Awestruck

Who shall not fear You, O Lord, and glorify Your name? For you alone are holy.

Revelation 15:4

The primary meaning of the word holy is “separate.” It means “to cut.” A holy person is cut apart from the rest. God is holy in that He is totally, in His person, separate from all of us. So much so that it is almost a foreign subject to talk of Him. He is so awesome and so overwhelming in His person that there is nothing in human language or in human experience to which we may compare Him.

Some years ago, a German scholar named Rudolf Otto tried to determine in a scientific way what happened to people when they came in contact with that which they believed to be holy. He observed that there is something extra in the experience of the Holy, something you can’t describe in human terms. The clearest sensation a human being has when he experiences the Holy is an overwhelming sense of creatureliness. When we meet the Absolute, we know immediately that we are not absolute. When we meet the Infinite, we come in contact immediately with our own finiteness. When we meet the Absolute Holy, we become aware that we are not like that.