Learners Lounge Thursday

What Is Holiness?

Holiness is a word that can make us feel uneasy.  It seems lofty, threatening, alien.  We instinctively sense that God’s holiness has dangerous overtones. His purity calls our sinful attachments into question, demanding that we forsake them in order to enjoy the greatest of all goods—belonging to a God of infinite love and power. To come casually with our hearts grasping tightly to the sins we cherish or to come lightly as though they are no big deal, might be like throwing ourselves onto a roaring fire with the expectation we will not perish. How, then, can we—sinful and broken human beings—hope to come into the presence of a holy God and survive the experience?

When God was forging a relationship with the Israelites, he told Moses to "Give the following instructions to the entire community of Israel. You must be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). God was calling his people into relationship with himself and he wanted his people not only to survive the experience but to be nourished by it. But for that to happen, they needed to know the ground rules, needed to come to him on his terms not theirs.

The Hebrew word for “holiness” is qōdes, a word that highlights the realm of the sacred in contrast to everything common and profane. The adjective qādôš, “holy,” refers to God and what belongs to him. In various places in the Hebrew Scriptures, God is called by the title the “Holy One of Israel.”