“If holiness is the destination, then love is how we get from here to there.”
“You’ve got to remember, God isn’t just loving. He is also holy, just and righteous.” This solemn pronouncement was recently made to me in support of God’s supposed ordering of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Old Testament. “But what do you think is holy, just or righteous about killing women and children?” I protested. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” came the confident reply, “my job is just to believe it.”
You may have heard or even said something like this yourself… “God is not just loving, God is also holy.” But I wonder what we really mean by this. Are we implying that God’s love is somehow negated by God’s holiness? As though we are warning “don’t get too comfortable with God’s warm and gentle side, he still has exacting standards. He’s not a tame lion you know!” It makes me wonder how we have come to so casually associate the Hebrew concept of ‘holiness’ with our own ideas of pious religious purity in the first place.
To understand the problem we have to start with “chol”, the ancient Hebrew word for “sand”.
The exact same word also meant “common”, because what was more common for a nomadic, desert dwelling community than sand? For example Ez 48:14 says “the remaining area will be for common (chol) use of the city, for houses and for pastureland.”
So “chol” meant anything commonplace, ordinary or mundane.
Houses were chol.
Clay pots were chol.
Fetching water from the well was chol.
Sand was chol.
But for the ancient Hebrews, as for us today, some things were also much more than sand. Some things were extraordinary, precious and compellingly enigmatic. The mystery of sweet rains from heaven, the warmth of an embrace, the wonder of the stars above or the longing for home. These things were the opposite of “chol” because they were uncommon, precious and somewhat mysterious. The word for this concept was “qadosh”, which meant something like ‘other’ or ‘special’ or ‘transcendent’. If something was wonderfully ‘other’, hard to define or otherwise very much ‘more than sand’ - it was “qadosh”. For the Hebrew people then, God was obviously also “qadosh”. In our English Bibles, this word has usually come to be translated as “holy”. We must remember though, that “Holy” is just an English word pushing right up against the limits of human language, trying to communicate how much more there is to reality than can be easily articulated.
From a human language point of view then, we need to remind ourselves that by calling God “holy” we are not declaring God to be aloof, judgemental or partial to occasional bouts of genocide. By saying ‘holy’ we are instead describing God as boundless, extraordinary and transcendent - a bit like love itself. Which is how we can indeed say that ‘God is love’ and ‘God is holy’, because love itself is holy. Love and holiness are not separate, competing facets of God’s personality, as though God were both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. They are just words trying to describe the almost indescribable reality of God’s transcendent nature.
This is why when Peter challenges us to “be holy as He is holy”, he is not telling us to withdraw from society and judge it from the moral high ground and he is certainly not condoning ethnic cleansing against any society we deem ‘too sinful’. He is simply underscoring Christ’s primary command for us to love each other - the most holy (qadosh) thing anyone can do. And that’s probably the point actually… that literally anyone can do it. Whatever your age, education, religion, social standing, sexuality, nationality or gender - anyone can be compassionate and therefore practice holiness.
In this sense ‘holiness’ is not something reserved for the really spiritual and pure people. It’s actually much more accessible than we realise. Think about anything that feels ‘holy’ to you. The joy of watching your grandchildren play? The easy laughter around a shared meal with friends? The tenderness between lovers? The inspiration of a work of art? The moment a baby smiles at her mother for the first time? These things are all immeasurably precious and hard to quantify, yet they are the very moments that make life what it is - the stuff of poetry and song. They are indeed ‘set apart’ and holy, as God is ‘holy’.
Moreover, we live in a world where going to work, walking your dog and doing the shopping are all routine, ordinary and apparently unremarkable things. They are “chol” like sand. But even these moments can be made “qadosh” through love. When we consciously pursue love and compassion in all that we do, even the mundane, ‘chol’ moments can be made holy - as the clip below demonstrates. If holiness is the destination, then love is how we get from here to there.
God is holy.
God is love.
Live a holy life of love.
“Holy, holy, holy Lord. Heaven and earth are filled with your glory.” Is. 6:3
This is what it looks like when “chol” turns to “qadosh” in the blink of an eye. We really have nothing to fear from holiness.