Chapter 3
Holy, Holy Holy: Transcendence
Moses never saw anything like it. He went into the wilderness expecting nothing new. Just bushes scattered about as usual. This time, one of the bushes he wouldn't usually pay any mind to was burning. Any other day, if a bush caught fire, it would burn. The smell of smoke atop its own ash is all that would be left. The one burning now was different, strange in every way. It burned and stayed the same shape. If there was any smoke at all, it wasn't from the branches but from the flame itself seeing that the fire was independent of the bush it danced inside of. The sight caught and kept Moses' attention, a bush burning but not consumed. Looking at it, he wondered why.
Then, the answer spoke.
God called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here I am." Then [God] said, "Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." And he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. (Exod. 3:4–6)
The reason the bush burned without being consumed here in Exodus 3 is because of who was present in it. It was the self-revelation of the transcendent God. Transcendence, as we've dabbled in a bit earlier, is the "otherness" of God. He is infinitely different. Ontologically set apart. Unique. He transcends all categories unless the category has above it the name of God and beside it in contrast is everything else. Everything, meaning everything that exists. It's not as though God is simply a better, more improved version of humans. It's not that He is transcendent because He simply knows more than us. No. When speaking of God's transcendent knowledge, for example, it isn't simply that He knows more, but that He knows everything—and to know everything, He must be a being that exists in a way that no creature can or ever will.
Isaiah asked the question, rhetorical of course, "Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord, or who gave him counsel? Who did he consult? Who gave him understanding and taught him the paths of justice? Who taught him knowledge and showed him the way of understanding?" (Isa. 40:14 csb). Think about that. And whatever it is that you thought about, whether it was the formation of a set of questions or the remembrance of what you already know about God as omniscient, recall when it was that you learned it. This knowledge of God, or anything really, wasn't innate. The only thing you knew when you were born was nothing. Through your parents' guidance, your teachers' teaching, your eyes watching, your studious studying, etc., you were able to do what all humans have to do: learn. With God, however, He never needed instruction at any point in time or before it. If He did, from where would He have gotten it?
Before this book—the paper, the hands that wrote it, the mother who birthed its author, the mothers before her who washed babies, greens, cotton fields, and West African floorboards—way, way before them, was earth, a garden, many trees, one forbidden, two people, one made first, the other second, both imaging one God in three persons who was here, before everything. Before everything, then, when the triune God existed with Himself, who would've given Him advice on how to make light? From what source other than Himself would He have sat down before, in a chair, pen and pad in hand, to take notes about how to make a universe? Darwin? Socrates? Plato? Aristotle? Einstein? Hawking? Google? Twitter? You?
God is altogether separate and not set apart to the degree that He is unreachable or unknowable but separate from us in that He exists differently than us. As the holy God, He is one of a kind. His uniqueness is what defines Him as holy for, as we've seen before, the word itself means "to cut" or "to separate." He is above us in His very being, totally different than us in how He exists.
Definitions of God's holiness have often been wrapped around the moral perfection of God, something we explored in the last chapter, which as we've seen, isn't excluded from the meaning but also not exclusive of it either. When it comes to our definition of God's holiness, we'd be right to include God's righteousness, but alongside that is God's "otherness." R. C. Sproul said this: "When the Bible calls God holy, it means primarily that God is transcendentally 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."19 It seems to me that highlighting the ethical implications of what holy means and not giving due diligence to the transcendental nature of the term, theologians have made room for our understanding of holiness to be too narrow, eliminating a measure of awe and potentially additional reasons to be faithful.
Returning to the bush that wouldn't burn, how is God's transcendence observable? Because of the fact the plant was able to remain intact. What Moses saw was a bush—within it, a flame. The fire didn't reach for the stems or grab hold of the leaves; it burned without any help. The bush contained the flame, but the flame wasn't dependent on the bush. Concerning a bush ignited by anything other than God, the fire would need the bush, as its fuel, for its life. Each flame would derive every ounce of energy it required from what it burned. Once fire catches onto anything, whether it's a paper's edge or a forest's trees, it exists only because the thing does and the fire will only last as long as the thing it burns exists. Once the thing is consumed, the fire is gone, revealing how needy the flames were in the first place. But this bush burned without being consumed because the God who manifested Himself in it didn't need the leaves, the stems, or the branches for its fuel. All He needs is Himself. So it is with the flame. It wasn't dependent on the bush because it was totally independent of the bush.
What are we to discern from this theophany (a pre-incarnate, visible manifestation of God)? What does it reveal? That God is the epitome of independence. He is free in the truest sense of the word. Meaning, He is free from the need of anything else but Himself for Him to be. This is one fundamental difference between everything and God; because what is there to name that isn't dependent on something or someone for its life? Dependence is creaturely. Everything that is needs something outside of itself to both begin and continue. The very fact we all have a beginning distinguishes us from the I Am, who has life in Himself. The question is asked, "Who created God?" The answer is that God was not and cannot be created; He is because He is. Before the beginning, He was. After the end, He will be.
In the first sentence, on the first page, in the first book of God's Word, it reads: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen. 1:1). The beginning came out of someplace. Someone who had to be before anything else could. What this says about God is that He is self-existing. Alive, not from borrowed breath, but sustained by the life He has in Himself. God is not a derivative of anything since everything derived from Him. He is only able to give what He Himself is, which means when the world and time and the stars and the sun—and the first man to see it shine next to the first woman to make him laugh—were brought forth, their life came from His own. Having life and creative power from within to make and maintain everything that exists, compare God to us and see how different the two are. Let us create anything, and we need assistance. A writer needs a paper or a MacBook, not to mention a mind with memories given and ordained by someone other than chance. God only needs Himself. As God He is not dependent on His creation to do anything. He is distinct from it, and therefore He can never be controlled, challenged, or intimidated by it. If every sea in the world twisted itself into a hurricane, tall enough to meet the clouds, wide enough to cover a thousand cities, its knees would still bow and eventually break at God's command to "Be still." More than that, the seas couldn't twist into nothing anyway without His decree or permission, as if they had some ability to conspire against God or some inner life of their own apart from His word that holds them together. They cannot move one inch without Him saying so or without His knowledge, under His watchful eye and divine sovereignty. What can the world do to the God who formed it?
Being self-existing and independent has even more implications to which I don't have the time to put forward here, but another one worthy of our attention is how as self-existent and independent, God has no needs. "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:24–25). God's self-sufficiency means there is nothing lacking in God. He is immutably whole. Tozer said, "To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator. God has a voluntary relation to everything He has made, but He has no necessary relation to anything outside of Himself. His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply nor from any completeness they can bring to Him who is complete in Himself."20 If the rocks replaced the praise of millions who opted to withhold their love or keep quiet their worship, it would not leave God empty, as if He needed our praise to be complete. If and when we imagine a God who needs us for anything, we are dreaming of an idol and not the "I am who I am" (Exod. 3:14).
There's Nobody Like the Lord
For centuries Christians have known that God is God, incomparable to anything other than Himself. We put it in our creeds, sing about it in our songs. The saints before us agreed with reality when saying, "Ain't nobody like Jesus" or "There's nobody like You, Lord." Both confessions came out of a faithful comparison, made with memories and observations that were put next to the Scriptures. They placed God beside anything and everything to see the difference between the two resulting in a right-now praise sent toward the Holy One. These aren't the musings of a theological romantic. It is the shared testimony of the psalmists and the prophets who wrote songs about and sent praises up for God's transcendence long before we did.
To say it again, "Ain't nobody like Jesus." And Scripture agrees. There are times when God, in showing the utter futility of idolatry, says to Israel, "To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?" (Isa. 40:18) and "'To whom will you compare me, or who is my equal?' asks the Holy One" (Isa. 40:25 csb).