Jehovah Mekadesh

Thankful for God’s continued grace and mercy upon each one of our lives especially with Christine’s wedding this past week. We are continuing with our series on “I Am” on the names of God and we have three weeks left including today. One of the things that has been so profound even in my own heart as I’ve gone through this series talking about the names of God is how vast, wonderful, and indescribable our God is. Just one name is not enough to describe Him to us, so the word of God uses so many names. We have gone through several, almost eight or nine weeks, of different names of God, each one pointing to a different aspect about Him. Put together, what you see here is a wonderful God who is worthy of our worship and adoration, exactly as we did this afternoon, because He cannot be described by one name and He is so much more beyond that. I thank God for the way in which He has revealed Himself to us in His word this morning.

This afternoon, let’s turn our Bibles to the Book of Leviticus. I’ll read for you from 20:7-8. Leviticus 20:7-8. God’s word reads like this: “Consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am the Lord your God. Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the Lord who makes you holy.” Verse 8 again, “Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the Lord who makes you holy.” That last sentence in verse 8 gives us the next name that we’ll be focusing on today, which is this: Jehovah Mekadesh, the Lord who makes you holy. This is the first time in Scripture that God is identified as Jehovah Mekadesh, or the one who makes you holy. The importance of Him making us holy is given to us in verse seven. We serve a God who is holy. He expects His children to be holy as well, and apart from Him, there is no holiness in us. So, the gracious God, the loving God who wants us to be holy, chooses to sanctify us. In His relation to us, in making us holy, He gives us the greatest gift ever could be given to us, and He identifies Himself as Jehovah Mekadesh, the one who makes us holy.

The word comes from this word kadash, which is a very common name in the Old Testament. In fact, you find it more than 700 times in the Old Testament. The word kadash means holy, sanctified, or separate. Holy, if you go to the next slide, means holy, sanctified, or separate. When you put those words together, we get the word “the one who makes us holy.” Kadash is a very common word in the Old Testament, but Jehovah Mekadesh, the one who makes us holy, is only mentioned a couple of different times.

What does it mean by a God who makes us holy? Any kind of talk about a God who makes us holy has to start with the holiness of God Himself. In the Old Testament, especially, holiness basically means being separate, not being defiled from the things that make us unholy. So, God told His people often to stay away from impure things, unclean things. Many of the instructions of the Old Testament have to do with us not defiling ourselves, keeping ourselves from things that are unholy, so that we can keep ourselves to be holy in the presence of God. In the New Testament, the focus is a little bit different. It is not about what you touch, what you drink, what you eat that makes you unholy. Jesus told us holiness has to come from the inside. The holiness that comes from the heart is what God is so concerned about when you come into the New Testament. So, it is not unbelievers that make the believer unholy ever again, but it is us producing things that are not fitting to the standards of a holy God that makes you impure in the New Testament.

The standards of God are the same and God is the holy standard. When you talk about the holiness that God wants us to have and when you talk about the holiness of God, see, you cannot define God’s holiness the same way we define our holiness. For us, holiness is staying away from anything that is impure, staying from things of the world that make us unclean. When it comes to God, God is not a being that is affected by anything on Earth; He is beyond Earth. By definition, God is Holy by who He is. By nature, He is Holy. We get our holiness with our relationship with God. God’s holiness is inherent to His nature and as to who He is.

In his book “Knowledge of the Holy,” A.W. Tozer says this: “Holy is the way God is.” No one can say that on the face of the Earth. Holy is the way God is. To be holy, He does not conform to a standard. You know why? Because He is that standard. We have to conform to the standard of God’s holiness; that’s how we become holy. But God, you cannot compare Him to anyone else; He is Holy. He is a standard. He is absolutely holy, with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. What he’s saying is that no one can describe the holiness of God; it is beyond what we can imagine. Not only that, by who God is, God cannot be anything other than holy.

A lot of times, this is kind of difficult for us to process because we are sinful beings. But if I were to tell you God, through and through, imagine someone that is pure through and through. There is absolutely no corruption or sin in Him; that is who God is. And because of that, God’s word tells us that our Father is Holy, that the Son is Holy. We call the Spirit of God the Holy Spirit. He is the Holy One of Israel. His reign is a Holy Kingdom. His people are a holy nation. His house is called a holy Temple. His word is called The Holy Bible. Everything that God comes into contact with is Holy because of who He is. It is unavoidable when you come into contact with Him. His presence makes a Holy Ground.

The angels could have cried “eternal,“ “almighty,“ mighty,“ “faithful” when they stand before God. But as you read in God’s word, they did not describe Him by any of those things as they worship Him. The cry of the angels, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for all eternity, is the one quality of God that makes Him so unique in the universe. It is this: He is holy, holy, holy. Holy is the Lord God Almighty. See, all the other things that I mentioned, the eternality of God, the faithfulness of God, the almighty power of God, are all wonderful, but they cannot even get past the first line of their praise because they’re so captured by the holiness of God. So, they’re crying out, and they don’t get tired of singing the same song. If we were to sing the same song two weekends in a row, people might complain, saying, “Why are you singing the same song over and over again?” But God’s holiness is so capturing of the imagination of the angels that they cry out continuously, constantly: holy, holy, holy. It is indescribable; it is beyond what we can understand here on Earth. See, on Earth, we can say, when we are suffering something, we are Holy. But God cannot be separated from Himself; He is Holy through and through.

In one of his recent books, Paul Tripp talks about a visit that he made to Dubai. And many of you have done that, maybe on a long transit, long layover in Dubai. You have taken a tour of what Dubai looks like. And you know what the greatest attraction in Dubai is: the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa. And he says, whenever you’re going to Dubai, you are confronted with the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Impressive skyscrapers are all around Dubai, but the Burj Khalifa looms over them all with majestic glory. At 2,716 feet, which is half a mile in the sky, it dwarfs buildings that would otherwise leave your mouth wide open. He says, any of the skyscrapers in Dubai could rival many of the skyscrapers in Dallas or New York City, but the Burj Khalifa is in a league of its own. And then you say to yourself as you look at it, he says, “How in the world did they build that?” Even from far away, it was hard to crank my head back far enough to see all the way to the top. The closer I got, the more imposing and amazing the structure became. As I walked, there was no thought of any other buildings in Dubai that had previously impressed me. As amazing as those buildings were, they were simply not comparable in stunning architectural grandeur and perfection to this one. When I finally got to the base of the Burj Khalifa, I felt incredibly small, like an ant at the base of a light pole. I entered a futuristic-looking elevator, and in what seemed like seconds, I was on the 125th floor. This was not the top of the building because that was closed to visitors. As I stepped to the windows to get a feel for how high I was and to scan the city of Dubai, I immediately commented on how small the rest of the buildings looked. These small buildings were skyscrapers that in any other city would have been the buildings that you wanted to visit.

And he writes like this: by means of God’s revelation of Himself in scripture, we see that there is no perfection like God’s perfection; there is no holiness as God’s holiness. If you allow yourself to gaze upon His holiness, you will feel incredibly small and sinful. It is a good thing spiritually to have the assessments of your own grandeur decimated by divine glory. Let me say that again, it is a good healthy practice in each one of our lives to have our assessment of spiritual grandeur decimated by divine glory. What I’m trying to say here is that to Malayali Pentecostals who have been serving God faithfully, and thank God for that, for 50, 60 years, God’s holiness and your holiness are not in the same universe. God’s holiness and your holiness are not in the same universe. None of us, none of us have even come an iota, even an inch closer to the holiness and the majesty of the God that you worship. No one can ever say perfection, holiness, apart from what He gives to us through His son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Look what the greatest apostle ever to walk on the face of the Earth says about his own spiritual walk. Romans 7:18. “For I know that good itself does not dwell in me.” How many of you will have the honesty to stand before your church and say, “Good itself does not dwell in me?” We won’t do that. Paul did that. And then he says: We know why, because I have a sinful nature still in me. I have the desire to do what is good; the idea is good. The problem is what? Doing it. The desire is there, and every single one of us, we are honest believers, by God’s grace, we have the desire to do good all the time, but you know what happens? Oftentimes we cannot carry it out. We think thoughts that we’re not supposed to think; we don’t really want to think them, but it happens. We say things we should not be saying. It’s not that you got up that morning and thought, “I’m going to say this.“ No, it just happened, and then you’re like, “I wish I hadn’t said that.“ There are things that happen like that, hundreds and thousands of times. See, we strive and we try, but we always sometimes fail because of the sinful nature that is in us.

And Paul says, “The desire is there, but I am not able to carry it out.” But God’s word tells us this. 1 Peter 1:14-16, “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance.” Peter says, you lived in ignorance of God at one point. Main thing that happens when you’re lost is that you are ignorant of the holiness of God, you’re ignorant of who God is. That’s why the knowledge of the Holy is so important, and you live satisfying the evil desires of your life. “But just as He who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written, ‘Be holy, because I am holy.'” This is the admonition and the encouragement and the requirement of God’s word.

In 1 Thessalonians 4:7, the Apostle Paul would say this, “God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life.” So, on one side, you have the sinful nature that is waging war against our new man that has been created in the Lord Jesus Christ. On the other side, you have the requirements of a holy God that says, “You have to be pure, just as I am pure. You have to be holy, just as I’m holy. Without holiness, no one will see God. You have to be holy, you have to be pure.” There’s a war that is going on.

What is our hope in the midst of all this, a tug of war between the desire of what God wants us to be and what our sinful nature, even in the redeemed state, is driving us to be? But I’m here to tell you this morning, we have hope because we are believers of the Lord Jesus Christ, even though the Apostle Paul tells us that oftentimes his sinful nature does not allow him to do what he wants to do, in that same exact chapter, in Romans 7:25, here is a great promise and the exclamation of God’s word: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Paul, in Romans 7, is not telling you that all hope is lost. Paul is not telling you that you cannot do what you want to do. But he is saying, on my own, I cannot do what I need to do, but I am not alone in this battle. Look at God’s word: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me from my sinful nature through Jesus Christ our Lord.” How did God do that? There’s a huge gap, remember how holy God is. It’s kind of like the Burj Khalifa and our small hut or home that we live in. It is so vastly different, the holiness of God. But how do you bridge the gap? 

2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, but in Him, we might become the righteousness of God.” God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that through Him, we might become the righteousness of God. That is the only way you can approach a holy God. That is the only way you can see God. That is the only way you can call yourself God’s children, is because of the imputed righteousness that God gives to us because we are in the Lord Jesus Christ. No matter how good I do, I will never measure up to God’s holy standards. I could never pay the penalty for my sins. Last night, we talked about this: the justice of God upon the cross of Calvary. God showed perfect justice on the cross. See, God’s holy standards meant that sin had to be punished. There was a problem: you could not pay for your sins, I could not pay for my sins. No matter how much I paid, it could never pay the one that I offended, which is God Himself, by my sins. 

So, you know what God did? The one who was offended by my sin came down into this world and took my place on the cross. He paid the price, so that my sins can be completely and fully forgiven. And because of that, the good news of the Gospel is that you are accepted in the holy word of God, in spite of the sinful nature that is in me. You know what the Bible, the most favorite phrase in the Bible for believers, is? Saints. I have to admit, there are many times I don’t feel like a saint. There are many times when I don’t feel quite like a saint. But I thank God that through grace and through the forgiveness of the cross, and the justification that comes to me by faith and faith alone, God calls me a saint. I know that this is kind of difficult for us to swallow because we keep thinking that we are saints because we are good. I’m here to tell you, you are not good. I am not good. Because only God is good. Only He is good. Only He is perfect. Only He is holy. You are only holy because God made you holy. 

The biggest sin that Jesus railed against is self-righteousness. The biggest sin that Jesus called out so clearly is self-righteousness. It’s thinking that we are something when we are nothing. We’re only something because of God’s abundant grace in our lives. He took our place on the cross. God laid our sins on Him, so that we can be holy before God. So, now that you are holy, declared right and just, does the Christian life come to an end? It does not. Remember what we said: your God wants you to be holy through and through.

So here’s what we’re supposed to do. Philippians 2:12-13: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” I love this verse because it shows to us the two parties that are involved in your sanctification. You are not alone; there is a God who is at work with you and in you to sanctify you. He does not leave your sanctification to your own efforts, but your efforts are also needed because God’s word says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” But along with that comes the Lord who works in you, both to will and to work His good pleasure.

Let me make a couple of statements that you need to understand very clearly. First is this: the gospel that saved you does not and should not end with your justification. The gospel that saved you does not and should not end with your justification. Secondly, justification is a starting point for much greater and better things that God wants to accomplish in and through you. Justification is just the starting point, but God wants to do greater things through your life. God wants to use you greater. God wants to accomplish certain things through you. His desire is that your holy, acceptable sacrifice, are presented as your bodies are presented to Him, and you become a holy nation. Remember, He is a God who desires for you to be holy, so He continues that work, and it starts in the life of the believer.

How does God do that? Real quickly, three things. First Peter 3:18: “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.” This “bring you to God,” this word is not just talking about justification; it is talking about bringing us near to God over and over and over again. You know what happens when you come close to God? You become more and more like Him. You gaze upon Him, His beauty, as you behold His glory, we are being transferred from glory to glory, and you become more and more like the Savior who saved you. And Christ came for that reason, to bring you closer and closer to God. I hope and pray that the testimony of your life is that I am closer to my God today than the day that I got saved. I am closer to my God today than in 2022. I am closer to my God today than I am in 2020. That every single day there’s a progressive sanctification, cleansing, and purification that is going on in our life where we become more and more like Him.

How do we do that? First Peter 1:17: “Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.” How are we able to do that? Verses 18 and 19: “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” You know what God’s word is saying very quickly in this verse? The blood of Christ not only saved you, but the blood of Christ also bought you for holy living, and the blood continues to give you power for holy living.

How many of you confess the blood of Christ when you’re faced with temptations in your life? How many of you confess the power of the blood to save you from sin? If you have addictions in your life that you have tried to overcome on your own time and time again but failed, let me give you, on the authority of God’s word, the blood that saved you has the power to deliver you from the clutches of sin, wholly and completely. You know why? My God does not purchase; He paid the price fully by giving His blood. That was an effective purchase. Why? To bring you back to holiness again. So, don’t live for the worthless things from which you are saved, because the power contained in the blood is still strong today. We sang about that this morning, didn’t we? “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. What can make me whole again, whole again, time and time again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” It is the blood that can save us.

Another songwriter with right: “Ask, would you be free from the burden of sin? There is power in the blood, power in the blood. Would you over evil a victory win? There is wonderful power in the blood. Oh, there is power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the Lamb.” For a lot of people, the cleansing of the blood was a one-time event. Not so. The blood gives you the power to overcome the sinful nature that is in your life. And that’s why at the end of our testimony, at our lives as we stand before a holy God, adorned in white, oh what do they say? “They overcame him by the power of the blood and the word of their testimony.” Confess the power of the blood over anything that is holding you down, even this afternoon. I pray that even this very hour, the power of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ will flow through every life that is here, breaking down bondages, strongholds, things that have been held on by Satan. Your God wants to make you holy. If you surrender to Him and ask for the blood’s power to flow through you, He can still set you free today.

Continuing on, how else could God cleanse us? Cleanses by His blood, secondly, He cleanses by the Holy Spirit. Look what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 15:16. He says, “I’ve been given this great privilege of preaching to the Gentiles,” so that why? So that people can be added to the church, yeah, of course. But look at the greater goal for which you and I are saved. So Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God. What is that? Holy living before God. And how are they able to achieve that? They’re sanctified by the Holy Spirit. I mean, if you’re glad this afternoon that God has given us His Spirit to cleanse us and make us more like Him. Oh, how precious God’s gift is. The Holy Spirit does not come and go like the Old Testament times. If the believer receives the gift of the Holy Spirit immediately at the point of him accepting the Lord Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of our life. But as Pentecostals, we believe that you have to go further. It is not enough to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit at the point of your salvation. You have to pray for the filling of the Holy Spirit. You have to pray that the Holy Spirit will overtake your life completely, overtaking you, sanctifying you, cleansing you like only the Holy Spirit can. A lot of people think that the filling of the Holy Spirit is only so that he can speak in tongues. Wrong. The Holy Spirit’s power is given to the believer first and foremost so that you can live a life of holy, acceptable sacrifice unto the Lord. It is the power to holy living that is given in the life of the believer, is the power of the Holy Spirit.

One time, a young man went to a pastor and complained, “Pastor, my life is like a bucket with holes in it. Every time I pour water into it, lift up the bucket, the water just falls out of the holes in the bucket. That’s how the Spirit of God is in my life.” The Pastor said, “What you need is to be immersed in the water. When you do that, even if there are holes in the bucket, guess what happens? When the bucket is immersed in the water, the entire bucket is filled with water.” Oh, I pray that we will not be satisfied with any kind of a superficial touch of the Holy Spirit but will ask for a divine cleansing of the Holy Spirit that encompasses us completely. Oh God, it is not enough that it covers up to my feet, it is not enough that it comes to my knee, it is not enough that it comes to my waist, it is not enough that it comes to my shoulders. I want an overflowing power of the holiest in my life where I have to literally swim to get across. That’s what I want. Why? Because your desire is that I have a holy life and I need all the power and the help that I can get. And the Holy Spirit is here to give that.

Galatians 5:16 tells us, “I say, walk by the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.” The blood is given to cleanse us, the Holy Spirit is given to cleanse us. Finally, the third thing that is given for our help to cleanse us, Ephesians 5:26, “To make her, the church, holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word.” I often say this to young people, but it’s worth repeating again, even if you don’t understand God’s word, read it. Even if you don’t fully understand all the interpretation and theology, and it might seem boring to you, just read it. Just read it. You know why? The Bible says there is cleansing that happens by the word of God. When you read and meditate and internalize God’s word, we all need that daily in our lives. The cleansing of God’s word. See, His blood, His word, and the Holy Spirit are given to us because He is a God who delights to make us holy. And it is His greatest desire for us. He is Jehovah Mekadesh, The Lord who makes us holy.

You know what the greatest desire for our church is for the Lord? That we are a church that is set apart for the Lord, that we pursue holiness, that we pursue righteousness. That, having been saved from eternal damnation by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we pursue God’s nature in us every single day. That when others look at our church, they will not just look at our building or how many people are in our church. They look at us and say, “That church is filled with God-fearing, God-loving, God-honoring, holy people of God.” And if there’s anybody that walks in this building who is not living according to God’s standards, our worship, our preaching, the move of the Spirit of God would be so convicting that no one can sit here and not be transformed by the power of God. That’s what we should be desiring for. The sinners will repent, that backsliders will come back, that people who do not know the Lord fully will come to a relationship with them again. That’s what Restoration Church is all about, to restore back into fellowship with God again, because that is the greatest life on the face of the Earth. And life lived in pursuit of God.

In this side of eternity, you and I will never become perfect, but thank God there is a day that is coming. Oh, when, oh Hallelujah, when we will see Him, the Bible says, we will become just like Him. I cannot even describe that to you. The Bible says we will become just like Him and we will be in sinless perfection for all eternity because the work of Calvary’s cross would have been completely finished in the life of the redeemed. Justification, a love, sanctification, that’s God’s continued work in each one of our lives, because He desires for us to be holy.

Heavenly Father, we thank You that You are a holy God. We come before You in awe and reverence, Lord, You are a great God, indescribable, incomprehensible, beyond the understanding of any man is Your holiness. You became sin so that we can receive Your righteousness, but You’re not done. You gave us the Holy Spirit to live inside of us, You give us Your word by which we might live by, and the word cleanses us, and You gave us Your precious blood that had never lost its power. We thank You. We pray that You will wash us again, oh God, especially at this time as we now enter into the table of the Lord, we pray for God’s cleansing in our life again. Thank You for hearing our prayer. Its in the name of the Lord that we pray.