Holiness and Love Meet

Be holy, because I am holy.—Leviticus 11:44

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.—1 John 4:11

The absolute cutest thing my granddaughter does is to put her hands together at mealtime and questioningly look to me and say, “Pray?” I wrote about that last week. The second most touching thing is when she reaches her arms up to me and says, “Hold you?” She actually means please hold me, but that’s what makes it so cute. This week, God has been showing me another pair of His attributes: God’s holiness and God’s love. Whenever we see holiness and love come together, we notice.

I attended a memorial service last week for a dear friend. This man died at age 87 and lived and worked right up to the last few weeks of his life. The community and his family and friends knew him as a man of integrity. His word was better than any signed contract. As I spoke with the family in preparation for the memorial service, I learned that among other things, he was known to the family as the baby guy. Anytime relatives would visit, they would give him the babies to hold. Even the extended family remembers him holding the babies, everyone’s babies. What a contradiction for my mind to grasp. He was a respected man of character and wisdom but also known as the baby guy. Holiness and love come together.

The same tension of holiness and love describes God’s character as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. God is our Heavenly Father who loves everyone, but God is holy and just. If God is to be holy, sin must be punished. I am reminded of the lyrics of the old hymn, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross by Isaac Watts. We sing in the third stanza, “Sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown.”

Sin both angers and breaks the heart of God. The Genesis flood passage records, “The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I created, from the face of the earth.’” (6:6-7)  

In Jesus Christ, God reveals His ultimate plan for dealing with sin. Sin, personal and corporate sin, your sin and the sin of the world, still angers and grieves God. Sin still must be punished, but the Cross of Jesus Christ becomes God’s solution. “Sorrow and love flow mingled down.” Oswald Chambers writes, “The Cross is the exhibition of the nature of God…The center of salvation is the Cross of Jesus, and the reason it is so easy to obtain salvation is because it cost God so much. The Cross is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash and the way to life is opened—but the crash is on the heart of God” (My Utmost, April 6).

My friend, God dearly loves you, but God terribly hates sin. Your sin separates you from God and prevents you from experiencing God’s best for your life. Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, took the punishment for your sin. Jesus is God; therefore, God actually punished Himself for your sin and mine. Romans 5:8 records, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Call upon the Lord today. Let Him hold you in His loving arms. God’s holiness and love meet at the Cross. In some sense, as Jesus hung on the Cross with His arms stretched out, God was saying to you and all the world, “Let me hold you.”