What is holiness?

Usually we associate God's holiness with his majesty and power. We don't often associate it with love... but Jesus did. Check this out.

Exhibit 1: Leviticus 19 is the chapter of that book devoted to the subject of holiness among God's people. I was surprised to discover that most of that chapter is social in nature, meaning that holiness among us is a matter of the quality of our relationships. Read it and see for yourself!

--> Holiness is primarily a matter of relationships.

Exhibit 2: Jesus stated that the two great commandments were to love God (the Shema from Deut 6:4-5) and love our neighbor as ourselves. Guess where the second commandment is from... Leviticus 19 (19:18 to be exact), the chapter on holiness! So for Jesus, one of the greatest commandments is to love our neighbor as ourselves, and loving our neighbors is an expression of holiness.

--> To love our neighbors is to be holy.

Exhibit 3: What about people who are not our "neighbors"? (In New Testament speak, "neighbors" are people we accept because they are in our social sphere.) We now turn to Matthew 5. Holiness is godliness, right? God is holy, to be holy is to be like God. Are you with me so far? Okay, proceding further then... In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs his listeners to "be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt 5:48). In other words, he is calling people to be godly and holy. Most Christian interpret "be perfect" individualistically as a call to absolute control of one's moral choices. It's not. What is the context of this statement? Love. Jesus' instruction to be perfect comes at the end of a brief teaching about loving our enemies.

To love our enemies is to be perfect.
To be perfect is to be like God.
To be like God is to be holy.
--> Therefore, to love our enemies is to be holy.

Conclusion: The Pharisees were the masters of moral and ceremonial obedience. They were correct in that they knew God wanted Israel to be holy. But for them, holiness was a matter of behavioral conformity. Jesus agreed that God's people should be holy, but he rejected moral and ceremonial conformity in favor of an ethic of love. Holiness = love! Love your friends, and love your enemies. This is to be holy and godly.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Why I have no hope of going to heaven

Image
I have little hope of going to heaven. In fact, I don't even want to go to heaven. Why? Because if we mean by "heaven" the final destination for God's people, then heaven isn't somewhere we go at all. Heaven isn't up in the sky. Heaven is here. When we say "heaven," most people think it's the place you go when you die. You are with God and his people, and you live forever in eternal bliss. The trouble is, that's a half-truth. It's not the biblical hope. Imagine it like this. Say you are living in a house that has been your beloved home for a long time, but it has fallen into disrepair. The plumbing is bad, the roof leaks and the house is infested with termites. You have painted the walls, and you even bought new kitchen appliances. You love the house, but it needs extensive work. Now through the generosity of a rich relative, you suddenly come into an inheritance huge enough that you can have your beloved house completely remod
Read more

Ten essential Dallas Willard quotes

Image
This week the church has lost a great saint and a shining light. Dallas Willard succumbed to cancer. As John Ortberg says in a wonderfully written tribute , Willard was brilliant, but "his heart and his life were better than his mind." I thought it would be appropriate to bring out ten quotes that do a pretty good job of getting at what Willard spent his life teaching and working on. 1. This quote states the central problem Willard spent his career working on: "My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance." (opening paragraph of  The Divine  Conspiracy ) 2. The central problem, restated: "The governing assumption today, among professing Christians, is that we can be 'Christians' forever and never become disciples." ( The Gre
Read more

Connecting with God when it feels like nothing special is happening

Image
I read recently that Facebook has been known to lead to depression. This person just enjoyed a vacation to Hawaii. That person's kids are cuter and apparently don't act up like yours. And that friend over there just won another award. If you're feeling sassy about your life, you join in on the bragging parade. If that little gray cloud is hovering over you reminding you of how things just aren't turning out, Facebook makes it worse. Today I decided to raise my fist in protest by writing a post about the morning my walk with God was less like leaping forward and more like shuffling along. It's like getting on Facebook and posting, "Nothing special happened in my world this morning. You feel me?" This morning I got up and made tea like usual. I sat in my chair like usual. I began my prayer time, like usual, with these words: "You were [God’s] enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself
Read more

A test of your relationship with God

Do you have the kind of relationship with God that is like a married couple, including fights and spats? That’s the biblical, Jewish picture of a person who really knows God.  At a certain point in life when I was dealing with some major disappointments, I came to the conclusion that it would be better to yell all my frustrations at God than go through a separation and live apart from him. That’s why I love this quote from Lois Tverberg and her quote of Peter Kreeft so much. Trust me, you’ll want to read to the bottom of this discussion of Job.  “Job’s friends were making the mistake that Western Christians do today when we don’t have a Hebraic understanding of the ‘knowledge of God’—da’at Elohim. A Westerner opens the Bible and wants to prove God’s existence and construct a theology to explain God’s nature. We would call that ‘knowledge of God.’ But in Hebrew, to ‘know’ someone was to be familiar with him through experience and relationship, as a wife knows her husband... “While Job’s
Read more

Sympathy for the mocking Roman soldiers

Image
Some time in the morning hours of Good Friday, Jesus was handed over to the Roman Praetorian guard before being led away to be crucified. It was a gruesome scene. Jesus had already been flogged within an inch of his life, and now the whole company of soldiers gathered around to mock and beat him. (Incidentally, historians report that this kind of treatment was not unique to Jesus. Others were mocked in similar ways.) The soldiers mocked Jesus for being a false -- and in their eyes, laughably pathetic -- king. Jesus stirred up this kind of trouble when he rode into town on Palm Sunday in a fashion that mimicked and symbolized both King Solomon and King David. New Testament scholar Craig Evans writes, Such an event suggested in unmistakable terms that Israel's king was Jesus, not Caesar. Thus, from the very moment of entry into Jerusalem, Jesus was set on a collision course with Roman authority. ( The Last Days of Jesus , p. 6)  Evans also points out that many of the soldiers&
Read more