Each of these living beings had six wings, and their wings were covered all over with eyes, inside and out. Day after day and night after night they keep on saying,
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty—
the one who always was, who is, and who is still to come.”
Today, I will step out of the way and allow two of my literary mentors to relate the devotion this morning. In chapter one of Crazy Love, Francis Chan writes, “Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe GOD with the glory he deserves.”
I agree and won’t even try. What I will do, however, is give you this edited passage from C.S. Lewis. Every time I read this, I’m reminded how holy GOD is and how unrighteous I am in his glorious light.
(This portion is taken from the novel Perelandra. Both “the Lady” and “Ransom” were main characters.)
“As soon as the Lady was out of sight Ransom’s first impulse was to run his hands through his hair, to expel the breath from his lungs in a long whistle, to light a cigarette, to put his hands in his pockets, and in general, to go through all that ritual of relaxation which a man performs on finding himself alone after a rather trying interview. But he had no cigarettes and no pockets: nor indeed did he feel himself alone. That sense of being in Someone’s Presence which had descended on him with such unbearable pleasure during the first moments of his conversation with the Lady did not disappear when he had left her. It was, if anything increased. Her society had been, in some degree, a protection against it, and her absence left him not to solitude but to a more formidable type of privacy. At first, it was almost intolerable; as he put it to us, in telling the story, “There seemed no room.” But later on, he discovered that it was intolerable only at certain moments- at just those moments in fact (symbolized by his impulse to smoke and to put his hands in his pockets) when a man asserts his independence and feels that now at least he’s his own. When you felt like that, then the very air seemed too crowded to breath; a complete fullness seemed to be excluding you from a place which, nevertheless, you were unable to leave. But when you gave in to the thing, gave yourself up to it, there was no burden to be borne. It became not a load but a medium, a sort of splendor as of eatable, drinkable, breathable gold, which fed and carried you and not only poured into you but out from you as well. Taken the wrong way, it suffocated; taken the right way, it made terrestrial life seem, by comparison, a vacuum. At first, of course, the wrong moments occurred pretty often. But like a man who has a wound that hurts him in certain positions and who gradually learns to avoid those positions, Ransom learned not to make the inner gesture. His day became better and better as the hours passed.”
This is what GOD’s holiness “feels” like to me.
Author’s Note: for more on this topic, read pages 30-31 of Crazy Love by Francis Chan and Danae Yankoski
