The holiness of God is one way of talking about his otherness, his difference from us.

His being in a class by himself,

his being absolutely unique, Hannah. unique. Hana put it like this in 1st Samuel 2.

There is no one wholly like the Lord.

Indeed there is no one beside holy like the Lord.

Indeed there is no one besides thee,

nor is there any rock like our God.

His holiness is transcendent, pure, absolute uniqueness. There is none like the Lord in His holiness. So there's an infinite difference between us and him.

Which means that when we see his holiness most clearly,

we feel not only unworthy the way Isaiah did in Isaiah 6 where it says,

woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips.

My eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.

So not only is this infinite difference between him in his holiness and us.

Not only does it have the effect of producing a sense of unworthiness

so that we cry out,

woe is me, but it also means that we meet strange things

in the presence of the holiness of God, things that at first don't make any sense to us.

The clearer you see the holiness of God revealed in the Bible, the more strange things

about life and about your heart and about him start to come into focus. Inexplicable things, things

that don't seem to fit in your life or in the world. We think we have the

gospel a little bit figured out and then on our way there we think we have our lives brought

into a little bit of accord with the gospel and suddenly we see in the presence of his holiness some

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