Holy, Holy, Holy

At a glance

Scripture referenced in this section

The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil; He shall dwell on high: his place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks: bread shall be given him; his waters shall be sure.

Isaiah 33:14–16 KJV

For our God is a consuming fire.

Hebrews 12:29 KJV

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

James 1:17 KJV

And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures.

Ezekiel 1:4–5 KJV

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UECF.NET summary

The sovereignty of God

Tozer will not soften the throne into a metaphor. He says plainly that he believes God is, in a real and not merely poetic sense, seated on a throne — and that this is the picture Scripture wants us to carry. A throne means a ruler in full control, not a spectator, not a manager coordinating from the sidelines. God, Tozer says, determines the course of events according to the purpose He set before the world began. That is not a small comfort. To trust a president, a prime minister, or any human authority with the outcome of history would cost a person sleep; human rulers are not equal to the weight of what they are trusted with. But the picture of an actual throne, actually occupied, means the believer's rest does not depend on who is managing the news of the day.

Holy, holy, holy

Around that throne stand the seraphim — in Tozer's description, exalted beings on fire with love for God, positioned closer to Him than anything else in the vision, calling to one another antiphonally: Holy, holy, holy. Tozer finds this threefold cry theologically loaded. He notes that older rabbis and saints, reading this passage centuries before Christ was born, already sensed something triune in the way the cry is structured — not one voice saying "holy" once, but a pattern that points toward a plurality within the one God. Tozer states his own Trinitarian conviction here without embarrassment: the more closely he prays through Scripture, he says, the more assured he becomes that the doctrine of the Trinity is not an invention laid over the text later, but something the text itself keeps disclosing.

The holiness of God

What does it mean to call God holy? Tozer resists letting "holy" become a decorative adjective, one more compliment added to a list. Holiness, as he presents it in this sermon, is active: God is not passively separate from sin the way a shelf is separate from dust; He is, in Tozer's phrase, hostile to it — opposed to it as a matter of His nature, not merely offended by it as a matter of taste. Tozer distinguishes between repenting for specific things we have done and reckoning with what we are. The second, he says, cuts deeper. Even the most admired figures in Scripture — he names Abraham, David, Elijah — carried flaws alongside their faith. God's holiness is not one virtue balanced against others; it is spotless in a way no creature's goodness has ever been, and rightly understood, it produces not pride in comparison but humility in the presence of it.

Mystery and transcendence

Underneath all of this sits a conviction Tozer returns to more than once: God is not fully sortable by the human mind. The vision Isaiah receives, and the vision Ezekiel later receives by the river Chebar — a whirlwind, a great cloud, fire, a brightness like amber, living creatures no ordinary vocabulary quite captures — are not meant to be reduced to diagrams. Hebrews calls God "a consuming fire"; James calls Him the unchanging "Father of lights." Tozer's point is not that God is unknowable in every sense — the whole sermon assumes He can be met — but that whatever can be known does not exhaust what He is. A God who could be fully mapped by the intellect would not be worth falling on your face for. The God Isaiah saw was.

Key ideas

• Tozer takes God's throne as a real, present-tense fact governing history, not a symbol for a vague providence.
• The seraphim's threefold "Holy" is read by Tozer as early evidence, sensed even by pre-Christian readers, of the Trinity within the one God.
• Holiness is active opposition to sin, not passive separateness — a distinction Tozer treats as important, not academic.
• Repentance over what we do is real, but Tozer presses further, toward reckoning with what we fundamentally are before a holy God.
• God's transcendence — His mystery — is not a problem to be solved. Tozer treats the parts of the vision that exceed description as confirmation of its reality, not a defect in the account.

Bible references in this chapter

• Isaiah 6:3
• Isaiah 33:14–16
• Ezekiel 1:4–5
• Hebrews 12:29
• James 1:17