocent you might find 10,000 other people that have means motive and opportunity but just because you have the means and motive and opportunity doesn't mean that you've done it and I think Freud has shown that human beings have the means the motive and the opportunity to invent religion that doesn't mean
that that actually is what happened but I have some questions you may have a question right now what in the world does this have to do with the holiness of God it has everything to do with the holiness of God because what I discover through reading the Scriptures and what I want to show in the days to come is that if we were going to invent a God who would redeem us from the threat and the danger of trauma my question is would we invent a God who in his character is ten times more threatening
then the threats we've invented him to overcome yes I can see our inventing a God who resides in the storm and so on who's a benevolent God who is easily appeased and who he may even be a bad God an evil spirit and all that he may have many of the attributes that we would attribute to religious icons and so on but would we invent one who is holy where does that come from and what I hope that we will begin to see is that there is nothing in the universe more terrifying more threatening to
a person's sense of security and well-being than the holiness of God I don't think we would create that not unless we're masochist because what we see here throughout the scriptures is that the God and the Bible reveals is a God who rules over the storm yes who rules over the earthquake yes who is the God who reigns over all of the threatening forces that we're afraid but which God ain't enough himself frightens us more than any of these other things and rightly so because we understand that nothing poses a greater threat to our future well-being
than the holiness of God I am amazed at people when I have discussions with them about Christianity who say to me frequently well it's fine that you have a religious faith in Christ but I don't feel the need of Christ and I would say well if God is holy you need Christ there's nothing more desperately you could ever need than a savior because if God is holy and he is your judge and you are not holy then you have something to fear something to fear ultimately that is far more devastating than a tornado or cholera
as the Bible says it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God and so what I want to show in our following messages is the biblical portrait of the traumatic character of the holiness of God which brings a primary and fundamental threat to our sense of security [Music] you you
