How Can Christians Be Holy As The Trinity Is Holy?

“Be holy as I am holy” (Lev 19:2).

In the Old Testament the Lord reveals a good deal of concern for both his holiness and the holiness of his people—a concern expressed with what one might consider uncomfortable frequency.

A frequency which the apostle Peter reinforces in the New Testament with a fair degree of forcefulness: “But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy’” (1 Pet 1:15-17).

What is God getting at? What can he mean?

How can a person be holy like God?

And just how is God holy, for that matter?

Let us begin with Jesus.

When Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, he blesses their hearts, declaring, “Peace be with you!” (Jn 20:19), offering his shalom of well-being and wholeness. Later, concerned for their physical well-being, he feeds them with fish cooked over a charcoal fire. How does he provide for them spiritually? Jesus breathes on them, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn 20:22).

Through this gift, Christ initiates human beings into wholeness, into holiness, into a new creation that came into being in Christ by his incarnation, death, and resurrection, and is actualized by the Holy Spirit.

Help from The Holy Trinity

So we could conclude that, far from being left out on a limb, struggling against impossible odds to be holy as God is holy, the Trinity really understands a person’s needs and frailties, really takes in the impossibilities of living a holy life on this planet without the all-out help of the holy Trinity. 

But the assistance is not unilateral. God does not accomplish it all on his side. For Jesus consummates his call to holiness and wholeness with the challenge, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (Jn 20:21). Such a challenge requires a good deal from anyone who accepts it, for it calls on human beings to embark on a process of holistic transformation in personality and attitude, thoughts and feelings, as well as practices and behavior (Lk 24:38-43). 

Holy Transformation

Compass psychotheology asserts that it is less helpful to view holiness in the Platonic sense of an absolute quality in God’s eternal being, and more helpful to view it as a relational dynamic that overflows from intra-Trinitarian love into God’s relationship with people. 

This means there is a compass dimension of holiness meant to connect people to their own highest good that grows from relating rightly to God and one another. Thus we can understand God’s holiness as a delicate balancing act between his altruistic love (Love compass point) and impartial justice (Assertion compass point), between his humble service (Weakness compass point) and glorious majesty (Strength compass point).

Taken together, these dynamic interactive qualities set God apart from both the physical creation and from any sense of moral degradation, because his faithfulness to his eternal consistency and wholeness endures forever. 

This holiness and sheer interpersonal health of the holy Trinity helps explain the great reversal of the cross, through which “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). While God finds sin abhorrent, he nevertheless took sin into himself in order to ultimately vanquish it; that is, to dissolve sin from inside out, replacing its insidiousness with a deeper outworking of loving power.

The Great Reversal of The Cross

For instance, God initially sanctifies King Saul and fills him with the Holy Spirit, but when Saul disobeys God, the Lord sends his Spirit to torment Saul (1 Sam 16:14), and uses Saul’s paranoid jealousy to develop holy qualities in David, so that when David becomes king, he will rule righteously, having become a man after God’s own heart. In this way God makes even evil serve his holiness.

When people allow God to set them apart for his holy purposes, their lives take on a depth dimension, for the Holy Spirit has their permission to promote personality health, cultivate interpersonal communion, and actualize their mission on earth.

This is holiness and wholeness.

Hope is offered in the words, “Be holy as I am holy,” for in contemporary exegesis they mean, “Be well-balanced…in your whole lifestyle” (1 Pet 1:13,15; Davids, NICNT).

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY

Trusting in The Trinity

 

God Knows Everything About You

As a psychologist I'm fascinated how deeply Jesus Christ knows us. This knowledge can be unnerving, though, since God's knowledge includes our thoughts and feelings, perceptions and sensations, and goals and dreams. No other person or no institution has this capability to instantaneously know what we are thinking and feeling as we think and feel it.

This could make me a little paranoid, to realize that God knows why I am typing this now. And how everything in my life has led to this sentence I am now constructing. Not only that, but God has foreknowledge of you coming to this site today and knows how you are interacting with it.

This is an extraordinary attribute of the living God -- the God of spirit and truth Jesus spoke about to the Samaritan woman at the well, when he revealed divine knowledge about her five husbands.

We wouldn't even know that God sees through us like we see through a windowpane, unless God revealed this to us in the Bible. But reveal it he does!

• "Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts" (Mk 2:8). 
• "Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account" (Heb 4:13). 
• The Bible itself, inspired and illuminated by the Holy Spirit, also reveals this penetrating knowledge of people: "For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart" (Heb 4:12).

Why is this important? Because modern psychology shows that only in deepest confidence, like the confidentiality of a psychotherapy session, do people disclose their innermost thoughts, feelings, and motives.

Human beings have both the free choice to "come clean" with what's going on within, and a defensive urge to conceal it behind a false front. We often hide our true intent from others and sometimes even from ourselves. But God sees and knows what's in us.

So won't this make us self-conscious? To know that nothing is hidden from God? Our selfishness, our sexuality, our rationalizations, our hidden agendas -- all laid bare before his eyes, so to speak.

Actually, yes. And this self-consciousness is called cognitive dissonance in psychotherapy and conviction of sin in Scripture. A major role of the Holy Spirit in the world today is to convict us that Christ alone is righteous and whole, and we ourselves are unrighteous and fragmented.

"My dear children," says the apostle John, "I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world" (1 Jn 2:1-2).

Christ went to the Cross to pay the price for our secret lives of self-will and self-concealment. We are now free to come out of hiding, into the light of his grace, because his intention isn't to accuse and punish us, but to reconcile and love us, and guide us along the wisest pathway of our life.

Compass psychotheology helps us follow this pathway, because it reveals our behavioral psychology, whether we are pleasing and placating, withdrawn and aloof, grandiose and condescending, or aggressive and exploiting.

Whatever way we've gotten along without God riddles us with personality deficiencies that we cannot get rid of on our own. But God can and does help make progress toward human wholeness, as we surrender in trust to his light, his truth, and his love.

And the message of this post is simply this: Why not confess what God already knows? Why not find relief in his omniscience, and comfort in his forgiveness. And why not enjoy growing mature in Christ, rather than going it on our own without him.