Monday, November 22, 2010

Holiness Paper

A very academic-sounding essay attempting to define holiness, describe God's holiness, describe how God makes us holy, and describe our responsibility to be pursue holiness.  I'm going to try to put together a less pompus sounding commentary on the essay at some point.

What is holiness? According to the dictionary, holiness is “the quality or state of being holy; sanctity.” To be holy is, again according to the dictionary, to be “endowed or invested with extreme purity. . .” “Holy” also means to be set apart, particularly as regards being set apart by God or for God. Holiness is therefore being set apart for and by God for purity. Sanctification is the process whereby God makes us holy.

If to be holy is to be set apart, we must know not only what we were set apart for, but also from what we were separated. In the beginning, God created man and man was without sin. But man chose to go his own way and defy God’s commands, thus breaking fellowship with God and bringing sin into the world. Christ came and through His work, that broken fellowship can be restored and we become the purchased possession of God. God then utilizes His right as the owner to set us apart from sin and the world and purify us for Himself to make us a holy people.

Without God’s working to cleanse us from sin and His exchanging of our sin-splattered record with Christ’s perfect one, we would have no ability to approach God. Holiness is an intrinsic part of His nature. God is supremely perfect and pure. Habakkuk 1:13a states “You [God] are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness.” Synonyms listed for holy are words such as “untouchable,” “unassailable,” “sacred,” and “blessed,” all of which evoke a picture of someone or something completely different from us. It is this difference that requires us to be made holy in order to be near God.

God uses many different means to make us holy. Sometimes He uses the hard times to show us how much we need him and how little we can do on our own. Sometimes God uses teaching on His own perfection to bring us to recognize our lack of holiness. But, in the end, our sanctification is all His doing. A recurring phrase in Leviticus 21 and 22 is “I am the LORD who sanctifies them.” This follows God’s listing of qualifications for the priesthood and the things that the priests must and must not do in order to be holy before God. Thus we see that even when we are doing everything that God asks of us to be made holy, it is still God alone who does the actual work of sanctification.

The fact that it is God who does the work does not release us from the necessity of pursuing holiness. Just because our position before God is holy, we should not take advantage of that to sin. In Paul’s words “. . . How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?” (Romans 6:2b). When Christ’s death purchased us, it was for the purpose of purifying us for Himself (Titus 2:14). 2 Peter 1:15-16 takes the command given to Israel in Leviticus and transfers it to us “but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, ‘Be holy, for I am holy.’” As God’s children, we should strive to be like him, even as a son desires to be like his father. Also, as His possession, we are obligated to do as our purchaser prescribes. It is God’s enabling that allows us to do anything that pleases Him, but we are to follow where He leads and not try to turn back to the old ways from which He parted us.

To be holy is to be set apart. God “. . . chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love” (Ephesians 1:4). His choosing was without regard to our merit (we had none) but not without purpose. We were chosen for holiness. God chose us that we might be made like Him and one day live with Him forever. Christ’s work on the cross gives us the position of holiness before God that—unlike the priests of old—we might “. . . come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). Because of His grace and mercy, God sanctifies us in this life, making us more like Him so that what is true in the spiritual realm can be made known in the physical as well.