“God’s holiness is not a threat to us; it is our hope.”
He Is Holy. And That Is Good News
Holiness may be the most misunderstood attribute of God.
For many people, when they hear the word holy, they feel one of two things: distance or duty. Distance, as in, God is so high and pure and untouchable that there is no real hope of connection. Or duty, as in, holiness is a moral checklist that God holds over our heads. Neither of those gets it right.
Holiness, at its root, means otherness. God is holy in the sense that he is utterly unlike anything else in existence. He is the uncreated one in a universe of created things. He is light without a shadow of darkness. He is the one being in all of reality who is not influenced by selfishness, fear, insecurity, or pride, because none of those things have any hold on him.
In the Holy Scriptures, a prophet by the name of Isaiah, encountered God in the temple, the seraphim were not singing about God’s power or his greatness. They were singing about his holiness. Over and over: holy, holy, holy. The repetition in Hebrew is how you mark something as ultimate, as beyond all comparison. It is as if language itself buckled under the weight of what they were trying to say.
Isaiah’s response tells us something important. He didn’t feel inspired. He didn’t feel motivated. He felt undone. “Woe to me! I am ruined!” Not because God was cruel or threatening, but because in the presence of absolute purity, he suddenly saw himself clearly. A Holy God shows us who we truly are, not worthy, unclean, adulterated by the world that we live in, a world that we are from and not of and yet the inhabitants of a world that influences us more than we imagine. A world that tells us we are one of it, drowning the faint voice from within that says, we do not belong here.
Here is the good news buried in that terrifying moment: holiness is not God’s way of keeping us out. It is what makes him trustworthy. You can only fully rest in a God who is wholly good, who has no hidden agenda, no shadow of corruption, no days when he is less than he claims to be.
We live in a world where trust has become scarce. Leaders disappoint. Institutions fail. People we relied on turn out to have hidden motivations. But the holiness of God means there is one anchor that will never shift. One Person who is exactly who he says he is, in every moment, without exception.
His holiness is not the barrier to relationship. It is the foundation of it.
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