Defining Holiness

Of all the attibutes of God, holiness has been the most difficult for me to get a handle on. Years ago, when I was doing a series on God’s attributes, I wrote this about holiness:

Writing about God’s attributes hasn’t been easy, but of all the attributes that I’ve written about, this one has been the most difficult, because it’s not been easy for me to to understand exactly what it means that God is holy. Is it even right to think of God’s holiness in the same way we think of the other attributes of God? It doesn’t seems to be so much one among others, but rather, God’s overarching attribute—the attribute into which all the other attributes fit.

Here’s how J. I. Packer describes the holiness of God:

God is holy, different and standing apart from us, awesome and sometimes becoming fearsome to us. Holiness is a biblical technical term signifying the God-ness of God, the combined quality of being infinite and eternal; omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; utterly pure and just; utterly faithful to his own purposes and promises; morally perfect in all his relationships; and marvelously merciful to persons meriting the opposite of mercy. God in his holiness is greatly to be praised and worshipped for both his greatness and his goodness at all times.

Quoting from Taking God Seriously: Vital Things We Need to Know (page 26).

Faith Itself Is a Blood-Bought Benefit

From the very last chapter of From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, “My Glory I Will Not Give to Another,” by John Piper:

[O]ne of the promises made in the new covenant is that the condition of faith itself will be given by God. This means that the new covenant people are created and preserved by God. “I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me” (Jer. 32:40). God puts the fear of God in us in the first place. And God keeps us from turning away. He creates his new people and keeps his new people. And he does this by the blood of the covenant, which Jesus said was his own blood (Luke 22:20).

The upshot of this understanding of the new covenant is that there is a definite atonement for the new covenant people. In the death of Christ, God secures a definite group of unworthy sinners as his own people by purchasing the conditions they must meet to be part of his people. The blood of the covenant—Christ’s blood—purchases and guarantees the new heart of faith and repentance. God did not do this for everyone. He did it for a “definite” or a “particular” group, owing to nothing in themselves. And since he did it through Jesus Christ,1 the Great Shepherd, who laid down his life for the sheep, we say, “to him be glory forever and ever.” This achievement is a significant part of the glory of the cross of Christ.

If saving faith is a blood-bought benefit of the new covenant (Piper argues from scripture that it is.), then the atonement must be definite. There’s really no way around it.

Previously posted quotes from this book:

• Someone for Some People
• Death Is the Penalty
• Election Is the Spring
• Election Circumscribes the Atonement
• The Circle of Salvation
• Still Bearing Wounds
• Three Features of Typology
• Providing Confidence for Mission

1See Hebrews 13:20-21 where it says God is “working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ… .”

Providing Confidence for Mission

Quoting from Daniel Strange’s chapter, Slain for the World, in From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, on definite atonement as grounds for missions:

Far from dampening the motivation to missions, definite atonement provides great confidence for Christian mission. The message we proclaim is not that of a gospel offer which construes the atonement as providing merely the possibility of salvation or the opportunity of salvation, for “it is not the opportunity of salvation that is offered; it is salvation. And it is salvation because Christ is offered and Christ does not invite us to mere opportunity but to himself.”1 Moreover, in the spirit of the Lord’s words to Paul—“I have many in this city who are my people” (Acts 18:10)—we are confident in the unity of the triune God’s sovereign economy of salvation, for we know that wherever we proclaim the gospel, God’s Spirit has gone before, relating to all personally through the ever-present revelation of himself both externally in creation and history and internally in the imago Dei. While this revelation is both sinfully suppressed and substituted, it is never totally erased, so that all know God and are “without excuse.” But more, in God’s amazing graciousness and mercy, and in a myriad of ways, we are confident that he has been preparing his own people, those for whom Christ died, to receive the gospel message we proclaim, in saving repentance and faith.

Previously posted quotes from this book:

• Someone for Some People
• Death Is the Penalty
• Election Is the Spring
• Election Circumscribes the Atonement
• The Circle of Salvation
• Still Bearing Wounds
• Three Features of Typology

1 Original footnote: “John Murray, ‘The Atonement and the Free Offer of the Gospel,’ in Collected Writings of John Murray. Volume 1: The Claims of Truth (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1976), 83.”