
While meditating on God’s holiness might seem like an impractical thought exercise, it can have a practical and lasting impact on our lives.
By Jordan Wootten
When you think about God, what comes to mind? Is it one of His attributes, like His omnipresence or omnipotence, that grabs your attention? Or maybe the thought of God scares you—that He sees all and knows all can be a dreadful thought.
Whether we know it or not, what we think about God shapes everything else about us. As A.W. Tozer argued in his book The Knowledge of the Holy, “What comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
In her book Holier Than Thou: How God’s Holiness Helps Us Trust Him, Jackie Hill Perry contends one of the most important things that should strike us when we think of God is His holiness. While God’s holiness might seem like a purely theological and mostly impractical thought to consider, Perry shows the opposite is true. Meditating on the holiness of God can have a practical and lasting impact on our everyday lives.
God’s holiness defined
The word “holy” occurs frequently in the Bible (almost 500 times, by most counts), but its meaning can still be tricky to grasp. According to most Bible scholars, holy means “apartness,” “sacredness,” or “separateness.” To be “set apart” is the language Christians often use when speaking of what it means to be holy.
Perry expounds on this idea, pointing out that “The root word of ‘holy’ means ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate’ . . . [which is] why the Sabbath is called holy throughout the Old Testament. God separated it; He set it apart.” So, to say God is holy is to say He “is unique, different, other, and distinct from everything that exists.”
But it’s not enough to say God is merely “distinct” from everything else. Were that the case, one could argue God is no better or worse than us, just different. Instead, Perry asserts God’s holiness is “the sum of all His perfect and incomprehensible attributes,” namely His moral perfection and transcendence. God is morally perfect—He will never lie or sin against us. And He is wholly transcendent— “above us in His very being, totally different than us in how He exists . . . free from the need of anything else but Himself for Him to be.” Yes, God is holy. There is no one like Him.
God’s holiness and our response
But meditating on God’s holiness isn’t just a thought exercise. The reality of God’s holiness, as Perry points out, does two things for us. First, it reveals our unholiness and, ultimately, our idolatry. And secondly, for those filled with God’s Spirit, it moves us, giving us eyes to see and an idea of what we can and will one day become: holy.
Jackie Hill Perry says the reality of God’s holiness reveals our unholiness and idolatry but also gives those filled with His Spirit the eyes to see that we can and one day will become holy. Share on XThe good news of God’s “separateness” is He is “not set apart to the degree that He is unreachable or unknowable.” God has chosen to make Himself known to us. And in making Himself known, He also makes known all our little idolatries—the lies we believe, the little gods we follow, the gaps between “what we think about God and what we believe about [Him].”
If we’re honest, God’s holiness can make us uncomfortable. Think of Isaiah’s response when he came face-to-face with God’s “set-apartness.” “Woe is me for I am ruined because I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5a, CSB). But by His grace, when we gaze at His holiness, it shines on all the idols we’ve put in His place and exposes them for what they are: unholy substitutes.
God’s holiness shines on all our unholiness, yet it shows God to be the answer and the fix to that unholiness—inviting us and empowering us to see and behold Him and to become more like Him as we do. God’s holiness is terrifying. It’s humbling. It unmasks all our improprieties, laying us bare before the only morally pure being in the universe. But in the person of Christ, and by the power of His Spirit, the holiness of God is also an invitation to come and be holy like Him (Leviticus 19:2; 1 Peter 1:16).
How we become holy
John Calvin wrote, “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” To know God is to know He is holy; likewise, to know God is to know we are not. But God, being full of grace, when He welcomes us into His family, destines us for a life of sanctification—of making us holy as He is holy by the power of the Spirit who lives in us.
“God’s holiness shines on all our unholiness, yet it shows God to be the answer and the fix to that unholiness.” — Jordan Wootten Share on XHe focuses our gaze on the Christ—the holy one made flesh—and empowers us to “believe what it is that we see” and then to walk in His way. But we must cast a believing gaze upon the Word incarnated by beholding Him in the Word inscripturated. And then, in Perry’s words, “behold[ing], we become.” Become what? We become like Him: humble, loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, compassionate, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. We become what God has already declared us to be: holy (1 Peter 2:9).
At the heart of Holier Than Thou is the question, “Can we trust God?” By spotlighting God’s holiness, Perry’s answer is a resounding, “Yes.” All it requires, as discomfiting as it may be, is that we behold Him—in the Scriptures and in the person and work of Christ. And by God’s grace, as we do so, the Spirit not only helps us worship and trust God, but He forms us more into the image of the one who is holy, holy, holy.
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