Holier Than Thou

How God's Holiness Helps Us Trust Him

Jackie Hill Perry

• Éditeur: B&H Books
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781535975704
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Religion

If God is holy, then He can't sin. If God can't sin, then He can't sin against you. If He can't sin against you, shouldn't that make Him the most trustworthy being there is? Bestselling author Jackie Hill Perry, in her much anticipated follow-up to Gay Girl, Good God, helps us find the reason we don't trust God— we misunderstand His holiness. In Holier Than Thou, Jackie walks us through Scripture, shaking the dust off of "holy" as we've come to know it and revealing it for what it really is: good news. In these pages, we will see that God is not like us. He is different. He is holy. And that's exactly what makes Him trustworthy. As it turns out, God being "holier than thou" is actually the best news in the world, and it's the key to trusting Him.

Chapter 1

Holy, Holy, Holy

Imagine yourself as an Israelite. Egypt and its gods are a recent memory. There are fifty days between you and the sea that divided itself in half so you could walk on dry ground. In the desert now, you’re told that in three days, you’re going to meet God. God? Yes, God. You’ve never seen His face, but you can suspect how He might be when you remember His ways. You remember the day when the water turned red and the river bled out. When all of the dust beneath your feet began to crawl. When one morning, the wind blew, bringing with it a swarm of locusts so large they covered the sun, making everything black and eating everything green. On the last night, right in the middle of it, you heard what sounded like a communal sadness. You remember how afraid you were that the sorrow down the street was on its way to your home—a traveling grief? Desperate to know if the blood on your door kept your firstborn from a sovereign death, you put your face to theirs until you felt breath. The blood worked.

Now the day has come for you and the rest of Israel to meet God for yourselves. It’s morning, and in your tent, you watch as shadows grow all around you. The sun isn’t shining as bright as it typically does, and you wonder why. As you converse with your own curiosity, what sounds like thunder reaches into the space around you. You can’t tell if it’s at the same time or not, but one second after the noise, lighting scatters across the clouds like confetti on fire. There’s no rain to accompany either, but there’s a trumpet played by only God knows who that’s loud enough for you and all of Israel to know the musician isn’t human. Your hands shake. Your heart paces, back and forth. You look at your firstborn and remember to breathe.

You’re at the bottom of the mountain now. Close enough to see it’s wrapped in smoke. Far enough to stay alive. You follow your line of sight, past the bottom of it and the burning parts, all the way up to the top where smoke shoots out of the mountain’s mouth and levitates into the clouds—the very same place the invisible trumpet player must’ve been located. Clearly discontent with the initial volume of his instrument, the sound of it gets louder and louder. As it plays, you get it now. You’re realizing that you were delivered from Pharaoh in Egypt so you could meet the King in the desert. You’re recognizing the difference between this God and the others. That unlike them, creation does this God’s bidding and not the other way around. He seems to be above it and everyone. Different than Egypt’s gods who were imagined into being. Those gods imaged their makers because they too were made. They too were immoral, expecting of Egypt a righteousness easy enough for any of Eve’s children to keep. This God expects nothing less than an awful2 obedience from you and everything else, and you know it. The plagues sit in the back of your mind as a reminder of what kind of King you’re about to meet. One that can use rivers and bugs and reptiles and nature itself against you. Like your hands, the mountain shakes. Like your heart, it can’t get still because now, finally, in the midst of the thunder smack, the fire-lit sky, and the trumpet blast, descending on the mountain in fire is God. If you didn’t know it then, you know it now, that this God, this King, is holy.

For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. . . . Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” . . . But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God . . . 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. (Heb. 12:18–19, 21–22, 28–29)

God Is Holy

Israel saw with their eyes what we’ve come to know by faith, that God is holy. To say that God is holy is to say that God is God. All of God’s ways, such as His moral purity and how it sets Him apart from all that is perverse, untrue, lawless, and unrighteous comes out of His being. No one told or taught God how to be good; that is simply who He is, and He can be no other way. As Stephen Charnock put it, “God is good as he is God; and therefore good by himself and from himself, not by participation from another.”3 It is His very nature to be righteous, as in right, as in conforming to a set standard of morality, the standard being Himself. We are only good insofar as we are like God, so then, any attempt to be holy is an attempt to be like God. Simply put, the two are inseparable, holiness and God’s being, that is.

There are times when our conversations around the holiness of God make it seem as if holiness is a part or piece of God. That God moves in between attributes when deciding how to be. That one day, He chooses to be loving. Another day, He chooses to be vengeful. That if God were a sweet potato pie, holiness is one slice of it that’s set aside from the others. On one plate is holiness; on another plate is love. However, holiness is not an aspect of God; holy is who He is through and through. His attributes are never at odds with one another, nor do they switch places depending on God’s mood; they are Him. “God is his attributes. That means, all that is in God simply is God.”4 When God loves, it is a holy love. When God reveals Himself as judge, pouring out His cup on the deserving, He has not ceased to be loving, or holy either. In all that He is and all that He does, He is always Himself.

Even now, I hope you’re beginning to see the glory of God. I don’t mean that hypothetically either. Since holiness is essential to God, shining through all that He is and whatever He does, it means that there has never been or will ever be a time when God is not God. To say it another way, there will never come a day when God ceases to be holy; if that were possible, it would be the day He ceased to be God. Knowing that as an absolute and unmovable truth colors everything we understand about God’s ways and works.

Holiness Revealed in Creation

In creation, He was holy. Man was made to image His righteousness, and all the other things like the sky, the ground underneath it, and the animals on it were judged as good by God. When He applies the word to anything, He is telling the truth, for if anybody knows how to use it the right way it would be Him. The rich young ruler put “good” in his address to Jesus, to which Jesus asked him why. Why call Him good if only God is? This wasn’t a denial of He whose divinity was veiled. It was to say that the attribution of good as it related to Jesus was to tell the truth about who He really was. If good, then God. If God, then good. A good God makes good things. Good? All of the time.

Holiness Revealed in the Fall

After the two goodie-two-shoes took them off to place their feet on unholy ground, the bad things came. With sin came judgment. As judge, God is holy still. Some finite folk can’t seem to reconcile this, that judgment is a good (holy) thing. I’m not omniscient in any way. I’m completely blind to the motives that move them to make up things about what should or shouldn’t be true about the Holy One, but if I had to guess, I’d say their lack of applause for God’s justice comes out of their desire for Him to be like them: unrighteous. “It is too common for men to fancy God not as he is but as they would have him; strip him of his excellency for their own security.”5 If they had it their way, the guilty could go about life unpunished, freed from judgment as underneath the stayed gavel of God. The problem with that is this: to want God to withhold justice is to want God to make Himself an abomination. “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord” (Prov. 17:15). This would be for Him to become a loathsome, detestable being, more like Satan than Himself. It’s an impossible ask and borderline blasphemous, so as God is, He will remain. Holy and therefore just. “But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness” (Isa. 5:16).

Holiness Revealed in Redemption

In the redemption of souls, God is holy. Out of His righteousness, God gave a law. At first, it was to not eat. If obeyed by faith in the purity and worth of the lawgiver, the two garden misfits would’ve continued in His love. Refusing this, their nature was eventually inherited by every generation. One that loves the dark more than the Son. Born like them too, Israel was provided with a written law. A set of commands, good ones in fact, that imaged God in its insistence to do right by Him and others. None of them saw such behavior as a good thing, of course. Who wants to love God above all things when there are so many deficient alternatives for which to place our affections? The gods they collected were an incomplete thing. Like cisterns broken all up, wasting water all over the place. These lesser gods were unable to make anyone who trusts in them whole; neither could they transcend their created nature if ever they were asked to deliver. But, Israel loved their idols still, and so do we.

As is expected of God, then, judgment must come down on the heads of those with a hesitant “yes, Lord.” His righteousness will not allow the guilty to go unpunished. Scary, to fall into the hands of the living God, until we believe in the One who did so in our place. The cross reveals God’s holiness in how the sinless Son was judged on behalf of sinful people so that when God justifies the guilty, He does so without compromising His righteousness. The Holy Spirit is then sent to fill and sanctify us as a means of restoring our divine resemblance, helping us to wear the right clothes and two good shoes, wherein we “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24). From the beginning with creation, in our redemption and eventual glorification, God’s holiness is revealed.

Holy, Holy, Holy

To go deeper into what Scripture means when it testifies that God is holy, let’s glean from Isaiah’s vision of Him. In the sixth chapter of the book titled after the prophet’s name, written in it is the song of the seraphim. About God they say to one another, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (v. 3). Notice the word used thrice. It isn’t “love, love, love” or “good, good, good” but “holy, holy, holy.”

Why is that important? Well, in Hebrew language and literature, the use of repetition was common practice. Jesus used it often by beginning his lessons with the words “Truly, truly.” By this, His listeners knew that all that was to follow was significant and true. Rarely in Scripture do you see this literary device used to the third degree; never do you see it used to the third degree to address an attribute of God except here in Isaiah and in Revelation 4:8 (“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty”). With all three “holys,” the seraphim are emphasizing the absolute, unalterable, essential, and total holiness of God.

To say that God is holy, holy, holy is to say that God is most holy. He is totally holy. Completely holy. Unwaveringly holy. Utterly holy. If you’re in need of more words to describe the emphatic nature of God’s holiness, the thesaurus offers up these in addition to the word most: greater, highest, utmost, uttermost. So then, God’s holiness is great. The highest holy. He is holy to the uttermost. The Lord is holy beyond comparison for His holiness is not a derivative of some other source. His holiness is intrinsic to His nature as God. It’s as essential to Him as creaturely dependence is to us. Of all the songs to sing to one another, of all the divine attributes worth praising God for, Isaiah saw the seraphim make melody around the supreme holiness of God.

Like trees, words have roots. Dig underneath the letters’ soil and you’ll discover its definition. The root word of “holy” means “to cut” or “to separate.” When applied to everything outside of God, whatever is holy is whatever is set apart unto and for God. For example, God sanctified the Sabbath day, setting it apart from all other days as one in which His people were to rest in Him. That’s why the Sabbath is called holy throughout the Old Testament. God separated it; He set it apart. In another example, the ground on which Moses stood was called holy, not because the dirt was divine but because the presence of the Holy One sanctified it, setting it apart from all other ground (Exod. 3:5).

There’s a sermon by the great Tony Evans6 in which he uses an illustration involving dishes to make sense of the term “holy.” In his home, and in most homes really, there are two types of dishes. There are the regular dishes. The ones you corner off with French fries and squirt with ketchup. Those dishes that contain the average meal, on normal days, for your ordinary and unimpressive breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Some of them are chipped, maybe even cracked, and if they are, you don’t whine over their disposal because they were never made to be special anyway.

Then there is another type of dish. These dishes don’t even see the light of day until a tall green tree with multi-colored lights flicker them onto the dining table. Something significant has to be happening under the roof to make their use a necessity. And when all is normal a...