Archive: Holiness for a New Millennium
By John N. Oswalt
“Holiness” is a word which has fallen on hard times. For most of us it is a word which does not have very positive connotations. We think of Bible-waving “Holy Rollers,” or store-front churches with some such name as “The Sanctified Church of God of the Holiness Brethren.” Or we think of prim, self-righteous people whose religion is primarily what they don’t do. It is little wonder that no self-respecting teenager today would aspire to “holiness.”
But that is not what holiness, biblical holiness, is all about. Like many of the other great ideas of the Bible, holiness has suffered a lot of mistreatment, often at the hands of its greatest friends. But just because an idea has been mistreated, even abused, is no reason to abandon it, especially if it is as near the heart of biblical religion as holiness is. Instead, we must find ways to recapture the essential truth and make it livable for our day. That is especially true for this idea, because the Christianity which has forgotten holiness is in deep trouble.
What is the essential truth of holiness? It is that God’s purpose for us is to share his character. In many ways Christian teaching in the last 40 years has lost sight of this. We have taught ourselves that God wants us to be happy, or free from guilt, or well-adjusted, or saved from eternal condemnation, or open-minded, or financially and materially blessed. Now, all of those are partially true, but the problem which all of them have is that they are largely me-centered—they focus upon benefits which accrue to me from my practice of religion. This kind of religion can become pagan all too quickly. What do I mean by that? I mean that pagan religion is the kind which seeks to manipulate divine power through religious behavior. Consider many of our prayers. Aren’t they offered to persuade God to do something for us we want? Why do we go to church? Isn’t it to receive blessings, however those blessings are defined? And what is the result of religion like that? Unfortunately, the result is very similar to what we have seen in American Christianity in the last 20 years. We have seen prominent Christians involved in financial mismanagement (otherwise known as theft), in sexual infidelity, and in all kinds of extravagantly materialistic life-styles. And why not? If God’s chief goal for you and me is happiness, then surely anything which promotes, or seems to promote, that happiness must be legitimate.
This problem is rooted in the way we have handled the dearest of all evangelical doctrines: salvation by grace alone. I do not want to minimize this truth in any way, nor do I want to suggest that we need to return to the doctrine of salvation by good works. That heresy characterizes too many United Methodists today. The Bible is crystal clear on this point. None of us can make ourselves acceptable to God by our own goodness. That is the way of human pride, and human pride is the essence of sin. No, we can only come to God by admitting our absolute helplessness and accepting what he has already done for us through Christ. This is the Good News, and we dare not stop declaring it to the world.
So what is the problem? The problem is that we stop right there, and declare only part of the Good News. When we do that, we make it appear that all God requires is to get us “saved.” To be sure, he wants us to accept our forgiveness from him, and not be estranged from him anymore, but that’s not all. In fact, it may not even be the most important part. When we act like forgiveness is all there is to the Good News, what do we communicate to people? We communicate that being forgiven is all God wants. So if you are forgiven apart from any behavior of yours, then it doesn’t matter how you behave, does it? Just enjoy your forgiveness! You have probably seen a bumper sticker which reinforces this point in a very subtle way. It says “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” There it is: the purpose of the Christian religion is to get—to get forgiveness and the happiness which flows from that forgiven condition. The behavior of Christians is really beside the point. And that explains the rash of moral failures which has blighted our witness recently. Christians have said in effect, “Don’t expect much from me in the way of character, it’s only being forgiven that counts.” And sure enough, reality has just matched our expectations; the world has not gotten much from us in the way of character.
But perhaps you believe that I have overstated the case. Perhaps you are saying, “Now wait a minute, everybody knows that being a Christian means that there are certain moral expectations upon a person. After all, the very reason we are shocked at the behavior of many Christians is because we have these expectations.” This is certainly true. No reputable minister or evangelist suggests that if you are truly forgiven by accepting the grace of God in Jesus through faith, it really doesn’t matter how you live. But what so many of us do suggest is that as important as Christian living may be, it is really viewed as very secondary to the main point: forgiveness. The result is that we don’t have any great expectations. After all “Christians aren’t perfect, they are just forgiven.” But forgiveness is not the main point of the Christian religion. Christianity is not about what we get from God in return for our religious behavior. Christianity is about the transformation of our character into the likeness of God’s character. So Jesus said to his disciples who were commenting upon the rigorous righteousness of the Pharisees, that their righteousness would have to exceed that of the Pharisees if they hoped to see the kingdom of heaven. What could he possibly mean by a statement like that? Surely Christianity is about relieving us of such rigor, not about turning up the rigor a few more notches. What Jesus meant was that his disciples would have to have the same passionate concern for keeping God’s commandments as the Pharisees had, but that they would have to add to that concern a new motivation, the motivation of love springing from the realization of forgiveness. The Pharisees’ problem was not that they were too righteous, it was that they were not righteous enough. Here is the clue we are looking for. Forgiveness, or any of the other benefits we get from God, are not ends in themselves; they are means to a much greater end. When we try to make ourselves acceptable to God by our good works, all our righteousness is just damnable pride. God wants the good works, but he wants them to be an expression of that wondering love which springs from a grateful heart. He wants the righteous behavior, but only when we have stopped trying to prove by it that we can be as good as God!
All this is illustrated beautifully in the story of the Exodus. Did God ask the Hebrew people to live perfectly righteous lives for a couple hundred years before he would deliver them from Egypt? Hardly! He simply delivered them for love’s sake alone. It was only after they had been delivered and were on their way to the Promised Land that he offered them his covenant. What were the terms of the covenant? If the people would agree to belong exclusively to God, he would care for them and bless them in wonderful ways. Of course the people jumped at the opportunity. Of course they wanted the God who had just shown himself to be both gracious and all-powerful to be their God. But what would it mean to belong exclusively to God? Would it involve lots of strange rituals and weird, secret magic? No. Apart from serving God alone, not making any idols, not dragging his reputation in the mud, and showing that all their time was his by how they treated the seventh day, all of God’s commands had to do with how they treated other people—ethics! What a strange idea!
What does my ethical behavior have to do with my relationship with God? Only everything. In the covenant, God placed a series of ethical requirements upon the people (like not oppressing their workers), and then said, “for you must be holy, just as I am holy.” God’s holiness is not some magical essence of his, it is his character. And what he was trying to impress upon the Hebrew people was that if they were to live with him, their characters had to be just like his. Since the Hebrews belonged to God, if he did not oppress people, then they could not oppress people either. But their obedience was not for the purpose of entering into a relationship with God; they were already in one simply because of his grace. Rather, God intended for righteous, ethical living to be a response to the grace that he had already given. Holy character is the goal of all of God’s covenants of love in the Old Testament.
The same thing is true in the New Testament. Over and over again, Paul announces that if anyone thinks they can make themselves good enough for God by keeping the law (the covenant commands), they are badly mistaken. Use the law in that way, he says, and the only thing it will do is damn you for your failures to keep it perfectly. No, he says, accept your salvation—your forgiven relationship with God—as a free gift to you by means of Christ’s sacrifice of himself. But then, in letter after letter, and with what seem like surprising words to those who do not know the Old Testament, Paul turns right around and commands Christians to do nothing contrary to God’s law. To this we respond, “Surely, Paul, if obedience to God’s covenant commands cannot bring us into a forgiven relationship with God, there is no reason to obey them at all.” To that suggestion, Paul responds explosively, “Not at all! Don’t you understand? Christ came to deliver us from bondage to sin! How could you even think of continuing to live in that bondage if you have ever experienced the love of God?” (See Romans 6, Galatians 5 and 6, I Thessalonians 4 and 5, etc.) Nor is this just Paul’s idea. It appears in I Peter and also in I John. All of these apostles understood that God’s purpose in delivering us from the condemnation of sin was so that we would live holy lives, lives that mirrored the ethical character of God.
But there is a problem; and that problem, just like the original expectation, appears first in the Old Testament. Once you understand and accept that the natural response to God’s grace is to want to live his life, it would seem that all you have to do is do it. That’s what the Hebrews thought, too. When Moses instructed the people to call down a curse of death upon themselves if they ever broke any covenant commands, they agreed to at once (Exodus 24:1-8). Little did they know that within a month they would be dancing around a golden calf! And the rest of the Old Testament is a story of the Jews’ escalating despair over their inability to live the life of God, a life which they increasingly understood was the best life—the one we were all designed to live.
So, what to do? One approach was to pad the biblical laws with twice as many additional laws so that if the additional ones got broken, at least the biblical ones would not. But as Jesus pointed out in rather strong language to the Pharisees, that still does not get at the real problem—a heart that does not want to give itself away to God and others. That is the problem: our wills are not a clean page which we can give over to God by a simple, decisive act. No, the Bible teaches us that the human will is deeply perverted. It is determined to serve itself, please itself, and exalt itself in ways most of us are shocked to uncover in ourselves. For most of us, just as for the Hebrew people, it is only when we decide to accept God’s love in Christ and attempt to live his life, that we discover how deeply ingrained that twisted will is. Even our righteous living can become just another attempt to make ourselves look good.
God’s plan confronted the problem from another angle entirely. His plan, as revealed in the promises he made through several of the prophets, was to give his Spirit. The human spirit was helpless to live a life of true holiness, because it was held hostage to the perverted will. So God planned to give his Spirit—who until this point, had only been given to a few select leaders—to everybody. That would mean that God’s own Spirit would give people the power they lacked in themselves to live out God’s holy character in their lives. For an example, we read in Ezekiel 36:22-27:
“Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: It is not for your sake, O House of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Sovereign LORD, when I show myself holy through you before their eyes. For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; and I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; and I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.’”
This is why the disciples of Jesus were so excited when the Holy Spirit came on them. This was what the Hebrew people had been anticipating for hundreds of years—divine power to truly keep their covenant with God, to live lives like his.
This is what the death and resurrection of Jesus has made possible for all Christians—the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives so that we can live holy lives. But many Christians do not realize this. We have thought Christianity was about forgiveness and personal pleasure, comfort, and security. As a result, too many of us are missing out on the real benefits of Christianity here on earth—the privilege of living as we were meant to live, with love to give in place of hatred and contempt, with integrity in place of deceit and self-serving, with self-forgetfulness (humility) in place of all the puffery and self-marketing, with pure and faithful relations in place of perverse and faithless ones, with glad, self-giving in place of the fearful, self-protection which is all around us. This is the life which is a true pleasure, the one in which there is real security. This is what we have been made for.
Not only do many of us fail to understand that we are expected to live holy lives, we haven’t comprehended that when we received Christ, we received the Holy Spirit in whom all the power to live holy lives exists. As a result many of us are like the couple who lived in an electrically wired house using candles for light. When they were asked why they did not use the power, they replied that they had never had the electricity turned on because they were afraid to let the power company know where they lived, for fear somebody from the company would come and spy on them. A lot of us are like that with the Holy Spirit. We have accepted Christ, so everything we need is in place. The Holy Spirit is in us and is ready to fill us with himself and empower us to be the holy people we were made to be. But we live in the dark. Why? Because our perverse wills hold us in slavery, telling us that if we were to really let the Holy Spirit take control of our lives, we would lose our independence. What we would really lose would be our inability to live our Savior’s life in our homes and workplaces. What we would really lose would be our foolish pride which poisons our relations with other people, especially with those we love most. What we would really lose would be the self-centeredness which twists every good intent back upon itself.
Independence? Yes, the independence of a galley-slave who is afraid to accept adoption from the captain of the ship because then the captain might command him to do something. Who would not gladly give up an independence like that to share the Captain’s life and love?
This is what biblical holiness is—the power and the freedom to live the life of God, even if everything around you should be slipping away into corruption, hatred, and despair. It is not a life of self-righteousness, or priggishness, or bizarre, mindless behavior. It is, in the words of John Wesley, “loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
What do you need to do to experience God’s holiness through the fullness of the Holy Spirit? Nothing different than what you did when you received Christ. You need to repent of your proud and selfish determination to run your (Christian) life the way you want. You need to believe that Christ really can give you his character, not merely on the surface, but through and through. You need to make an absolute, irrevocable surrender of your will to him. And you need to ask him in faith to fill you, now, receiving his promise in faith. This is the door to genuine holiness. Will you open it?
John Oswalt is the Beeson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He is a noted Old Testament scholar and a contributing editor to Good News.
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