The LORD our Holiness
Yahweh M’Kaddesh
Therefore you shall consecrate him, for he offers the bread of your God. He shall be holy to you, for I the LORD, who sanctify you, am holy.
Leviticus 21:8
Introduction
As believers and followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, we have been given a new heart (Ezek. 36:26). The heart of stone in us was replaced with a heart of flesh — one that has a delight in God, desires Him and His word, and whose affections go out to Him. This is the miracle of regeneration or new birth. We were once unable and unwilling to come to God but now our heart jumps with joy at the mention of His name and we rejoice at the proclamation of His works.
Since the heart that was once rebellious was regenerated, it is inevitable for a true believer to desire to pursue a life of holiness. A true believer will not only worship God with songs but also with His life. Throughout the Scriptures, we are exhorted to live a life that is worthy of God. We are told to “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service (Rom. 12:1)”. Even though we are still in the world, we are not of the world. For this reason we are told to “not love the world or the things in the world (1 John 2:15).” As the One who called us is holy, we also ought to be holy in all our conduct (1 Peter 1:15).
There are lots of exhortations, commands, and reminders in the Bible which pertain to how we ought to live as Christians. While it is good to desire to live holy, we must first have the proper and solid foundation before we pursue a godly life. Without the solid foundation which is Christ alone, we will find ourselves like walking on egg shells and the way of our living will be like a house of cards. Furthermore, the danger of being trapped in our performance is at the door if we attempt to live a righteous life without knowing who we are in Christ.
Whenever we hear the word “holiness”, doing or moral behavior immediately comes to our mind. We always have the tendency to think that holiness is primarily about what we ought to do. While there is some truth in that, we must realize that holiness is primarily about being in Christ. In this post we will realize that holiness is not first and foremost a matter of becoming Christlike but of being in Christ.
The Holiness of God
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.
Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one cried to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
The whole earth is full of His glory!”
Isaiah 6:1–3
The LORD sanctifies for He Himself is holy. The LORD Himself made Isaiah see a beatific vision. The earthly king Uzziah just died but Isaiah saw the true living God — the King of kings and Lord of lords seated on His majestic throne. He saw the sovereign Lord who is immovable on His throne. The train of His robe filled the temple. It was not the temple that makes God glorious, it is God who makes the temple glorious. The LORD is arrayed in all splendid majesty, so glorious indeed. Isaiah saw the LORD high and lifted up with authority and supremacy over everything.
Close to the throne are seraphim who were roaming around while crying to one another, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts!”. It has been said that word repetition is a Hebrew literary device used to give emphasis to a certain thought or word. But what is written by Isaiah was not written that way to give emphasis. Instead, Isaiah wrote what he heard the angels were crying for — that God is indeed holy, holy, holy! Now, what is the holiness of God?
There are two approaches to this. One meaning of God’s holiness is His absolute moral purity. The prophet Habakkuk wrote, “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, And cannot look on wickedness (Habakkuk 1:13)”. God is not only the standard of purity, He is also the one who is absolutely pure. The second but the primary meaning of holiness is being separate. The Hebrew word for ‘holy’ is “qadosh” which means holy, set apart, different or distinct. God is separate from His creation with regards to His essence and nature. God is separate from sin and cannot have any participation with sin. The holiness of God is His otherness or transcendence. This means that God belongs to a different category. He is above the nature. He is supremely above all that there is. He is beyond time and space. He is completely other. He is pre-existent, self-existent, and self-sufficient but we are not. He is the Great I AM, we are the great I am not’s. He is separate from His creation in the sense that there is no one like Him. He said, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; There is no God besides Me (Isaiah 45:5)”. He is incomparable. He is absolute being. He is absolute perfection. He is infinitely worthy.
A heavenly vision was also seen by the Apostle John in the Book of Revelation. He saw the four living creatures who do not rest day and night saying,
“Holy, holy, holy,
Lord God Almighty,
Who was and is and is to come!”
Revelation 4:8
There is no other attribute of God that is repeated to the superlative degree except the holiness of God. Although God is love, the Bible does not say of His love as “love, love, love”. While it is true that God is gracious, there is nothing in the Bible that says God is “grace, grace, grace”. The holiness of God is what the angelic beings utter restlessly day and night. It is the theme of their heavenly anthem. It is as though they cannot do anything but to cry out about the majestic holiness of God.
Responding to God’s Holiness
To further understand or to have even just a small glimpse of God’s holiness, let us take a closer look on how the sinless seraphim (singular is seraph) and a sinful man responded to God in His holiness.
The Seraphim’s Response.
Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one cried to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
The whole earth is full of His glory!”
Isaiah 6:2–3
The seraphim are holy angelic beings. But when these creatures witnessed God’s incomparably absolute holiness, they covered their faces and their feet with their wings. They have six wings (three pairs) but only two are used for flying. It was as though God created these creatures with extra two pairs of wings for their protection against the brightness of God’s holiness. They know that they are angelic hosts yet they understand that they are but creatures before the holy God who is worthy of all our highest regard, most fearful reverence, and greatest respect.
These angelic beings covered their faces signifying their unworthiness to look upon God in His holiness. They have the sense of unworthiness in spite of their sinlessness when they encountered the holiness of the Divine. In response to God in His holiness, they worshipped Him with the humblest reverence simply because God is holy. The covering of their faces and feet tells us that God is indeed on high and that He is lifted up. This signifies that God is above His creature — that He transcends His creatures, that He belongs to an entirely different category. Even the sinless seraphim cannot gaze upon the matchless worth of the Lord and so they cannot do anything but worship Him.
Isaiah’s Response.
So I said:
“Woe is me, for I am undone!
Because I am a man of unclean lips,
And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;
For my eyes have seen the King,
The LORD of hosts.”
Isaiah 6:5
An encounter with God’s holiness brought Isaiah to the end of himself. When he heard the angles crying to one another, “Holy, holy, holy!”, his immediate realization was “Woe is me, for I am undone!”. In Hebrew culture, there are oracles which are announcements of either good news or bad news. The positive oracles are announced with the word “blessed”. We see Jesus used this in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus pronounced the blessings, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…blessed are those who mourn…blessed are the meek (Matt. 5:3–5)”. The negative oracle to indicate a pronouncement of doom is the word ‘woe’. Jesus also used the negative oracle, indicating angry denunciation or judgment. To the Pharisees and scribes, Jesus said, “Woe to you!” (Matt. 23:13–29). When He rebuked the cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, He used the oracle, “Woe unto you!”.
When Isaiah encountered God in His holiness, he pronounced woe upon himself. This is to indicate that he was about to perish in light of God’s holiness and his sinfulness. He uttered the words concerning himself, “I am undone!”. To be ‘undone’ means to come apart. This means to be disintegrated. It has the idea of being destroyed or cut-off. Isaiah was a statesman. He was a man of virtue. His contemporaries might have considered him as righteous. But when Isaiah had a glimpse of God in His holiness, in that moment, all of his self-esteem was shattered. He was exposed for the man that he was — a man of unclean lips. It was as though he found himself naked before God in light of His holiness. He encountered the ultimate standard of purity — the holy and righteous One. The moment he measured himself against the ultimate standard, he was destroyed morally and spiritually. Indeed, he was undone and his sense of integrity was made to collapse.
Isaiah confessed, “I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips”. God’s holiness exposed the reality of Isaiah’s sinfulness. He understood that God being holy and them being sinful means that they were separated from God. Isaiah himself wrote,
But your iniquities have separated you from your God;
And your sins have hidden His face from you,
So that He will not hear.
Isaiah 59:2
Isaiah saw God’s holiness — His absolute purity that made his sins to surface. God’s holiness is like a light so bright that even the seraphim cannot look upon it and that through it the sinfulness of Isaiah was exposed. The Bible tells us that “God is light and in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5)”. As light naturally does not mix with darkness, so is God’s holiness does not mix with sin but it exposes the sinful man.
When Peter first met Jesus, He witnessed a miracle that no one ever did before. He saw Someone who is totally different from others. He saw Someone who is the only one capable of exercising authority over nature. Peter encountered the Holy One, Jesus Christ of Nazareth and his response was:
When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying,
“Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!”
Luke 5:8
Just like what happened to Isaiah, nobody told Peter that he was a sinful man. He just realized his sinfulness when he encountered the holy One. Truly, at the presence of God in His holiness, man becomes painfully aware of his sinfulness. But the realization of our sinfulness is a beautiful understanding. The moment we realize how sinful we are, we are also compelled to cry out, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” A real born-again experience is to see God as holy while seeing ourselves as undone and in deep need of mercy.
The most dangerous, if you will, sin today is the sin of self-righteousness. Being self-righteous has many faces. Man looks at himself as inherently good. Man always compares himself with others and thinks of himself as better than others. Some people today read the Bible, in such a way that one reads himself into the texts of the Scriptures and makes himself the hero of the narrative. This sense of false entitlement is a self-righteous attitude that makes the Bible about himself and not about Christ. Some professing Christians even go to church thinking that worship is for them. Some even have the guts to command God as though God is like a genie who is ever willing to give us what we desire. The reason why this sin is so rampant nowadays is because men have no real encounter with the holiness of God. Instead of teaching men about who God is, the pulpits today are filled with entertainers who caters the desires of the goat. If only we will have a biblical understanding of God’s holiness, we will surely abandon all faces of self-righteousness. A single glimpse of God’s holiness is enough to empty man of himself so that he will see his need for a savior.
Christ our Holiness
Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips;
your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”
Isaiah 6:6–7 ESV
The infinitely holy God extended His grace to Isaiah by taking away his guilt and atoning for his sin. When Isaiah met the end of himself, God reached him and saved him from his sins. While it is true that grace was given to Isaiah, God showed him grace without compromising His holiness. God is absolutely morally pure. Justice and righteousness are the foundation of His throne (Psa. 89:14). Even if He desires to show grace and mercy to His chosen ones, He does so without violating His holiness and justice. He does not exercise or show any of His divine attributes or perfection at the expense of other attributes. In the case of Isaiah, his guilt was taken away because his sins were atoned for.
Since God is holy, He desires that His people should be holy as well. When we read the books of the Law, we notice that there are lots of commandments which pertain to purification and separation. This is because the law reflects the good, righteous, holy, and just character of God. Paul wrote to the Romans, “the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good (Romans 7:12)”. Since the law reflects God’s holy attribute, when we read the law, what we need to realize is our sinfulness for “by the law is the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20)”. In reading God’s law, we must see the light of God’s holiness which exposes our sinfulness and leads us to despair. Any person who reads the law and yet does not realize how sinful he is has no genuine encounter with God and that is self-righteousness.
Having known God’s holiness, we should have already come to the understanding that we can never be reconciled to the holy God by our own works. The best of man’s so-called good works are like filthy rags before God (Isaiah 64:6). Therefore, we cannot make ourselves holy. The LORD desires that we should be holy for He is holy but He does not intend that we should be holy by our own. This is why, since He is holy, only Him can make us holy, only Him can sanctify us. He is the LORD that sanctifies us — “for I the LORD, who sanctify you, am holy (Leviticus 21:8)”.
Just like what He did for Isaiah, God made us holy by taking away our guilt and by providing an atoning sacrifice for our sins. How did God take away our guilt? Who is the atoning sacrifice for the sins of His people? The answer is the Lord Jesus Christ. This is what God did:
whom [Christ] God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins.
Romans 3:25
God Himself provided the atonement for our sins. The sacrifice that He provided was not a mere sheep without blemish nor a ram or a bull. The perfect sacrifice was His Son, Jesus Christ the Righteous. God Himself put Christ forward as a propitiation by His blood. The word ‘propitiation’ in the context of penal substitution means ‘a sacrifice that satisfies God’s holiness and justice thereby removing His divine wrath’. Christ was put forward as a propitiation because He is the only one qualified to be sacrificed. Christ is:
“…the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”
1 John 2:2
At the cross, the justice, holiness, righteousness, love, grace, and mercy of God met. God’s divine attributes were in harmony at the cross. None of His divine attributes was compromised by this act of redemption. As one theologian puts it,
“The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.” ~John Piper
By that one atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, He did perfectly and completely the will of the Father “and by that will we have been sanctified (made holy) through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Hebrews 10:10)”. God sanctified us through Christ once and for all. It means that our holy standing before God will not change. Having been made holy in His sight through Christ we are now called as “saints”. As God’s holy people, we are separated from the world and from ourselves for Him — for His glory and for His purpose. This is the purpose of God for His people “that we should be holy and blameless before Him (Ephesians 1:4)”.
Being in Christ, we are now holy. You might think that you don’t feel like holy or righteous. But take heart beloved for the truth of God’s word does not depend on what you feel. The word of God says that “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:11)”. We have to always remember that holiness is not first and foremost a matter of becoming Christ-like but of being in Christ. The gospel promises to first change our being, that is, our identity. Your holiness does not depend on your doing but in your being, in your identity in Jesus Christ. Christ Himself is our sanctification and it is by the word of God that we are being sanctified:
And because of Him [Father] you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption,
1 Corinthians 1:30
Christ being our holiness is not a doctrinal theory. It is not wishful thinking which we think about whenever we are afraid of God. It is a reality in the believer’s life. It is an actual, definite holiness that God bestows upon us on the basis of what Christ has done. Holiness is as much a gift of God as a ny other element of redemption. Since God desires that we should be holy, He made us holy. We were cast-outs like a leper but God made a way for us to be reconciled to Himself through the atoning sacrifice of His Son. We are now holy in His sight and for this reason we can now come to Him without fear but with confidence. Now, “let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. (Hebrews 10:22)”. Christ is our holiness. He is the LORD our holiness.
