What actually is the holiness of God?
God is very holy. Triple emphasis (Is 6:3, Rev 4:8) indicates his superlative level of holiness. And we are told to be holy because God is holy (Lev 11:44).
Problem I did not know in actuality what was this holiness of God.
The dictionary has several definitions of holy:
- "set apart for the service of God": God will always serve his purposes, so this tells me nothing about God. I understand that he is set apart, but this appears to be only partly true because he continues to have dealings with humans.
- "spiritually pure": This is only a state description because by definition, only God is pure. My question was, "God is pure what?". Our own best efforts at doing good are as filthy rags to God (Is 64:6), so there is no useful meaning here.
- "morally excellent": This only offers a hint of usefulness. Personally, I understand good morality to be whatever definition God has made. But it doesn't explain why God is morally excellent.
By my own synthesis of what I had learned about the Bible, I didn't have a much better definition either. How in the world can you work toward something you do not know? I knew that following the Old Testament laws were inadequate for attaining holiness. Jesus came to bring something better, but available explanations seemed to be vague.
Explanation
God's holiness is that he completely free of and separated from the value system of the world.
The value system of God is sacrificial love for the benefit of others: this is his moral excellence. He is motivated only by this value system (pure), and is completely uncorrupted and set apart from by the self-centered value system of the world (our native value system). This is why God is completely holy.
We also then become holy when we adopt his value system and separate ourselves from our old selfish value system.
Theologically, since we are under the direct authority of our holy king-representative Jesus, God treats us as holy (positional sanctification). And as we increasingly live the value system of God with his help, then we also become holy (progressive sanctification).
The value system perspective used here is based on ideas from the work of Darren Twa.