Is God a snob?
When you hear the words, “God is Holy” what do you think of? Maybe you think God is a snob, like he can’t be bothered to get dirty and meet us where we are? But snobs don’t send their beloved son to bear the hell of our sin. Jesus ate with sinners and tax collectors who knew they needed healing, and he met them exactly where they were, and he did take the hell of their sin on the cross, being reduced to a cursed, dead corps—then bursting from the grave, he overcame the hell of their sin and ours, rising from the dead, defeating it, and offering to include us in resurrection, spiritual now, and physical later.
Does all that cause problems with your view of holiness? It’s easy to make the mistake of separating the end result from the process that achieves it. Because the holiness of God is related to his sinlessness, it is easy to assume that the process of becoming holy is as clean as the result. But the process of God making us holy is not tidy because we are filthy. God has never needed what we need. He has always been sinless. But do not mistake his hatred of sin with hatred for you. When you love people, you also hate what destroys them. He hates your sin by the very fact that he loves you.
Is God far away and impersonal?
Perhaps you think it means he’s far away from you, impersonal, detached? But read what David said in the psalms.
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.”
(Psalm 139:7–15 NIV11-GK)
For thousands of years people around the world have affirmed that this Psalm expresses the truth about God’s loving personal pursuit of us and our doubts and fears and struggles to understand. That may not be your experience so far, but consider something else that is written in Revelation.
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.”
Revelation 3:20 NIV.
Being holy is not something that keeps God from pursuing us. But it is part of the reason he pursues us. He pursues us with a desire to bring us into his family and make us holy and eternally incorruptible like himself. Nothing that is unholy can survive His presence, so becoming holy is the only option that leads to life for us.
Being called out of everything that passes away, into an eternal purpose and being joined to God himself—that is the context of God’s holiness and how it relates to us.
What does the word Holy mean?
The word holy actually means “set apart.” But to understand holiness, like the holiness of God, we have to understand much more than just the idea of being different or separate. God is completely other than everything else in existence. And that means, while we can learn things about God from the things that are made, we can’t understand all of Him that way. In fact, understanding all of Him is something we will spend eternity working on. And this otherness about God is very important to consider.
For example, wood is different from hay, but they can be near each other—their being together doesn’t cause a problem. And we don’t need to think about hay when we’re using wood to build something. In fact, when you’re using wood, there’s very few reasons to think about hay—unless you’re building a barn.
Fire, however, is different from both of them, but not in the way that hay is different from wood. Fire is different in such a way that the difference must be taken into account in almost every decision we make about wood and hay—like how and where we will store them, how we will use them, and what we will use them for, and how we will dispose of them when we’re done using them. There are all kinds of codes related to buildings and fire for this very reason. You can probably remember movies you’ve watched where a house is burning down—failure to properly navigate the relationship between wood and fire has catastrophic effects that have impacted our lives on a daily basis, as well as impacting our cultures and stories.
God is different from everything else in some very important ways, and we must take him into account in everything we do. First, God is the creator of everything. But God Himself was not created. He calls Himself, The I Am—a phrase by which he means, he just is. He has no beginning and he has no end. That is different from everything else in existence, ever. You may have heard someone say that there was some kind of uncaused cause that started the universe. When Jesus calls himself, I Am, it’s another way of saying I Am the Uncaused Cause.
God made mankind in his image—to display the truth about himself. Therefore, the very purpose of all of us includes being holy. And that is why sin leads to death—it is the denial of our purpose which brings us to an end. To sin is to do something that is incompatible with or contrary to the nature of God.
Is God a blood thirsty rage monster?
“And he struck some of the men of Beth-shemesh, because they looked upon the ark of the LORD. He struck seventy men of them, and the people mourned because the LORD had struck the people with a great blow. Then the men of Beth-shemesh said, “Who is able to stand before the LORD, this holy God? And to whom shall he go up away from us?” So they sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kiriath-jearim, saying, “The Philistines have returned the ark of the LORD. Come down and take it up to you.””
(1 Samuel 6:19–21 ESV)
Without really understanding the context, it is easy to come to a passage like this and think that perhaps God is a blood-thirsty rage monster who needs his pound of flesh in order to be satisfied. But this passage is pointing us to an unchangeable, eternal fact of reality. God is a certain way (he is holy) and he cannot change. We, with God’s power, can be transformed. If we are not transformed to be like him, we will not survive him. The very nature of his own self will ultimately destroy anything that is not also holy. But remember, with no limit to personal expense, this unchangeable holy God loves you enough to save you from that reality. But we must all accept that offer in faith.
““For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.”
(John 3:16–19 ESV)
“This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
(Hebrews 12:27–29 ESV)
“How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
(Hebrews 10:29–31 ESV)
