The Holiness of God
Published: Wed, 10/21/15
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Contact: josh@joshhhunt.com 575.650.4564 The Great BooksI am pleased to introduce the release of a new curriculum outline. For years I have written four lessons a week, based on the suggested texts of someone else’s outlines. With this new outline, I will invite groups to join me in reading The Great Books and discussing the Bible verses in those books. What are The Great Books? Here is a partial list. (I’d be open to your suggestions. Email me at josh@joshhunt.com )
I plan to write these first four and then evaluate from there. If I get positive feedback, the plan would be to write about 6 a year. This way, you will always have choices. I will be writing more than you have time to complete. These studies will be suitable for Sunday morning as well as mid-week groups. Participants will be encouraged to buy and read the corresponding book. I will be writing a study guide in the form of Good Questions Have Groups Talking. These will be available on Amazon, in both print and Kindle versions. In addition, they will be available by subscription as part of www.mybiblestudylessons.com . On this site, churches can have access to hundreds of lessons for about $10 per teacher per year. Churches would be encouraged to subsidize the cost of the books. I do not encourage churches buy the books outright, as they typically do with Sunday School curriculum. If people will not pay for the book, they are likely not going to read it. I would not pass them out for free. Nothing has influenced my life—except for reading the Bible itself in Christian Quiet Time—like the reading of The Great Books. My dream is that this plan will encourage thousands of Christians to benefit from these books in the same way that I have. Nearly every church I am in is struggling with the question: how do we make true disciples. Encouraging people to read The Great Books is part of the answer.
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The Holiness of GodWe are pleased to announce the third Bible Study in our series, The Great Books. The Newest Bible Study is on R.C. Sproul's classic, The Holiness of God. The Holiness of God forever changed my view of God. I developed a deep and life-changing respect for God that has shaped my life. My prayer is that this study will help many more believers explore the truths of this great book. Here is an excerpt: I was compelled to leave the room. A deep, undeniable summons disturbed my sleep; something holy called me. The only sound was the rhythmic ticking of the clock on my desk. It seemed vague and unreal, as if it were in a chamber, submerged under fathoms of water. I had reached the beginning edge of slumber where the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is blurred. I was suspended in that moment when one hangs precariously on the edge, a moment when sounds from the outside world still intrude on the quietness of one’s brain, that moment just before surrender to the night occurs. Asleep, but not yet asleep. Awake, but not alert. Still vulnerable to the inner summons that said, “Get up. Get out of this room.” The summons became stronger, more urgent, impossible to ignore. A burst of wakefulness made me jerk upright and swing my legs over the side of the bed and onto the floor. Sleep vanished in an instant, and my body sprang into resolute action. Within seconds I was dressed and on the way out of my college dormitory. A quick glance at the clock registered the time in my mind. Ten minutes before midnight. The night air was cold, turning the snow of the morning to a hard-crusted blanket. I felt the crunch under my feet as I walked toward the center of campus. The moon cast a ghostly pall on the college buildings, whose gutters were adorned with giant icicles—dripping water arrested in space, solid daggers of ice that resembled frozen fangs. No human architect could design these gargoyles of nature. The gears of the clock atop Old Main Tower began to grind and the arms met and embraced vertically. I heard the dull groan of the machinery a split second before the chimes began to ring. Four musical tones signaled the full hour. They were followed by the steady, sonorous striking of twelve. I counted them in my mind, as I always did, checking for a possible error in their number. But they never missed. Exactly twelve strokes pealed from the tower like an angry judge’s gavel banging on metal. The chapel was in the shadow of Old Main Tower. The door was made of heavy oak with a Gothic arch. I swung it open and entered the narthex. The door fell shut behind me with a clanging sound that reverberated from the stone walls of the nave. The echo startled me. It was a strange contrast to the sounds of daily chapel services where the opening and closing of the doors were muffled by the sounds of students shuffling to their assigned places. Now the sound of the door was amplified into the void of midnight. I waited for a moment in the narthex, allowing my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. The faint glow of the moon seeped through the muted stained-glass windows. I could make out the outline of the pews and the center aisle that led to the chancel steps. I felt a majestic sense of space, accented by the vaulted arches of the ceiling. They seemed to draw my soul upward, a sense of height that evoked a feeling of a giant hand reaching down to pick me up. I moved slowly and deliberately toward the chancel steps. The sound of my shoes against the stone floor evoked terror-filled images of German soldiers marching in hobnail boots along cobblestone streets. Each step resounded down the center aisle as I reached the carpet-covered chancel. There I sank to my knees. I had reached my destination. I was ready to meet the source of the summons that had disturbed my rest. I was in a posture of prayer, but I had nothing to say. I knelt there quietly, allowing the sense of the presence of a holy God to fill me. The beat of my heart was telltale, a thump-thump against my chest. An icy chill started at the base of my spine and crept up my neck. Fear swept over me. I fought the impulse to run from the foreboding presence that gripped me. The terror passed, but soon it was followed by another wave. This wave was different. It was a flooding of my soul of unspeakable peace, a peace that brought instant rest and repose to my troubled spirit. At once I was comfortable. I wanted to linger there. To say nothing. To do nothing. Simply to bask in the presence of God. That moment was life transforming. Something deep in my spirit was being settled once for all. From this moment there could be no turning back; there could be no erasure of the indelible imprint of its power. I was alone with God. A holy God. An awesome God. A God who could fill me with terror in one second and with peace in the next. I knew in that hour that I had tasted of the Holy Grail. A new thirst was born within me that could never be fully satisfied in this world. I resolved to learn more, to pursue this God who lived in dark Gothic cathedrals and who invaded my dormitory room to rouse me from complacent slumber.
R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1993), 3–7. |
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