Holiness

HOLINESS is defined in the dictionary as being cut off, separate or set apart. Holiness is God’s standard for His people although few professing Christians aspire to live holy lives. It is God’s chief desire to create holiness or likeness of His Son in us.

I John 2: 6 “Whoever claims to live in Him must walk as Jesus did.”

God didn’t say that it would be nice if we would think about being like His holy Son and He didn’t say it was a nice standard to reach for. No, God said “MUST”.

If we are Christians it follows that we will grow in Christ-likeness. We don’t do it under our own power, but under the guidance and control of the Holy Spirit. He is there to guide us in Christ-likeness (or, holiness) using the Scriptures that He Himself inspired as our guide.

Holiness is God’s defining attribute against which all other attributes are understood.

Let us consider this: the love of God. Love seen through the lens of holiness is a holy love, a righteous love, a selfless love, a love that seeks to bestow undeserved good upon those that are loved. God’s holy love for us caused Him to put His Son to death–crushing Him for our sins–on our behalf–because God in His holiness could not abide our sin but His love wouldn’t let us go.

Consider God’s sense of justice. Our sins against God are insults to His holiness and an assault to His dignity (all sins–no matter how “small” we may see them as being). A human judge who let someone go who had committed a horrible crime would be thought insane and unfit to serve as a judge. God is the Ultimate Judge. His sense of Justice demands the death penalty for our sins: the wages of sin are death. God cannot be around unrighteous people because His holiness is offended by doing so.

Or, His sense of mercy: whereas justice gives someone what they deserve, mercy gives them what they do not deserve or doesn’t give to them what they might deserve. For instance, mercy might give amnesty instead of condemning someone to the punishment that they rightly deserve. Humans are at times slack in administering justice in the name of being merciful when we shouldn’t be, like when you know your child needs to be punished and you don’t because you feel sorry for them. (This is an example of false-mercy because true mercy would cause you to discipline your child, so that they might learn not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.) God, on the other hand, deals out His mercy tempered with His holiness. His holy mercy accepted Jesus’ death on our behalf as the payment for our sin, thus allowing the penalty for our sins to be paid but not paid by us. However, also because He is holy and merciful, He allows us to suffer the consequences of our sins so that we might learn and grow in understanding…and thus in holiness. If He did not allow us to suffer the natural consequences of our sins He would, in fact, be unmerciful (and unholy) because we wouldn’t learn and we would continue to sin resulting in greater destruction both to our lives and to those around us.

A. W. Tozer described God this way: “Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than what it is. Because He is holy, all His attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.” Tozer then went on to describe Christians or a holy man as “one who will not sin.” That doesn’t mean that we never sin, but that we love God too much to get bogged down into sin. Sin looses it’s power to tempt the true Christian because to fall into sin (on an on-going basis) would be an affront to the One Who is dearest to us.

We can’t slide into holiness anymore than a boy who wants to win a baseball game can sit on the sidelines and imagine himself sliding home and have his imagination become reality with no work involved. He has to get out there and practice and perfect his game and then he must get in the game and play to win. That’s how it is with us. We are called to be holy. We must then work at holiness. We don’t work at holiness in order to be saved but because we are saved. God’s grace saves us. Our response to that grace ought to be dedication to walking as He walked–just as we are instructed. The suffering Savior calls to us to walk as He did. He left us an example. We are to follow it.