Holiness
God’s holiness means there is no darkness hidden behind His goodness. He is uniquely God, completely pure, and untouched by corruption. His holiness exposes what is disordered in us—but the same holy God also provides the cleansing we need.
Holy is one of those words that sounds unmistakably religious.
We call the Bible holy. We sing “Holy, Holy, Holy.” We talk about holy places, holy people, holy living, and the Holy Spirit. The word is everywhere in Christianity, but explaining what it actually means can get surprisingly difficult.
Sometimes holiness is defined as being “set apart.” That is part of the idea, but it does not tell us enough. My good china is set apart from the everyday dishes. Hopefully no one is calling it holy.
When Scripture calls God holy, it is saying something much bigger.
God is unlike anything He has made, and nothing corrupt, false, wrongly ordered, or contrary to His perfect character belongs to Him.
Scripture Overview
Few passages capture God's holiness more vividly than Isaiah 6.
Isaiah sees the Lord “high and exalted,” with seraphim calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa. 6:3).
The foundations shake. The temple fills with smoke. Isaiah's response is not casual admiration.
“Woe to me!” he cries. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips” (Isa. 6:5).
Encountering God's holiness makes Isaiah suddenly aware of his own uncleanness.
That same combination of uniqueness and purity appears throughout Scripture. Moses asks, “Who among the gods is like you, Lord? Who is like you—majestic in holiness” (Exod. 15:11). Hannah declares, “There is no one holy like the Lord; there is no one besides you” (1 Sam. 2:2).
Habakkuk describes God's eyes as “too pure to look on evil” (Hab. 1:13), while John writes, “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).
Biblically, holiness is not simply good behavior taken to an impressive level. It belongs to God's identity.
God Is Unlike Anything Else
Calling God holy means, in part, that He is utterly unlike creation.
Think about it. If something is set apart, someone does the setting apart. We reserve a room for a particular purpose, designate an object for special use, or identify one person for a specific role.
God's holiness cannot work that way. No one looked at God and decided He should occupy a special category.
To put it simply, He is unlike everything He has made.
Creation depends on Him for its existence; He does not depend on creation for His. We develop, learn, receive, and change. God is not one creature farther along the same scale.
That is why Scripture can ask, “Who is like you?” and expect the answer to be no one.
Nothing Corrupt Belongs to God
Holiness also tells us something about God's moral character. There is no corruption within Him. God does not contain some mixture of truth and falsehood, goodness and malice, faithfulness and betrayal. He does not struggle against disordered desires or occasionally overcome a temptation to become evil.
When Scripture says that “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all,” the language leaves very little room for a shadowy corner.
This matters because sometimes we explain God's actions in ways that quietly make Him morally worse than the character Scripture attributes to Him.
If my explanation requires God to lie, become corrupt, delight in evil for its own sake, or act contrary to His own perfect character, I have not solved the theological problem. I have created another one.
Calling God holy means there are some things we simply cannot attribute to Him without contradicting the claim.
This becomes particularly sticky when we talk about suffering:
If God is good…
How could a good God…
Why would an all-powerful God…
Sometimes, without even realizing it, we begin treating the situation as evidence that something is wrong with God rather than asking whether our interpretation might be wrong.
That's the kicker. We may not even notice we are doing it.
I have done this many times. I am struggling with a situation, at my wit's end, nothing is working out properly, and I just want to scream my head off. My solution? Have a spiritual and mental meltdown.
Why has God abandoned me? (Is God faithful?)
Why isn't He answering my prayers? (Is God a provider?)
God absolutely hates me. (Is God loving?)
I am God's personal punching bag. (Is God good?)
I hate my life. (Is God sufficient?)
I'm not saying that wrestling with questions about God's character is wrong. What I am saying is that it can be surprisingly easy for questioning to shift into accusing God of violating His character without our recognizing that the shift has happened. And I'd be the last person to cast a stone over that one.
It takes time to learn what God's holiness actually means. But once we begin to understand who God is, we also gain something incredibly useful: a way to recognize which conclusions about Him cannot be right.
If holiness means corruption cannot belong to God, then an interpretation that requires Him to become corrupt should make me question the interpretation before I question His character.
Being Created Is Not the Same Thing as Being Unholy
If God is holy because He is unlike creation, we might begin to think that everything God does not share with us must somehow be defective.
But being a creature is not a moral failure.
Human beings have bodies, limits, dependence, and the capacity to grow and learn. None of those things is sinful merely because God does not experience them in the same way.
Adam and Eve were finite before the Fall. They were created beings with bodies, needs, and limitations, yet God looked at His creation and called it “very good” (Gen. 1:31).
Holiness therefore cannot mean that God rejects everything creaturely.
The problem is not our finitude; it is what has become disordered within us.
That distinction matters because redemption does not erase the difference between Creator and creature. Christianity does not teach that we eventually cease to be created beings and become the ultimate Creator ourselves. What God does with creation is far more interesting than simply returning it to Eden. He redeems, transforms, and ultimately brings it into a greater fullness than it possessed before the Fall, while the creature always remains the created and God remains the One from whom everything else receives its existence.
And I would argue that being a creature dependent on a perfect Creator is not a deficiency at all. It is a very good place to be.
Holiness Exposes What Is Out of Order
In Isaiah 6, Isaiah receives a vision of God seated on His throne, “high and exalted,” while seraphim call to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa. 6:3).
The foundations shake at the sound of their voices, and the temple fills with smoke.
Isaiah's response is immediate:
“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isa. 6:5).
Notice what Isaiah recognizes.
God does not accuse him of being a creature. Isaiah becomes aware that he is unclean. Encountering God's purity gives him a point of comparison he did not have before.
When I was a strapping young adult at the height of my self-righteousness, I was in church, in the middle of this due-diligence thing called prayer, when I had a vision.
I saw people dancing. It looked something like a waltz in a ballroom, although the environment itself was vague and I couldn't make out any details. What I could see clearly were people paired together in some kind of dance, all dressed in white. I remember being fascinated by the perfect harmony in which they moved, but even more by the cleanliness of the dancers themselves.
I don't mean they looked freshly showered.
There was something about them that simply announced, clean.
Then the scene shifted, and I found myself in a field surrounded by what looked like cherry trees covered in white blossoms. Fallen petals dusted the ground almost like freshly fallen snow. Everything was so purely white that I remember thinking I hadn't known white came in a hue quite that…well, white.
It gave me the same sense of cleanliness I had seen in the dancers. Nothing I knew on earth compared to it. Not bleached white sheets. Not perfectly fresh snow. There was a depth of purity to it that I had never seen before.
So when I read about Isaiah's shock at encountering the holiness of God, I understand a tiny bit of it. For one moment I was given a comparison I did not normally have. Something I'd always thought of as clean suddenly did not seem nearly as clean once I'd seen something cleaner.
Imagine a pig that spent its entire life in a muddy pen. The caretaker may clean the pen regularly, and by pig-pen standards it may even be quite tidy. But the pig has never stepped outside the pen. It has no idea what clean actually looks like beyond the environment it has always known.
Crude analogy or not, I think we are a little like that pig.
Sin is part of the environment every one of us has always known. Even our best examples of human purity are still being judged from inside the pen. We have no idea how filthy we are until we encounter what it means to genuinely be clean.
Even the purity I sense from the Holy Spirit is not the same as being in an environment of total purity. Isaiah encounters the holiness of God, and suddenly his own uncleanness is impossible to ignore.
That may help explain why holiness can feel threatening in Scripture. The closer someone comes to perfect purity, the harder it becomes to maintain comforting illusions about their own condition.
“Be Holy Because I Am Holy”
I would call this one of Scripture's more intimidating commands:
“Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2).
Taken by itself, that could sound impossible. Not even Isaiah was able to happily jaunt off after his revelatory vision thinking, Right. I shall be like Him. If I were Isaiah, I probably would have crawled under a rug and called it a day.
How exactly am I supposed to imitate the holiness of the God who has no equal?
I have no desire to take on everything involved in being Yahweh. I mean, have you looked at His job description? It involves pierced hands. I'll pass.
Fortunately, the rest of Leviticus 19 gives us an answer even I can aspire toward.
Leave food for the poor and the foreigner. Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not defraud your neighbor. Pay workers what you owe them. Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind. Judge fairly. Do not spread slander. Do not seek revenge. Love your neighbor as yourself.
Apparently, holiness has a lot more to do with how I treat the person standing beside me than with how religious I manage to look. And I can manage to look very religious when I'm particularly inspired. Good thing nobody's instructed to be like me.
God's people cannot imitate His uniqueness. We will never become the Creator. But we can increasingly reflect His moral character in ordinary life by telling the truth, acting justly, refusing exploitation, keeping faith with others, and learning to love what is good rather than allowing our desires to run wherever they please.
There is something to be said for that old question: What would Jesus do?
Not because holiness means copying a religious aesthetic, but because Jesus shows us what God's character looks like lived out in a human life.
Where That Leaves Us
God's holiness means there is no darkness hidden behind His goodness. Nothing corrupt needs to be excused, covered over, or explained away. He is uniquely God, completely pure, and untouched by the disorder that runs through His creation.
That purity is uncomfortable because it exposes what is disordered in us too. Isaiah's response was immediate recognition of his own uncleanness, but that was not where God left him.
The same Lord whose holiness exposed Isaiah's uncleanness provided the cleansing that allowed Isaiah to remain in His presence and then called him into His service.
I do not need God to become less holy so that I can approach Him.
All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version (NIV).