COV LIFE BLOG

Jude 4-16 – The Holiness of God in Judging Sin

To be a human being who sins against God is not merely to make a mistake or to mess up. To sin against God is to willfully, knowingly declare independence from your Creator, to declare that you want God to be unthroned, to declare that you want to be god in his place, to commit treason against the King of the Universe, to declare war on God himself. To sin is to reject the goodness of God, to indict the character of God, to despise the holiness of God. To sin is to look God full in the face and to say, “I hate you.” It is to turn your back on all of God’s love and patience and kindness and mercy and grace. It is to defile with sin a being created in God’s image. It is to be deliberately unholy in the face of all God’s holiness.

So many people expect that God should be less than just toward those who have committed the crime of sinning against God. But where there is sin, there must be justice. Do you see this? God cannot just overlook sin, he can’t pretend that it didn’t happen, he can’t just let the sinner off the hook any more than our legal system can look to a serial murderer and say, “Don’t worry about it.” To do that would be unjust and to be unjust would be unholy. It would go against God’s holy nature to let sin pass. There is no provision in the character of God to overlook even a single sin.

God must punish sin. He cannot judge that it is wrong and then do nothing about it. That would be unjust and unholy. If God did not respond to sin with wrath, he would be a God who is unworthy of our worship. He would be an unjust, unholy, unworthy God. He would not be God at all.

Tim Challies

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HEART PREPARATION
Read Jude 4-16. How does seeing the great holiness of God draw you into greater worship? How does it affect your daily life?

SONG FOR THE WEEK
Holy, Holy, Holy by Reginald Heber