The Psalmist exhorts his readers in song in Psalm 96:9, “Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!” I’ve always been afraid of the Biblical exhortations for me to be “Holy.” I know that I’m not! Moses told the people in Leviticus 19:2 what God told him to say; “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” To make the matter worse, Peter quotes from this passage and reinforces the command to us. In 1 Peter 1:14-16, he writes, “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” Pondering on Psalm 96 that says holiness is beautiful, I have struggled with understanding what holiness really is. Whatever it is, it must be beautiful. The English Standard Version translates this passage in Psalm 96 as, “Worship the Lord in the Splendor of holiness.”
I think we’ve misunderstood the idea of holiness. It seems i want to associate it with some kind of grimness! Steadman has it right for me, “We think of holy people as those who look as if they have been steeped in vinegar or soaked in embalming fluid. I used to think of the word that way, and holiness was not attractive to me at all. It repelled me.”1 One of the things I really like about my Logos Bible Software is that I search every word in the English bible and trace it back to it’s original language manuscript form but then take that form back to the “lemma.” That’s the form of the word that you would look up in a dictionary. If you ran across the word “loved” you wouldn’t look up “loved” you would look up “love.” Love is the Lemma of loved, lovely, lovable etc. All of these forms come for a single root word and I can search for the root word also. Without going through a lot of linguistic gobble goop, let me say the “holy, holiness, etc” all come from the root word that means “whole.” I wonder if Ray Steadman has the same software because he writes, “This is the word wholeness. So that holiness means ‘wholeness,’ being complete. And if you read wholeness in place of holiness everywhere you find it in the Bible you will be much closer to what the writers of that book meant. We all know what wholeness is: It is to have together all the parts which were intended to be there, and to have them functioning as they were intended to function.”1
Now, that would be a beautiful thing! Let me continue Steadman’s quote: “That is what God is talking about. He says to this people, ‘you shall be whole, because I am whole.’ God is complete; he is perfect. There is no blemish in God; he lives in harmony with himself. He is a beautiful person. He is absolutely what a person ought to be. He is filled with joy and love and peace. He lives in wholeness. And he looks at us in our brokenness and says to us, ‘You, too, shall be whole.’” Then comes Jesus to make us whole! Jesus was the subject of the book of Leviticus in the sacrificial system that manages man’s brokenness. Jesus is our guilt offering. our peace offering our trespass offering or our sin offering. In Him we can find “holiness.” If we think of “holiness” as related to our own righteous behavior, we are lost and discouraged. But when we realize that Christ’s holiness can be ours through faith in him we hear “good news.” Isn’t that what the Gospel is? But, I don’t feel holy or “whole”. Right, but Jesus is. Through faith in Christ we are grafted into Him. This is what Paul meant when he wrote in Romans 11:15, “If the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, so is the whole lump, and if the root is holy, so are the branches.”
1 Ray Steadman, Leviticus Commentary, n.d.