But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. For the Scriptures say, “You must be holy because I am holy.”
For most of us, the command to be holy in this passage can be difficult to understand and accept. After all, it is completely logical for God to be holy— morally perfect and pure— for that is exactly who God is, but to impose this same expectation on fallen humanity is to presume that we are capable of producing moral perfection on our own.
Yet, even Jesus Himself said, “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18).
In fact, the entire concept of the holiness of God means that God is unlike anyone else in the universe. God is wholly unique and His thoughts are not our thoughts nor His ways, our ways (Isaiah 55:8).
Biblical Definition of Holiness
Holiness in the original Hebrew is ‘qodesh’ which means to be “sacred” or “set apart”. God’s holiness means that He is entirely set apart from all creation because He created all things. His essential attributes of omniscience (all knowing), omnipresence (ever present) and omnipotence (all powerful) are the defining aspects of His holiness because they set Him apart from us.
By definition, only God can be holy and therefore, the holiness He demands from us must be a holiness that is attainable from human standards. Specifically, God demands a type of holiness that separates us from our past and the patterns of this world.
However, without proper context, one can easily interpret 1 Peter 1:15-16 and many passages like it, from a works-based, religious perspective. If one were to simply read this passage at face-value, the resulting application might be to strive to adopt and maintain a set of behaviours in order to live a morally pure life. In other words, the corrupted human nature will always default to strive to obey God’s commands through self-righteousness. But, the Bible teaches us quite clearly that the righteousness of humanity cannot satisfy the righteousness that God requires from us.
Romans 10:3 says, “For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.” This means that there is a difference between God’s righteousness and self-righteousness.
Self Righteousness vs. God’s Righteousness
The predicament of self-righteousness began with the fall of Adam and Eve when they sought to cover their shame with man-made garments woven from the leaves of the trees surrounding them. Even though God had created them perfectly holy and declared His creation to be “good”, their disobedience led them to view themselves in “shame”. Instead of reverting to what God had said about them, out of their striving for righteousness, they sought to cover their own mess by their own works.
In much the same way, sin invariably corrupts our view of God’s righteousness so that the good works we offer to God in order to appease Him are tainted by selfish motives. This is why Isaiah says, “Our righteous deeds are like filthy garments” (64:6).
God sees self-righteousness as filthy because it is a fallen imitation of God’s holiness. It seeks to justify our wrongdoings in light of our good works. It presents to the holy and just Judge of the Universe, a counterfeit righteousness in the hopes that God will ignore the selfish motives our good works are founded upon.
Self-righteousness does not seek righteousness for righteousness’ sake, rather, its primary motive is to seek to be accepted by God by the good that we do. Even though we know that God cannot simply ignore our wrongdoings.
But the Good News in Christ is summarised in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him”.
This means that even though Jesus Christ was sinless, He endured the punishment of a sinner on the cross. Why? So that the sinner may be declared righteous in Him.
God sees you and I as completely righteous, even though we are sinners. Not by blind ignorance, but by ‘imputing’ or ‘crediting’ the righteousness of Christ to our lives the moment we believed. In exchange, the sinful intentions, actions, words and reactions that made our garments filthy, were dealt upon Christ at Calvary.
Holiness is a State of Being, not a Set of Behaviours
Holiness is not a set of behaviours that one must continuously exhibit and can consequently lose if we fail to uphold its standard. Rather, it is a state of being that God declares upon us at the moment of salvation.
Jesus said it like this: “You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you” (John 15:3).
Holiness in Christ, therefore, is less about striving to become what we are not and more about growing into all that God has declared us to be. You are already holy, therefore, be holy!
This type of holiness cannot be earned but is freely given to us through Christ by the will and intent of God, and because you cannot earn this holiness by your works, you cannot lose it by your mistakes. It is holiness that remains.
Holiness is made evident in our lives through the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit. As Paul declares, “But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you” (Romans 8:11).
Therefore, Peter’s commandment for us to be holy just as God is holy, is entirely possible for God does not demand holiness from us without first depositing the Holy Spirit in us.
God’s expectation for holiness in all things takes into account the fallen nature of our world and our carnal flesh. However, holiness is no longer a promised land that we strive to enter into, but the land on which we live on and are sustained by. As Paul says, we are no longer slaves to sin, but we are slaves to righteousness (Romans 6:18).
To be a slave to God’s righteousness is to constantly yield to the convicting presence of the Holy Spirit, who prompts us to test all things and to hold fast to that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). It is His Holy Spirit that purifies our motives from striving to receive God’s acceptance, towards the primary ethic of self-sacrificial love.
Holy Spirit makes us holy
In essence, to be holy means to be guided by the Holy Spirit who works within us to produce fruits of righteousness for the benefit of others, at the expense of our selfishness. It is He who may also simultaneously convict and correct us when we act upon the deeds of the flesh. Simply put, it is the Holy Spirit who produces holiness in our lives.
To be declared righteous does not absolve us from the consequences of our sin, nor gives us license to sin, but as we all can attest, His holiness actually compels us in conviction and repentance to become all that God has declared us to be.
To be holy is to be like the sinless Christ and the mystery and the grace of the Gospel is that Christ also lives in us as Treasure in jars of clay. For just as Christ exemplified a life that was in constant surrender to the will of the Father and the prompting of the Holy Spirit, so too can we aim to live a life that glorifies God.
To be holy in all things, therefore, simply means the following: “To be holy just as God, who is in you, is holy.”
