Today’s Scripture: Nahum 1:6

“His wrath is poured out like fire.”

Many people think that God can just forgive our sins because he’s loving. Nothing could be further from the truth. The cross speaks to us not only about our sin but about God’s holiness.

We usually think of God’s holiness as his infinite moral purity, but there’s more to it than that. The basic meaning of the word holy is “separate,” and when used of God it means, among other things, that he’s eternally separate from any degree of sin. He does not sin himself, and he cannot abide or condone sin in his moral creatures.

He’s not like the proverbial indulgent grandfather who winks at or ignores a grandchild’s mischievous disobedience. Instead, God’s holiness responds to sin with immutable and eternal hatred. To put it plainly, God hates sin. The psalmist said, “The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers,” and “God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his wrath every day” (Psalm 5:5; 7:11, NIV). God always hates sin and inevitably expresses his wrath against it.

The cross expresses God’s holiness in his determination to punish sin, even at the cost of his Son. And it expresses his love in sending his Son to bear the punishment we so justly deserved.

We cannot begin to understand the true significance of the cross unless we understand something of the holiness of God and the depth of our sin. And a continuing sense of the imperfection of our obedience, arising from the constant presence and remaining power of indwelling sin, drives us more and more as believers to an absolute dependence on the grace of God given to us through his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

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