Holiness - Chapter 1
(edited by RPW. Sr. )
by WT. Purkiser
“For I am the Lord that brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God,and that you should be holy, for I am holy.”
The Book of Leviticus Chapter 11 Verse 45
All Christian truth must be based on the teaching of the Bible. God has spoken in the Scriptures and has made known to us both His will for our lives and His provision for our needs. It is based upon the total thrust of the Scriptures. It is not merely a thread or line of truth running through the Word of God. It is rather a network of teaching which is an essential part of the fabric of the whole.
No important Bible truth depends on scattered and isolated proof texts. One man is said to have claimed that he could prove atheism from the Bible. He offered the text, "There is no God." What he did not say was that the context reads, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" (Psalm 14:1).
The Bible is an amazingly realistic Book. It describes with great faithfulness the sorrows and sins, the struggles and hopes, the weakness and pain of the men and women who walk its pages. Yet through it all there shines a light of redemption and victory, the light of that "holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord" (Hebrews 12:14).
In swift strokes, the early chapters of Genesis paint the picture of creation and catastrophe, holiness given and holiness lost.
The Book of Genesis Chapter 3 tells us of the source of that corruption of our moral natures for which sanctification is the divine cure. Created in the image of God, but using the freedom which was part of that image to seek to "be as gods" (Genesis 3:5) themselves, Adam and Eve brought upon their descendants the corruption that comes to a branch cut off from the source of spiritual life in the Vine (John 15:1-6).
The man created in the image of God "begat a son in his own likeness, after his image" (Genesis 5:3) whose "every imagination( tendency, propensity, direction) of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5; Genesis 8:21). The sinful condition of the race is due to the depravity that comes from "deprivity," that is, human nature apart from the life of the Spirit.
Yet such is the marvel of God's love and patience that the very scene of human rebellion was the occasion for the first promise of divine redemption, of One who at the cost of His own suffering would crush the serpent's head (Genesis 3:15; Romans 16:20).
Through long centuries of preparation, the fact of God's holiness was revealed in a dozen different ways-by His wonderful works, by the awe men felt in His presence, by the ritual and sacrifices of Tabernacle and Temple, as well as by the prayers, aspirations, and proclamations of those men to whom God made himself known. God was seen to be, in Isaiah's favorite phrase, "the Holy One of Israel" (Isaiah1:4; Isaiah 5:19; Isaiah10:20; ). Holiness was seen to be the very inwardness of God's being. It is His nature, His "Godness."
Equally strong was the call for men who walked with God to be like Him in moral character. In the Old Testament, the familiar biblical term "sanctify" (102 times in various forms) often has the meaning we have come to attach to "consecrate." This is clearly true when men are told, as they frequently are, to sanctify themselves; to sanctify places, garments, altars, vessels, days, priests, and people to the Lord. The meaning is to separate or set apart as dedicated to God.
This is not the whole story, however. Present from the beginning, and growing stronger through the centuries, was the recognition that people who belong to God are not only consecrated but are to be different in a real and personal way. Ritual purity is symbolic of moral purity. The repeated command, "Ye shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy" (Leviticus 19:2; Leviticus 20:26), makes no distinction between the holiness of God and the holiness of His people, and is set in the context of moral conduct in 1 Pet. 1:15-16.
It is clear, certainly, that the holiness possible to man is not a property of his own nature. It is God's gift. But even before the finished work of Christ on the Cross, it was possible for inspired writers to describe Noah as one who "found grace in the eyes of the Lord ... a just man and perfect in his generations" (Genesis. 6:8-9); to record God's command to Abraham, "Walk before me, and be thou perfect" (Genesis 17:1); and to speak of job as "perfect and upright" (Job 1:1, 8; Job 2:3).
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