Few things are more important than knowing and understanding God’s holiness. Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” If we want to have any wisdom at all or if we want to begin to make any progress in understanding God, ourselves, and the world, then we must seek to know the Holy One.

After understanding the meaning of God’s holiness as best we can with our humanity, we are left with a significant question for consideration: how does the holiness of God impact His relationship with us as sinners?

The Bible spends a great deal of time unpacking the meaning of God’s holiness and establishing the reality that we are sinners. Unlike the general view of the world about the goodness of people, the Bible’s description of mortal beings is not merely that we are sinful people, but that we are totally depraved. Apart from Christ, every person is dead in and in love with sin, rebellious against God, detestable, and deceived – not only about God – but about their own heart. This truth about sinners only makes sense when we arrive at the correct understanding about the absolute holiness of God.

If we want to have any wisdom at all or if we want to begin to make any progress in understanding God, ourselves, and the world, then we must seek to know the Holy One.

There is a massive tension when God, who is holy, interacts with people who are not – and many people cannot grasp this concept.

First, we must understand that God’s holiness ensures wrath on sinners.

This is one reason why we don’t like to talk about God’s holiness – because it inevitably leads to the necessary conclusion that God’s wrath comes upon the wicked. There are many clear statements that bear this out, starting with Psalm 5:4-6. Here, the Psalmist gives us an unmistakable statement about God’s hatred of wickedness. God does not merely hate wickedness in some abstract sense, nor does He merely hate wicked things people do because they harm others. Rather, God hates all who do iniquity. God’s holiness means that God destroys all those who speak falsehood, which is just another way of saying ‘everyone who is a sinner.’ God abhors liars and violent people.

We have several examples of this playing out in Scripture. In Genesis 6, we observe a narrative of God in His holiness, looking at humanity, examining the heart, intentions, and deeds. When God looks at humanity from every angle, all He sees is continual evil. God’s response is total destruction of the world and an uncreation of creation. The wrath of God comes, not just on one person, family, or nation, but on the entire world. This response of God should not be shocking if we understand that God is holy, because when God’s holiness comes upon mankind’s sin, wrath is the outcome.

Thankfully, God’s holiness also ensures grace for sinners.

No one should be surprised that God’s holiness is the basis of His wrath toward sinners, and yet it is unexpected to learn that God’s holiness is also the foundation of His grace toward sinners. This fact is crucial because it gives legs to our faith; it gives certainty to our hearts; and it strengthens us when we discover that God’s grace is not arbitrary whimsical, mutable, or temporary. Because God is holy, He does not always bring wrath on sinners but shows mercy and grace.

There is no greater example of this reality than the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. As we see in Psalm 22 (words which Jesus uttered on the cross), what gave Jesus the courage, strength, and fortitude to go through the cross, enduring the holy wrath of God even though He was righteous and holy Himself – was that God was holy (v. 3). God’s holiness was Christ’s strength as He suffered and died for the sins of humanity.

Christ knew that God’s holy character provided the absolute confidence that God would be faithful to His covenant promises. God’s perfect holiness meant that Jesus’ death would not be in vain and that the promises of God to bring salvation to His people would be fulfilled. On the cross, the Messiah looked back at the fathers who trusted God and were delivered, and He knew God would deliver Him from death through the resurrection because God is holy. What an amazing reality to consider that God’s holiness not only ensures wrath upon sinners but grace for sinners.

God’s holiness was Christ’s strength as He suffered and died for the sins of humanity.

Finally, the consequence of God’s holiness depends on the offering the sinner brings.

Here’s the question: When individuals come before a holy God, what should they bring to make them acceptable to their Lord? Every sinner comes before God with an offering or some reason for God to accept him. Whether sinners incur God’s wrath or receive His grace depends on what they bring into His presence for their sins.

This is graphically and tragically played out for us in Leviticus 9-10. God explicitly commands the priests not to offer something on the altar that is strange, foreign, or outside the prescribed offerings – or there will be consequences. Nadab and Abihu ignored that command and were consumed; their sacrifice was rejected. As this passage instructs us, when people come into the presence of God, if they do not come with a sacrifice that atones for their sins, the holiness of God will consume them.

All the Old Testament sacrifices were a picture of the one, final, true sacrifice that God would provide for the sins of His people: the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It is only this sacrifice that God accepts to atone for the sins of sinners. If we are reading Leviticus 9-10 correctly, we will understand this very important truth: if people come to God with anything other than the blood of Jesus Christ to atone for their sins, they will be destroyed by His holiness in wrath.

A line from the old hymn “Rock of Ages” sums up this theme so well: “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling.” We do not come to Christ with anything of value, worth, or merit. Rather, we come as sinners in need of a Savior and all our trust is in Christ.

It is vital we do not forget the holiness of God. His holiness is our anchor during the dark night of the soul. When Satan tempts, condemns, accuses, or tells us we are unworthy, doubtful, fearful, wicked, ungodly people, we recognize that, though our faith might sometimes be weak, our God is not. He is holy and will meet us with grace through Jesus Christ.

In the last post, we studied what an encounter with our holy God looks like and how it changes us. True believers are filled with dread, awe, fear, and reverence upon encountering the holy God of Israel. This is completely antithetical to the world and sadly many evangelical churches that display a glibness and a lack of reverence and awe when it comes to our Lord’s holiness.

Having seen what happens when sinners encounter God in His holiness, we want to answer the question, ‘What does the Bible mean when it says that God is holy?’

The Bible uses the word ‘holy’ and its derivatives over 500 times, but it never defines the word, leaving us to discover its meaning by seeing how it is used in various contexts. Scripture instead gives us three different angles to reveal the meaning of the holiness of God.

The first angle is that God’s holiness is manifest in His incomparable preeminence.

Theologians use several different terms for this aspect of God’s holiness, referring to His majesty and exaltedness. The phrase speaks to the distinction between God and everything that God has made when it is used in the context of creation. The word holy is derived from a word that means to cut or to separate, and so the idea of God’s holiness is the idea that God is separate from us. There is nothing in creation like God; He is incomparably preeminent in that He is above everything, and nothing compares to Him.

Some passages in Scripture help us understand the holiness of God in His incomparable preeminence. The foundational text to consider is Exodus 15:11, where Moses and the sons of Israel are praising God for His holiness. These people note two things about God’s holiness: that His holiness is majestic, and that His holiness puts Him in a class all by Himself. This verse really defines God’s holiness in His incomparable preeminence for the rest of Scripture because it shows us that God’s holiness speaks to His majesty and to His exaltedness over all that exists in creation.

Perhaps no one waxes as eloquently about God’s incomparable preeminence as the prophet Isaiah. In Isaiah 40, Isaiah invites a comparison between God and things of the world. We see that the more questions Isaiah asks, the more obvious it becomes that there is no one like God. No one is like God in His majestic holiness! No one has power like His, no one has sovereignty like His, no one has majesty like His, no one has wisdom like His, and no one creates like He does. God is in a class by Himself. As R.C. Sproul put it, “God is an infinite cut above everything else. He is so far above and beyond us that He seems almost totally foreign to us.”

The second angle is that God’s holiness is manifest in His incorruptible purity.

This aspect of God’s holiness speaks to His perfect righteousness and justice. God does not do anything evil; He does not think anything evil; He is never tempted by evil. God has no hint of darkness in Him at all, but He is pure light, righteousness, and goodness.

The Scriptures also present this aspect of God’s perfect holiness to us. The prophet Habakkuk was wrestling with God’s incorruptible purity when he learned God was going to judge Israel’s sins through the Babylonians, a nation far more wicked than Israel. In Habakkuk’s wrestling, he notes the holiness of God in Habakkuk 1:12-13 and then takes it to its logical conclusion: God is too pure to approve evil, and He cannot look on wickedness with favor. It seemed like God was doing just that, but Habakkuk was reassuring himself that God was holy; and although it might look like God was acting in an unholy way, that was impossible.

The biggest spiritual problem of our culture is that individuals think they’re generally good people because they’ve never encountered the holiness of God.

James 1:13 goes further, informing us that God is so far from evil – so separate from evil, that He never tempts anyone to do evil nor does He watch someone else do evil. He wants nothing to do with evil at all because He is incorruptibly pure.

The biggest spiritual problem of our culture is that individuals think they’re generally good people because they’ve never encountered the holiness of God – much like the rich young ruler in Luke 18. Just about everyone in the world today is like that rich young ruler: they think there is something good they can do to inherit eternal life. However, despite the mental objections of millions to the idea of eternal punishment at the hands of an almighty God, God doesn’t send good people to hell; He sends sinners to hell because God alone is good. We must declare to the unbelievers in our culture – not that God wants them to have a better life or to help them with their problems or to be all that they can be – but that God is holy, and that they are standing on the precipice of hell because they are wicked people who deserve judgment.

The final angle is that God’s holiness is manifest in His infinite perfections.

This phrase simply means that God’s holiness is not one attribute among many, but that His holiness is the attribute that permeates everything about Him. God is holy in all His perfections. R.C. Sproul once noted that “only once in scared Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree…The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy…The Bible never says that God is love, love, love; or mercy, mercy, mercy; or wrath, wrath, wrath; or justice, justice, justice. It does say that He is holy, holy, holy.”

We might think about this idea by considering some of God’s many perfections, starting with His love. God is not any kind of love; He is a holy kind of love. God’s love is not perverse, self-centered, worldly, lustful, or any other worldly characteristic of love.

God’s wrath is not an outburst of wrath like ours when we give into the flesh, but it only manifests itself at appropriate times and towards appropriate objects; God’s wrath is a holy wrath. God’s grace does not violate His holiness even while He displays that grace to sinners, but that grace comes at great cost in the death of His Son. God shows us a holy grace. We know, too, that God’s omnipotence, jealousy, patience, and kindness are all holy.

These perfections of God are infinitely greater than our manifestations of them. We are not to look at human grace, mercy, love, or wrath – and think that we see what God is like because we’ve seen what men are like. Instead, we are to look at God’s Word to learn what grace, mercy, love, and wrath are supposed to be like – and then conform ourselves to God’s holy perfections.

When we talk about God’s holiness, we can scarcely wrap our minds around it or adequately capture it in human language. We can, though, understand it in measure. Seeing the greatness of God’s holiness leads us to wonder how it is that a holy God can have a relationship with sinful people. Next, we will look at the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man.

As I have written elsewhere, we are living through a famine of sound moral reasoning in the evangelical world today. The multiple failures at this point reveal an unbiblical separation between theology and ethics. The idea that one can live rightly while believing wrongly is foolish, and while right belief does not guarantee right living at every point, theology does provide the basis for judging the rightness or wrongness of actions.  That is, when a person acts contrary to what he believes his theology provides a corrective if it is allowed to function in that way on the practical level. But when one’s theology is faulty then ethical failure tends to be an outworking of that wrong belief. Rather than provide a needed corrective to bad living, bad theology confirms it.
For example, if one holds to an antinomian view of grace in salvation, then living immorally is fortified by cavalier platitudes like “once saved, always saved” and “since where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, let’s continue in sin so that grace may abound.” Yet, if grace is rightly understood as working a change in the believer so that he pursues a life of holiness, then immoral attitudes and actions can be corrected by the sound theology of that understanding.
In many ways our evangelical forebears understood this relationship far better than we do today. As such, they can help provide some help to us sharpen our moral reasoning. One such helpful teacher from our Baptist heritage is John Dagg. He was the first Baptist theologian in the southern United States to write a systematic theology. Along with that he produced A Treatise on Church Order which he considered to be the Second Part of his Manual of Theology.
A lesser known volume that Dagg wrote is his Elements of Moral Science. The book is a rich resource in thinking and acting Christianly. Though some of the specifics may be dated, the principles Dagg teaches are timeless. One such principle is the wickedness of evil surmising. He addresses this issue in chapter 8, section 8 of his book, which is found on pages 195-197 of the 1860 edition. While we do not hear much about this topic in our day, Dagg demonstrates that sincere Christians should work hard to avoid falling into this pattern of immoral judgment.

Evil Surmising

Reputation is the opinion of the community; and since I am one of the community, my opinion concerning my neighbor, is a part of his reputation. If I think less of him than I ought, I so far do wrong to his reputation. Hence we do wrong to others, when we judge them too unfavorably; and the wrong is not confined to them, but rebounds on ourselves. The habit of judging unfavorably, hardens the heart against the social affections and sympathies, on which our happy intercourse with others greatly depends. It is directly opposed to the charity which “thinketh no evil;”1 and tends inevitably to cut us off from the sympathies and affections of others, and the approbation of heaven. “Judge not, that ye be not judged; for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”2
Love to our neighbor will incline us to admit his sincerity, and attribute to him no other motives than those from which he professes to act. We resent the wrong, if others ascribe to us motives which we disclaim; and we ought, therefore, to avoid such judgment of others. Some men earn a reputation for insincerity, to which they are justly entitled, and there is no necessity that we should be blind to their true character; but there is no merit in being the first to suspect the evil designs of others. Some persons pride themselves on their deep insight into human character; and when some unlovely feature, before unsuspected, has been disclosed, they are ready to exclaim, I told you so; but they do not inform us how many times they have suspected evil which never existed. They are perhaps deceived as often as the less suspicious; but if they are not, it is better to be deceived sometimes, than to cultivate in ourselves the habit of thinking evil; to keep the mind in perpetual disquiet, with the apprehension of suffering wrong from all who approach us; and to banish all confidence from the intercourse of human society. To deal with honest men as if they were rogues, is a maxim which savors of the wisdom from beneath, rather than of that which cometh from above. The peace and happiness of human society depend much on the cultivation of love and mutual confidence; and it is better that men should be surprised and shocked by occasional abuse of confidence, than that they should be perpetually prepared for it by sleepless suspicion.
Much of the strife which disturbs society, originates in evil surmising. An injurious suspicion once entertained, cannot be concealed without great difficulty. If not expressed in words, it produces a cautiousness in action, by which the other party is led to suspect and resent its existence. Mutual suspicion being engendered, a fire is kindled within, which refuses to be smothered. If you would avoid strife and rage, check the very beginnings of evil surmising.
Since the most virtuous have imperfections, it is unjust, because of one failure, to judge the whole character corrupt. Peter denied his Master; but he notwithstanding loved and honored him, and suffered martyrdom in his cause. We ought not to judge a man destitute of any particular virtue, because he fails to exercise it in some one instance; and if it should be proved that he is totally destitute of a particular virtue, we ought not thence to conclude, that he is destitute of all virtue. Even the truly pious may have a sin that does easily beset them;1 and those who have not renounced all for Christ, may, like the young ruler whom Jesus loved,2 possess traits of character worthy to be loved and admired.
We should be careful not to suffer our estimate of others to be determined by their regard for us. “Sinners love those that love them;”3 but righteous judgment is not founded on considerations so selfish. If a man. has treated me unkindly, it does not follow that he is a bad man. Unkindness to me is not worse than unkindness to any other person; and if we strike from our list of friends all who have ever treated any one amiss, we shall have few names remaining. If we detect with keen perception, and decry with bold vociferation, the faults of our enemies or opponents, while we are blind to the faults of our friends, and those of our party; we do not judge according to righteousness. We should school ourselves to estimate every man, not by his bearing toward us, but by his true character.[1]

1 1 Cor. 13:5.
2 Matt. 7:1, 2.
1 Heb. 12:1.
2 Mark 10:21.
3 Luke 6:32.

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