Separate

First, we can see how God’s holiness means he is separate. The primary meaning of holy is ‘separate.’ It comes from an ancient word that meant, ‘to cut,’ or ‘to separate’. “He is so far above and beyond us that He seems almost totally foreign to us. To be holy is to be ‘other,’ to be different in a special way.” In this scene, Isaiah sees him “high and exalted.” He said he saw the Lord; but the only physical detail he can even describe is the hem of his garment. The way he pictures God here, there is no way he is walking up for a friendly chat. The seraphs add to the strangeness of it all, don’t they – they remind us that this is not some puny ancient near-eastern king we are talking about here, or some other great human: this is the throne of heaven itself.

God is so utterly unlike us: we are creatures, he is creator; we are limited by our bodies to one place; he has no body and is present everywhere; our wisdom is only ever a part of what he already knows. We can only begin to understand him, or pretend that our feeble human words capture him. We cannot study him like some trapped wombat. Theology – the study of God - is a subject you can never master; rather it ought to master you. Who can imagine how God made the world, or how he maintains it? Who can explain his power over all things that we see in the incredible vastness of the universe, or his creative genius that we see in the sheer diversity of the planet on which live? How could we ever presume to know in a personal way this separate, distant, holy, wholly other God? We just don’t have a lot in common.