If there is any doctrine that rivals God’s sovereignty in importance it is the holiness of God.

But do we have any sense or appreciation of the holiness of God in our churches today?

David Wells writes that God’s holiness weighs “lightly upon us.”

Why?

Holiness involves God’s transcendence. It involves majesty, the authority of sovereign power, stateliness or grandeur. It embraces the idea of God’s sovereign majestic will, a will that is set upon proclaiming himself to be who he truly is: God alone, who will not allow his glory to be diminished by another. Yet we live in an age when everything is exposed, where there are no mysteries and no surprises, where even the most intimate personal secrets of our lives are blurted out over television to entertain the masses. We are contributing to this frivolity when we treat God as our celestial buddy who indulges us in the banalities of our day-to-day lives.

Perhaps the greatest problem of all in regard to our neglect of God’s holiness is that holiness is a standard against which human sin is exposed, which is why in Scripture exposure to God always produces feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment and terror in the worshiper. These are all painful emotions, and we are doing everything possible in our culture to avoid them. One evidence of this is the way we have eliminated sin as a serious category for describing human actions.

Karl Menninger asked the question years ago with his classic book, Whatever Became of Sin? He answered his own question by arguing that when we banished God from our cultural landscape we changed sin into crime (because it is now no longer an offense against God but rather an offense against the state) and then we changed crimes into symptoms. Sin is now something that is someone else’s fault. It is caused by my environment, my parents or my genes.

But once again, this is not simply a problem outside the church.

We too have bought into today’s therapeutic approach so that we no longer call our many and manifold transgressions sin or confront sin directly, calling for repentance before God.

Instead we send our people to counselors to work through why they are acting in an “unhealthy” manner, to find “healing.”

David Wells claims that “holiness fundamentally defines the character of God.” But “robbed of such a God, worship loses its awe, the truth of his Word loses its ability to compel, obedience loses its virtue, and the church loses its moral authority.”

It is time for the evangelical churches to recover the Bible’s insistence that God is holy above all things and explore what that must mean for our individual and corporate lives.

To begin with we need to preach from those great passages of the Bible in which people were exposed to God’s awe-inspiring majesty and holiness.

If nothing else, we need to preach the Law without which preaching the Gospel loses its power and eventually even its meaning.

—James Montgomery Boice, Whatever Happened to God?

Read the whole of this perceptive article on the reality of the absence of God in today’s Christian culture, It’s causes, and it’s prescribed remedies, here. This is a very pressing and dire situation in Christendom today. I believe John Piper got it right when he said that people are starved and they don’t even know it! What sin it is to preach without accord to the Word; against God, at the expense of man!