"Holy cow!" I said as we got to the top of the 11-mile trail and took in the jaw dropping vistas of the Alaska Range mountains. It was our first time to the state; it hasn't been our last J. Both of us being fans of the Great Outdoors, it's impossible to miss the evidence of God's power and majesty contained in these silent yet enduring giants of His creation.
Yet there is one trait of God that supersedes even His power, majesty, and His Name as Creator. Above all of these other magnificent ways to describe His character, the fact He is holy outweighs the others by a measure of significance. Most of God's traits such as loving, gracious, and just, are described by way of demonstration of these traits, ie, God shows this attribute by having an object (mankind) to which He directs it. Example: the Bible says in Romans 5:8 that "…God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." There is a person or object toward which His love (and grace and justice) is directed. Indeed it would be difficult to comprehend a concept such as love if we didn't have someone to direct it towards.
God's holiness, however, is more abstract and it is difficult to give it proper attention in a short article. However, some key points can be made that will hopefully strengthen your understanding of this wonderful and supreme attribute of our Maker, and ultimately strengthen your knowing Him.
What does "holy" mean? We often use the word in rather common expressions, such as the one above, or even in more crass terms (we won't go there, but you get my drift). I find the latter expression rather interesting – we routinely think the crude is in some way mitigated by prefacing it with the sacred.
Wikipedia's description of holy is "…sacred, pure, without blemish…" but these are actually secondary meanings at best. Holy comes from an ancient word which means to cut or to
separate or to be above and beyond the rest. In contemporary language we could say it means a cut above the rest. When we talk of God's love we can say it is holy because it is a cut above or beyond human love. But when we apply holy to God Himself, we are saying He is separate, a cut above. God is higher than the world – He transcends it in His consuming majesty and power. More importantly, ascribing holy to God also points to the infinite distance that separates Him from us.
Why is this important? The reason is that God is inescapable – there is no place we can hide from Him. Not only does he penetrate every aspect of our lives, He penetrates it in His majestic holiness. No amount of passionate belief or fiery disbelief changes the fact that God exists. Therefore we must seek to understand what the holy is. God has declared in Leviticus 11:44 "Be holy, because I am holy."
Holy is one word in the Bible that is used three times in succession - a literary tool in Hebrew writing and a sign of major emphasis. The Bible does not say God is love, love, love or wrath, wrath, wrath. The triplicate use of the word holy gives it special importance and weight. In ancient Hebrew culture, using a term twice in succession indicated intimacy between two people. In Exodus 3:4 when God called to Moses from the burning bush, He said "Moses, Moses…" However, in Isaiah Chapter 6, when the seraphim called to each other worshiping God, they sang "Holy, holy, holy!!" No other word is used this way in the Bible.
In Matthew 6:9-10, Jesus instructs the disciples how to pray by giving us The Lord's Prayer. Notice the introduction "...hallowed [holy] be Your Name..." (emphasis mine). This is not a personal address; it is a petition. Every time we pray that prayer we are asking God that His holiness penetrate our hearts and minds, and that we come to understand that only He can make us holy. Without His direct intervention we are not holy, and in our culture where we pay homage to the god of independence that is indeed difficult to acknowledge. God doesn't have a standard; He is the standard and without Jesus' perfect life and subsequent death in our place on the Cross, we would be forever lost.
In the Bible no one who came into direct contact with God and His holiness came away unaffected. Not Moses, not Isaiah, or even Peter when he realized Jesus is God. In fact all of them became intensely aware of the great divide that exists between our sinful nature and the transcendent perfection of a holy God. Yet this is the amazing message of the Christian Gospel: that a holy and perfect God, infinitely separate from us, would look upon us in our brokenness, and instead of giving us what would be fair, which is His perfect justice that renders us guilty and sentenced to an eternity separate from Him (and everything about Him), He stooped down and became a human being in the form of Jesus, lived the perfect life we should've lived and died the death we deserved, substituting Himself in our place, and rendering a verdict of Not Guilty and eternal fellowship with Him for those who truly believe this in their hearts. All this because "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him would not die but have eternal life." (John 3:16). The result is a life filled today with unfiltered gratitude and devotion to a God who truly is worthy of our worship.
How about you? Have you ever thought about what "holiness" means or is it an abstract concept? Are you now intrigued by God's holiness and His gracious sovereign reach to initiate a personal and intimate relationship with you?
