Holier Than Thou?

Holy.

We call our God holy. We say buildings dedicated to Him are holy ground. We call the Bible Holy. We even claim to be holy people belonging to the Lord.

Holy     –     Sanctified     –     Consecrated     –     Pure

What do these words even mean?

I caught a glimpse of it once – what it means to say God is holy.  Just a glimpse. That was all I could handle. My mind flinched away as though burned. There is a purity about God so far removed from human imagining, I finally understood, at least for a moment, what Isaiah recorded in Isaiah 55:9

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Putting that in perspective, if you took a train to the moon, our closest heavenly body, it would take you 150 years to get there. God’s ways are not at all like ours. He is our creator. He has the right to do things however He wants. Yet…Psalm 145:17 declares

The Lord is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works.

Almighty God, maker of heaven and earth, the all-powerful One is not capricious or random in what He does. He’s not just righteous in the sense that He’s always right because He makes the rules. He is righteous because He keeps His rules. Everything He does is done in the right way: no shortcuts, never sloppy or whimsical, and always, always in accordance with his exacting moral standard. He does whatever He pleases (Psalm 135:6), but He does it in a way that is holy. This is such an integral part of who God is, He built His throne on it. Psalm 89:14

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne;

In Isaiah 5:16, the Lord defines His holiness with His righteousness.

But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice,

Then He goes one step farther, and asks us to be holy – because He is holy. (I Peter 1:15-16)

One of many ways God is different than we are. We are more likely to say, “I’ll be holy if you are!”  But God is holy first, showing us how. He would not expect fidelity from us if He was unfaithful. He would not expect honesty if His words were not truth. Unlike us, He never expects others to be more than what He is.

His holiness is founded on His justice, shown in His righteousness, rooted in His faithfulness, and secured by His immutable truth.

As Moses stated in Exodus 15:11, God is truly majestic in His holiness. Majestic because in His purity He has no shame, nothing to hide. His holiness is so beautiful, so absolutely pure, that when I caught a glimpse of it, I had to turn my face away.

Because I could never measure up. It’s a standard every human alive has failed at, according to Romans 3:23.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

There was a time when I had to face this fact in my own life–face the fact that no matter what I did I could not rid myself of sin, could not make myself clean, and in that moment I saw myself in Ephesians 2:12

…(I was) at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

Left to my own devices, I truly had no hope. How could a holy, pure, righteous God ever be satisfied with my endless failures and hopeless brokenness?

But the story does not end there. Nor for me, nor for you, nor for anyone who dares to come to Christ in faith. Jesus Christ, knowing we were flawed, came and defined holiness for us:

 For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.  Hebrews 7:26

Holy: innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, (and don’t miss this) exalted above the heavens. Our perfect, sinless sacrifice, able to do what we could not. For some reason I will never understand Jesus came to all who sinned and deserved His wrath, and instead

         (we) are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,  whom 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.  It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.  Romans 3:24-26

Our pure, flawless, holy God required a price be paid for the sin that stained my soul, but He allowed His Son to pay the price, and redeem me.

I would not have done it. My ways are not His ways, but His are higher, better, far beyond anything I could ever ask or think.

He was, is, and always will be

Holy.