Holiness – God’s first priority
“Be holy as I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:16; Lev 11:44, 45)
How are we meant to understand a believer’s growth in holiness? Some preachers in fundamentalist churches describe holiness in terms of women forgoing make-up, low-cut dresses and jeans and they say that men should stop drinking, gambling and swearing. Is that what it means to be holy?
No, certainly not. While true holiness does mean modesty and sobriety in every area of life – Paul does emphasise that a great deal in his epistles – true holiness is obviously much more than that. I like to think of true holiness as a call to dedicate one’s entire life to God – in Sunday worship, in your private devotion to God, in the confidentiality of your home, in the competitiveness of your occupation, in the pleasures of social friendship, in relationship with your un-evangelised neighbours, and in your love and compassion towards the world’s hungry and unemployed. So I believe it’s a comprehensive call that looks at the whole of life.
The danger of defining holiness as something external is that when you do that you lose sight of the heart of holiness. Holiness is more than a list of dos and don’ts. It is a life to be lived in conformity with the character of God who said: “Be holy as I am holy.” I see holiness as a commitment to be conformed to each of the persons of the Godhead – to the character of God as Father as He has manifested Himself in His law and gospel, to Jesus Christ the Son into whose image I am to be conformed, and to the Holy Spirit who thinks God’s thoughts after Him by revealing them in the Holy Scriptures.
Holiness really means two things: first, it refers to separation; then, it means consecration. When you consider God’s holiness, for example, which is holiness par excellence, God is seen to be wholly separate from His creation in the sense that He is “other” than creation – there is a Creator/creature distinction – He is perfectly separate, perfectly holy, from everything else.
At the same time, God is positively holy in that He is absolutely perfect and good. His holiness is, as one of the Puritans said, ‘the glittering of all His attributes’. Holiness shines through every attribute in which God consecrates Himself to that which is right, good and true. And so, when we are holy our thinking is entirely separate from a worldly way of thinking. We become consecrated to God with our whole way of life.
– Dr Joel Beeke, Australian Presbyterian, July 2006