The Holiness of God

Isaiah 6:3 And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”

Leviticus 11:44 For I am the LORD your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not defile yourselves with any swarming thing that crawls on the ground.

1 Peter 1:16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

The holiness of God should provoke the believer to live out a life that is in pursuit of holiness until the day of Christ’s return when man shall spend eternity with his holy and blessed Creator.

Boasting in the fact that the believer serves an all-holy, perfect, blameless Maker is enough to make us see the shortcoming of humanity. Proper boasting is to realize this: an all-perfect, holy, and righteous God allows us to boast in Him. Man is filth, dirt, and most of all, a sinner before the all-holy God. It blows the minds of men and women to know that God has not only provided a way for man to boast in His holiness, but to partake in this holiness to which they will be restored – being His perfect image-bearers for eternity. Since everything man has done, can do, or will ever do, always comes short of the all-holy God, he is stuck in his cesspool of sin. But God and the gospel has allowed a way in which man can come to give Him His praise, His adoration, and His proper worship in boasting in the resurrection of Christ which will restore us one day before God. But for now, here on earth, the believer should constantly praise God for what he may partake of, but at the same time constantly battle with his flesh in trying to pursue a life that is clean and as pure as his Creator’s, in all His holiness.

Octavious Winslow states:

It is said of God that, “He only has immortality.” All created beings are immortal, but God is absolutely so. He only has immortality as an essential perfection of His nature. All others derive their immortality from Him; He from Himself. What a great and glorious being, then, is God! He is “glorious in holiness.” He could possess no glory were He destitute of perfect holiness. Divine in His nature, endowed with infinite perfections, and possessing resources vast and boundless as His infinity, imagine what a being He would be – how powerful for evil, how potent for destruction – were not every perfection of His nature imbued with, and under the control of, infinite and perfect holiness!

God is set apart from all other beings, both in the spiritual and earthly realms. Nothing even begins to display the perfection and maximum holiness that gleams from His being. For believers, this is to be boasted. For there is no other like Him, and no other god or gods come close to Him. He is set apart from all of creation. The holiness of God only reveals to the believer the un-holiness in which he lives. Boasting in the fact that God stands alone above and beyond all creation gives the sinner and saint something to look and gaze upon when in the time of need or even in the time of the highest peaks in the walk of Christianity. Man must boast in the fact that there is no holiness in himself that gives the believer the ability of ethical purity and freedom over sin. The holiness of God has allowed the believer to be set free from sin’s bondage, and therefore gives God glory to the highest capability as possible.

Proper boasting in God’s holiness is becoming holy. Believers, like God, have been set apart from this world. Many will come to the day of the Lord and not know God. The believers who have been cleansed from their sin by the holy blood of Christ are called to be set apart. They are to live as a sacrifice to the Lord by conforming their lives. They do this by boasting in the fact that they may know and live out the holiness of God every day. R.C. Sproul says this best:

True transformation comes by gaining a new understanding of God, man, and the world. What we are after, ultimately, is to be conformed to the image of Christ. We are to be like Jesus, though not in a sense that we can ever gain deity. We are not god-men. But our humanity is to mirror and reflect the perfect humanity of Jesus. A tall order!