Just as the normative standard for the good and for the true is God, so the ultimate standard of beauty is God.

The only thing that we have earned at the hands of perfect justice is perfect punishment.

The holiness of God is traumatic to unholy people.

We tend to have mixed feelings about the holy. There is a sense in which we are at the same time attracted to it and repulsed by it. Something draws us toward it, while at the same time we want to run away from it. We can’t seem to decide which way we want it. Part of us yearns for the holy, while part of us despises it. We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it.

The Advent season is that time when we seek to, in a manner of speaking, mute our memory of what has already happened, that we might brighten our joy that it happened. We leave the already of His advent to taste the bitter of the not yet. We, in short, go back, that we might look forward to His coming.

There is nothing more foreign, more alien, to our nature than holiness.

When the gospel is at stake, everything is at stake.