As we continue shifting our gazes, almost imperceptibly, to see the different facets of the word ‘holy’ – admiring it like a crown jewel, noticing how it shines a little differently from each perspective – we land, today, on a different way to think of ‘holy’. We’ve arrived at the use of ‘holy’ that English speakers are most familiar with: the adjective. A word that describes something or someone. For instance, we have Holy Spirit, Holy Communion, Holy Bible. By adding the adjective, we know without any further explanation that this Spirit or practice or book is…holy.
Yet, do we really know what that means?
We have another English adjective that is often used as a synonym for ‘holy’: sacred. It aids our understanding of ‘holy’ to know that anything connected to God is deemed sacred. This idea of sacredness is prevalent in Scripture – so much so that it becomes key to “understanding the relationship between God and His creation, particularly His chosen people.”1
So, this week we’ll stand before this sacred facet of God’s holiness and give it space to do a holy work within us. We’ll notice a sparkle we haven’t seen before or experience a power that we didn’t know was possible – because we’re getting in tune with the essence of God’s nature and its effect on others. As this holiness soaks deep into our spirits, we will see God more clearly – and respond to Him more fully.
The Sacredness of God and All That Belongs to Him
A.W. Tozer paints a picture of ‘sacred’ for us – with words: “Because [God] is holy, His attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.” In its adjective form for ‘holy’, the Hebrew word, qadosh, becomes an indicator to anything associated with God – holy places, holy objects, holy people. All set apart for Him, of course! But also made sacred.
‘Holy’ is the all-consuming nature of God. As a result, His holiness seeps into every part of Him, defining His every attribute and action.2 Because God is holy, His law is “holy, righteous, and good” (Romans 7:12). Because God is holy, His love is holy.3
So as we move through this post, and through our year of ‘holy’, let’s hang onto these truths – God is so perfectly holy that every person, place, and thing connected to Him is also holy. Sacred.
A Little Word-Nerd Time
When I scoured Scripture for all the uses of the word ‘holy’, I uncovered several incredible treasures. And, perhaps, my favorite discovery was about the Most Holy Place in the Old Testament.
Remember with me the way the Tabernacle was organized. It had an outer court where common people could gather. Then it had an interior room, called the Holy Place, into which only anointed, consecrated priests could enter on a daily basis. Yet the name in Hebrew for this sacred room is not what I expected. I suppose my English-trained mind thought there’d be a noun for ‘place’ with ‘holy’ as the adjective – just as our English Bibles have it written: Holy Place (ie: Exodus 26:33).
However, the Hebrew language uses a single word for ‘Holy Place’ – the noun, qodesh. Simply, Holy.
Sit with it for a minute, in the beauty of it. One word, the thing itself, is the name of this space. Holy.
Well, it gets better. Deeper within the Tabernacle was one more room, the Most Holy Place. The space where the ark of the covenant was placed and God’s glory, the earthly essence of His presence, would reside. No human was allowed to enter this space with the exception of the High Priest. And then only one day a year so that he might make atonement for the people of Israel.
We are getting a sense of just how holy this room was. And in Hebrew, its name captured this quality without question. The Most Holy Place…Qodesh Qodesh. No qualifying adjectives. Just two ‘holies’. Qodesh Qodesh. Holy Holy.
Since the Garden of Eden, there has never been a more sacred space than this one on earth. Because it was God’s place. The Most Holy Place. The Holy of Holies.
Holy Holy.
Sacred | Scared
Have you ever noticed how easily the word ‘sacred’ can become ‘scared’ with a simple swap of two letters? I’ve often wondered if there might be a lesson in that happy truth. Today, I discovered it!
We see it best on display when Isaiah is swept up in a vision of God in His heavenly throne room. The minute Isaiah gets his bearings and realizes Who he is looking at, he cries out in terror:
“It’s all over! I am doomed, for I am a sinful man. I have filthy lips, and I live among a people with filthy lips. Yet I have seen the King, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.”
Isaiah 6:5 NLT
Isaiah is one hundred percent afraid for his life. He knows the reality of what it means to see God, to be in His presence as a sinful, unclean, unholy human. Death. God Himself once told Moses, “no one can see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). Isaiah knew this well.
I think we could safely say that Isaiah is so scared because God is so sacred.
In that moment, the angel swoops to the altar and picks up a burning coal, the heat of which purifies Isaiah as the angel touches his ‘unclean lips’ with it (vv.6-7). His sin is removed; Isaiah stands before God forgiven (v.7). Thus cleansed, Isaiah is able to remain before God because God’s holiness has made Isaiah holy.
There’s another scene in Scripture that conveys the kind of ‘scared’ Isaiah felt as he stood before God. And it goes back to the Day of Atonement. Before entering the Qodesh Qodesh, the High Priest had to don his holy robe, on which hung the ephod and a row of bells – “so that he will not die” (Exodus 28:35). The priests were so scared of going inside the Holy Holy that they would tie a rope around the High Priest’s ankle.4 That way if they stopped hearing the ring of the bells on his robe, they would know the High Priest had died, and they’d just pull him out by the rope. They were that afraid of God.
Most of us have never felt scared to go before God! And the reason is because in Christ we are atoned for, cleansed, forgiven…made holy (1 John 2:2; Hebrews 10:14). We can enter God’s presence and come before the throne of God unafraid (Ephesians 3:12).
However, as incredible as this is, too often Christians take for granted the grace we’ve been given, going to God casually, without a thought of His holiness. His power. His greatness. And that can lead us to lose respect for God’s sacredness, to lose the fear of God.
“There is the terror of God and then there is the fear of God. They are not the same thing. The terror of God describes the reaction of persons who come into God’s unmitigated presence who do not know God’s nature. The fear of God describes the posture of persons who know the enormity of God’s holiness and yet trust in the extravagance of God’s goodness.”5
Of course, Isaiah and the priests under the old covenant understood God’s nature very well. They were scared of being face to face with His purifying holiness, yet they were not so afraid that they ran the other direction. Their healthy fear of God might have triggered a few tremors, but it also pushed them toward total obedience.
In fact, many reactions to God in the Old Testament reflect the ‘fear of God’ rather than sheer terror. Case in point: The day God showed up in the biggest of ways, leading the Israelites out of Egypt and across the parted sea – then drowning Pharaoh and his army in that same sea! The people of God got a first hand lesson about God’s holiness.
“When the Israelites saw the mighty hand of the Lord displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.”
Exodus 14:31 NIV
Imagine the emotional and physiological responses of the Israelites that day. Heart-pounding awe. Gut-level respect. And good ol’ knees knocking, I’m sure. It reminds me of the time Jesus stood up in the boat during the storm, and with a word He calmed it all (Mark 4:39). And the disciples’ reaction? Fear. In their own trembling, they asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” (v.41).
But in both cases, the fear wasn’t the kind of terror that pushed people away from the Lord. Rather, it drew them closer. It knitted them more strongly to Him. It led them to worship! The Israelites sang their awe of God and danced their delight of Him (see Exodus 15). Even “those who were in the boat worshiped [Jesus], saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God’” (Matthew 14:33).
My friends, God is so sacred that He is to be feared. We’re meant to have a healthy respect for His sheer ‘otherness’, His awe-inspiring set-apartness, His purifying holiness! Not because God is scary but because He is so far beyond us in every way. And aren’t we thankful that this is God’s reality of being. Unshakable. Unbreakable. And utterly good.
Responding to Such Sacredness
In my haste to move us to the point of Isaiah’s story where he gets scared and the angel sanctifies him, I skipped right over the scene that lay before Isaiah: God on His throne. His holy robe filling the entire temple. Scary angels flying over God’s head. And coming from the mouths of these seraphim, unending worship.
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
Isaiah 6:7 NIV
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
If we had any question about God’s perfect holiness, this song of adoration hammers it home. The same adjective sung three times in a row: qadosh, qadosh, qadosh. Three, the number of divine completeness and perfection. God’s holiness is perfectly pure, perfectly powerful, perfectly…perfect.
Holy, holy, holy. Such a declaration reiterates what we’ve already learned: “no attribute of God is more defining than His holiness,” and such holiness demands reverence from all creation (Psalm 22:3; 99:9).2
So when I think of the priests under the old covenant and the people bringing all.their.sacrifices, I am humbled at God’s goodness, at the way Jesus changed everything. The old covenant demanded the continual shedding of blood for atonement – life to cover the death sin brings. Even when the High Priest went into the Holy Holy on that one day of the year, it was “never without blood” (Hebrews 9:7). So.much.blood in the tabernacle, in the temple. And as long as the temple stood, these practices were necessary (v.8). But the minute Jesus died, the curtain that kept people out of the Holy Holy ripped in two. Access changed. The blood the Lamb of God shed was once and for all.
Christ is now our High Priest. He has entered the heavenly Holy Holy on our behalf (Hebrews 9:11). So now as we enter this Most Holy Place, the very presence of God, we carry within us the fear of God, a healthier respect for His holiness – because the veil is torn! The doors have swung wide open, and we run into the throne room, before our holy Father. And we bow low, worshiping the Lord God Almighty with reverence and awe (Hebrews 12:28). This is the good and proper response to the sacredness of our Most Holy God.
Holy is… Sacred
Father God, thank You for the way You have woven your very nature – your holiness – throughout Scripture. In doing so, You are helping us to better know You, to better understand how all-consuming your holiness is. Thank You for giving us your Son, Jesus, and for atoning our lives with His life so that we can now enter that Most Holy Place, the place of your perfect presence with confidence. Holy Spirit, we ask that You would shape within us a healthy fear of God so that each time we look His way, our hearts recognize that we’ve entered the throne room, that we’ve stepped into a sacred space. Help us to honor God with faith, humility, and reverence. Help us to remember that even when we don’t feel ‘awe’, that God is still an AWE-SOME God – abundantly beyond anything than we can ever imagine. Lord Jesus, we take our place with You in the spiritual ‘Holy Holy’ to worship and adore our Most Holy God. We bow on our knees even as we lift our voices, affirming our understanding of God’s vast holiness and utter goodness, singing with the seraphim, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. The whole earth is full of His glory!” It is in your holy name that we pray, amen.
(inspired by Hebrews 10:19-20; John 14:26; 1 John 2:27; Deuteronomy 10:17; Psalm 145:3; Ephesians 2:6; Psalm 99:1-3; Isaiah 6:7)
Resources: I love sharing with you the books, podcasts, articles, and anything else that has inspired, encouraged, or taught me. These are humble offerings with no expectations.
- 1 – From Biblehub’s topical definition page on the word ‘sacred’
- 2 – From the Hebrew definition of qadosh on Biblehub
- 3 – JD Walt explains this further in his Wake Up Call post about the holiness of God, from 10/30/24.
- 4 – This notion of priests tying a rope on the High Priest’s ankle is not Scriptural but an idea handed down by tradition.
- 5 – I love the way JD Walt differentiates ‘terror of God’ and ‘fear of God’ in his Wake Up Call post on 5/11/20.
- Today I’m specifically pointing you to two songs on our Holy is… playlist. First, “Throne Room” by Charity Gayle, which was actually playing as I wrote that last paragraph. So I kinda quoted it! I have loved this song for so long because of the way it captures this miraculous way of God – of making a way for us to be with Him. Secondly, there’s a song that’s newer to me, and every time it plays my body stops what it’s doing and listens. It responds. Because I feel the truth of every word. It’s Brandon Lake’s “Count ‘Em.” I imagine this might be a little of what is experienced in God’s actual throne room – all the worship, all the words of truth, all the power! I dare you to pull up the lyrics on Spotify and sing them out loud as the song plays! Holy karaoke!
- Each Wednesday I upload a “Teacup” teaching video that carries on the topic here. You can find all the videos on my Facebook Author Page, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Many of you have found me on Substack. Thank you so much! And, if you’d like to listen to (rather than read) these weekly posts, you can do so on Substack. It’s easy to see and use the audio bar across the top of each post. While you’re on Substack, check out the ministry I’m blessed to be part of, the Devoted Collective.
- My monthly newsletter, The Abiding Life, goes to email inboxes the first week of each month to those who have subscribed on my website. I also post them on Substack. My most recent edition can be found there, and you can subscribe for future newsletters on Substack, here.
Rhythms: As my newsletter’s title infers, we seek to develop an abiding life in this space — a place where we can get informed but also be transformed as we learn to abide in God’s presence throughout our days. I like to think that developing rhythms is one way to aid us in our desire to become more Christlike.
- This first series of our new year invites us to give considerable thought to what ‘holy’ is. We will be challenged to bring to our level what is so lofty that we really won’t fully grasp it. And yet, we are called to know God and to know His holiness — to allow His holy-ness to shape a higher reverence for Him, to grow within us a humble respect for His utter majesty. And now we’ve added to this whole understanding the fact that we too are meant to be holy, to be set apart for God.
Even though ‘sacred’ might be the word we’d most automatically associate with the meaning for ‘holy’, we often struggle with actually describing it. Yet, sometimes we just sense ‘sacred’ don’t we? Like maybe when we step into a cathedral? What other images come to mind when you think of holiness as ‘sacred’?
- We’re all called to share the truth about who Jesus is. One way you can do that is by sharing this site and telling others your own stories of faith experiences. May we use our whole selves to tell others about our holy God!!
Featured Photo by Mario La Pergola on Unsplash “All the Bits and Pieces” Photo by Sahand Babali on Unsplash.
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