"'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,' who was, and is, and is to come." — Revelation 4:8b

This right here is holy ground.

I’ve spent hours and days pouring over this one verse—reading its context and cross references and commentaries—and I confess my holy fear, holy anticipation, even holy bliss. I have worshiped and wondered and wept at the “Holy, holy, holy…Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.” He is perfectly perfect and wholly other, all-powerful, self-existent, unchanging, and without end. Amen. 

But who am I to say such things? 

I am brought back again and again to the scandal of me, here before him, speaking words right now spoken in a place more marvelously true than any I’ve ever known—spoken by frightfully strange, glorious beings who endlessly worship God amidst lightning and thunder and fire and smoke, while every reigning elder casts down his crown, crying out, “Worthy!” 

Surely, I don’t belong. 

And yet, here I am. And here you are too. And here’s the best part: we’ve been invited here by Jesus. (Remember? We talked about how that all works last month here.) And these words are for us—for our good and for our worship! Right here on earth, we can and should join the heavenly beings as we recite our verse in praise of our God. How could we resist such an invitation? In this small space let’s consider each phrase of this praise and marvel for a moment (There’s so much more that I can’t begin to unpack here, but you can hear all about it on last week's teaching episode on the Dwell Differently Podcast). 

Holy, Holy, Holy

This phrase of one word, repeated three times might sound monotonously repetitive to modern readers, but it packs a huge punch! There’s significance to this repetition; it’s the biblical way of showing emphasis, which honestly makes sense in an oral culture where most people never saw words on a page. They sure could hear them repeated when they were read aloud though! To repeat a word or phrase is very common in the Bible, but to repeat a word three times is very uncommon, happening only a handful of times. And in the entire Bible “holy” is the only attribute of God repeated three times (also in Isaiah 6:3 in a similar heavenly scene). Here’s the point: God is HOLY!- all-caps, bolded, and underlined with an exclamation point. Of all the things the Bible says about God, holiness is stressed the most. So we know God’s holiness is really important.

But what is holiness anyway?

In our culture, you’re most likely to hear “holy” in phrases like, “holy moly” or “holy smokes” or similar, less PG versions—which are unhelpful at best for understanding holiness. You might also overhear a high-school girl say something like this: “Payton thinks she’s all holy” (somehow I can’t say this without a valley-girl accent—lol). This usage does carry the biblically accurate sense of moral purity, but also has a negative, self-righteous twist. The true biblical definition not only carries the sense of moral purity (without the self-righteous twist) but also that holy things are separate from that which isn’t morally pure. And when it comes to God’s holiness…well he isn’t merely holy, he’s THE perfect standard of holiness and the only source of moral purity. More than that, he’s completely different from us, set apart and wholly other. He is “holy, holy, holy.”

Lord God Almighty

“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty…” Does this sound like a song to you? The classic hymn by Reginald Heber starts this way (you might be familiar with the Shane & Shane version). In this second title we again see tri-fold repetition, only this time we get three different words: “Lord,” “God,” and “Almighty.” It’s a great literary device, creating a pattern that we’ll see repeated one more time. But what does this name mean? Our God is the Lord—the master over all things. Our God is God—THE only God. And he is Almighty—all-powerful and able to bring about his every desire. And though this threefold name, “Lord God Almighty,” might sound familiar to us, you might be interested to know that it’s an unusual name for God in the New Testament—it’s only found in Revelation. In fact the Greek word translated “Almighty” is used ten times in the New Testament, every time as a title for God, and nine of those ten times are in Revelation.

So, why does all of this matter?

Well, this is where it gets good. In a book that teems with wild and fearsome monsters, fire and plagues, battles and pits, demonic forces of evil and the devil himself, we need a God who is the “Lord God Almighty”—fully in control and all-powerful, able to defeat evil, the devil, and death itself and bring about his eternally good reign with glorious ease. And all of these terrible, awesome, glorious events are yet to come, which may be another reason for the unusual name of “Almighty.” This Old Testament name for God is used predominantly in the other prophetic books (62 times in Isaiah and 83 in Jeremiah, by my count). This same Almighty God who fulfilled so many prophecies in those books (some of which are still yet to come) will fulfill his every promise in Revelation too. He is all-powerful and able to make all things right in the end. 

Who Was, and Is, and Is to Come

Here we have our third and final group of three attributes—three sets of three that all point to our triune God (for more on this, listen to last week’s teaching episode). This “holy, holy, holy” God, who is the “Lord God Almighty,” is the God “who was, and is, and is to come.” He is the unchanging, eternally existent God, the great “I Am” (Exodus 3:14, John 8:48) who still is and always will be. And in this final installment of his great redemptive book, we get this reminder: the God who “was” from Genesis to Revelation still “is” right now reigning in heaven and in the hearts of his people, and he “will be” someday here with us again in fullness and always. He who set this whole story into motion, who entered in to save it, will also bring about its final glorious culmination. 

Who would not fall down and worship this God?

He is the holy, holy, holy God who didn’t keep his holiness to himself but instead became “sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

He is the Lord God Almighty who became weak, “humb[ling] himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8).

And finally, he who was, and is, and is to come will indeed return and wipe away our every tear, saying, “Yes, I am coming soon” (Revelation 22:20).

And all God’s people say in response, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).