A father spends many days building a playhouse for his children. He designs it, cuts each piece of wood, nails every board in place, and paints its walls yellow and red. Only then does he let his children see it for the first time.
After waiting for the initial euphoria to fade, he directs their attention to a framed document hanging on the inside of the playhouse door. Entitled “The Rules of the House” and signed “Dad,” it consists of the following instructions:
• Do not leave this playhouse until I return.
• Do not write or draw on the playhouse walls.
• Quickly clean up any messes made. (A rag and cleaner
are in the cabinet drawer.)
• Treat each other with kindness and respect.
The father then leaves the children while he goes inside the house to take a shower. Now alone, the kids decide to do some coloring. They take the books and crayons their father left on the shelves and begin to draw. After twenty minutes of this activity, the middle child becomes bored and, ignoring his father’s orders, begins to scribble in crayon on the red and yellow wall. His older sister immediately jumps to her feet and attempts to stop him, reminding him of “The Rules of the House.” When her pleading goes unheeded, she takes the rag and cleaner from the cabinet drawer and starts to clean the walls herself. Soon it becomes clear that he is coloring faster than she is cleaning, so she tries to enlist the assistance of her sister. Unconcerned about the drama unfolding around her, the youngest refuses to help and continues to work on the picture she has started.
And so the activity in the playhouse continues, until suddenly the door opens and the father reenters. At the sight of his presence, all three stop what they are doing. The boy puts down his crayons, the oldest drops her cleaning rag, and the youngest closes her coloring book. One guilty, one faithful, one indifferent, but all three in silence before their father, the creator of the playhouse and the author of its rules. As he stands before them, they each sense in varying proportions a mixture of guilt, dread, regret, and awe. And they do so before he has said a word, even before he turns his face toward them. Each of them has discovered what it is like when the good father enters the room where his rules have been broken. Worthy yet deprived of their complete devotion, he seems separated from them by a chasm of greatness and righteousness and they from him by their own disobedience.
What these children have experienced in small measure are the same emotions you and I encounter when confronted with the righteousness of God. The theological term for this mysterious apprehension is holiness. Before Him, we—sinful and rebellious children that we are—can only kneel in silence, wonder, and awe. God, our Father, fashioned the universe for us and wrote on our hearts the rules to follow. Each of us has played the part of those three children—sometimes willfully breaking his rules, sometimes attempting to atone for the sins of others, sometimes in self-righteous apathy turning our backs to the terrible deeds around us. But when He, the Creator and Lawgiver, decides to enter the house, all of us will know that He is holy and we are not. He will seem to us so great and righteous and we so small and sinful that, indeed, no analogy seems appropriate to describe the chasm between. That is what it was like when Isaiah knelt before God in the eighth century BC. That is what it will be like for you and me when, sooner or later, we find ourselves in the presence of divine holiness.
-Dear God, You Sure Don't Act Like You're Alive (Day 20)
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