Holiness of God

Once we are anchored in the realization that God isn’t a Judge sitting in a courtroom assessing guilt and passing sentence on humanity but instead that He is our Heavenly Daddy in a living room who invites us to enjoy sitting on His lap, we are moving to a place where we can begin to understand His true character. When asked to identify the most preeminent characteristic of God, many people would say that God is holy. While it is true that God is holy, the meaning of that statement isn’t what some people think.

            Some believe the holiness of God is a sort of divine cleanliness that is so sterile that the very presence of sin causes Him to recoil from us because, after all, who among us hasn’t sinned at times? That idea is as far from what it means to say that God is holy as one can get. God doesn’t pull back from sin’s presence. To the contrary, in the incarnation He has proven His passion to rush toward people trapped in sin so that He can take it away from us and set us free to live the life He created us to enjoy. Jesus stepped into a world filled with sin and then spent His whole ministry seeking out those who were still deeply mired in it so that He could free them from it.

            The holiness of God speaks to the fact that He is “in a class of His own.” The word means “to be set apart.” In other words, God isn’t like us. His thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. (See Isaiah 55:8.) God once said, “You thought that I was just like you” (Psalm 50:21) but the point is He isn’t. We have projected our darkened perception about who He is onto Him based on the way we have felt about ourselves and others, and the result has been catastrophic. We have ended up believing in a god whose greatest obsession is that we do the right thing by avoiding sin, but that is not what God is about at the core of His being. As we learned in the last chapter, our Triune God is about relationships not rules. He is infinitely more interested in people than He is in their performance.

            Starting from the place where we understand that He is relational, we are better able to grasp why God is so interested in relationship. The reason is simple: God is love. This anchoring truth of the love of God is the catalyst for everything. We could have as easily begun this book by discussing God as Love and then have shown how He is relational as a result of that love. I began with the Trinity because the relational aspect of His identity is the first thing revealed in Scripture, in Genesis 1:1. 

- Steve McVey