📖 Radical Christianity: The Ten Commandments of Jesus — Unit 5: Be Holy

1. Be Holy, For I Am Holy

Of all the commands of Jesus, this one can sound the most intimidating, because it seems to set the standard impossibly high: be holy, as God Himself is holy. Yet Peter does not present it as a crushing burden but as the natural calling of those whom God has called. The reason given is not our ability but God's character: because He who called us is holy, we are to be holy too. Holiness is not first something we generate; it is something we are summoned into by the One who is already holy and who has claimed us as His own.

So before we can obey this command, we have to understand it. What does it actually mean to be holy? The word carries a great deal of fear and confusion, and many people hear it as a demand to be flawless or grimly religious. Scripture means something both simpler and deeper, and getting it right changes everything about how we pursue it.

2. Holy Means Different

At its root, the word holy means to be different — set apart, distinct, not like the common run of things. That is why so many things in Scripture can be called holy. God Himself is holy because He is different from every other object that men have ever worshiped; He is in a category entirely His own, unlike every idol and every rival god. The Bible is called holy because it stands apart from all other books, set apart by God for His purposes. A day, a place, a vessel could be called holy in Israel for the same reason: it had been set apart from ordinary use and devoted to God.

This is the key that unlocks the whole command. To be holy is not first to be sinless or perfect; it is to be set apart — different from the world, marked out as belonging to God. Paul says the same thing in different words: do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed, presenting yourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God (Romans 12:1-2). Holiness is the quality of a life that no longer simply blends in with everything around it, because it has been claimed by a God who is Himself unlike anything around it.

3. Holiness Seen: The Vision of Isaiah

The great illustration of holiness in all of Scripture is the vision Isaiah was given. He saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and lifted up, and the seraphim around Him were calling out to one another, "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory." In Hebrew, to say a thing three times is to raise it to the highest possible degree; the angels do not merely call God holy, they name Him holy beyond all measure. This is holiness no longer merely defined but seen — the blazing otherness of God filling the temple.

And notice what the sight does to Isaiah. He does not feel inspired or comforted; he is undone. "Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips," he cries, for to stand before the holy God is to know at once how unholy we are. The same truth meets us from the other side in Moses. When Moses asked to see God's glory, the answer was that he could not see God's face and live, for no one can; God hid him in the cleft of the rock and covered him with His hand, letting only His goodness pass by. In the presence of the absolute holiness of God, sinful man cannot stand — he is undone, even destroyed. To ask to see the glory is to ask to see the holiness, and unshielded, it would consume us.

Yet neither vision ends in destruction. For Moses, God Himself provides the shielding rock and the covering hand; for Isaiah, a seraph takes a live coal from the altar and touches his lips, and his guilt is taken away, his sin purged. In both, the rescue comes from God's side — the rock, the hand, the altar, the coal — never from anything the man summons in himself. The best we can hope for today is to see the backside of God, as Moses did: a real but shielded and partial sight, never yet the full, unveiled blaze of His face. The whole arc of this unit is already present here: the set-apart holiness of God, our uncleanness exposed by it, and a cleansing we receive rather than achieve. As one way of putting it has it, glory is the holiness of God revealed, and holiness is the glory of God concealed — the same divine perfection, now blazing out to fill the earth, now hidden in the quiet set-apartness of God's own character.

And yet, even now, we are not left without sight of Him. We do not see God with physical eyes — no one can, and live — but we truly see Him with the eyes of the heart, the inner sight God enlightens in those who are His. This is no faint or unreal seeing. A church member once told me that God had become more real to him than the wife he had been married to for many years. That is the kind of sight the holy God grants His people even here: not yet His face, but Himself made more real to the heart than the things we touch with our hands. The backside of God now, with the eyes of the heart; His unveiled face one day, when we shall see Him as He is.

4. A Holy Nation

Peter goes on to apply this to the whole people of God. We are called a holy nation — a people set apart, His own special possession. The very phrase means a community that is different, called out of the darkness that everyone else takes for normal and into God's marvelous light. Holiness, then, is not the private project of a few unusually spiritual individuals; it is the calling of the entire people of God together. To belong to Christ is to belong to a set-apart people.

This rescues holiness from being a lonely, anxious striving. We are not each trying single-handedly to manufacture a flawless life. We have been brought into a people God has already declared to be His own and set apart for Himself, and our calling is to live in a way that matches what God has already said we are. The command "be holy" is, in large part, the call to become in practice what God has already made us in fact.

5. The Honest Truth About Perfection

Here we must be honest, because this is where much confusion and discouragement enters. There are groups within the church that go by the name "holiness," and some have even taught that it is possible to reach sinless perfection in this life. But the Bible never actually says that. Scripture calls us to holiness, commands us to pursue it with everything in us, and takes our sin with deadly seriousness — but it nowhere promises that we will fully arrive in this world. The honest testimony of every saint, and of Scripture itself, is that we press toward holiness while still confessing sin and depending on grace.

This is not an excuse for spiritual laziness; it is a guard against two opposite errors. On one side is the despair of those who, measuring themselves against perfection, conclude they have failed and give up. On the other is the pride of those who imagine they have already arrived and so stop growing. The truth keeps us humble and hopeful at once: we are genuinely called to be different, set apart, increasingly like our God — and we are honest that in this life the pursuit is never finished.

6. One Day We Shall Be Like Him

If we never fully arrive here, where does the pursuit of holiness lead? Scripture gives a breathtaking answer: one day we shall see Him as He is, and we shall be like Him. The holiness we reach for now in part will one day be ours completely, not by our own achievement but by the transforming sight of Christ Himself. What we cannot finish, He will finish in us. The very next verse adds that everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure — so the certainty of future holiness is not an excuse to coast now but the great motive to keep pursuing it.

This is the hope that makes the honest admission of section four bearable. We do not pursue holiness in despair, as if everything depended on our reaching perfection by our own strength. We pursue it in confidence, knowing the One who called us holy will one day make us fully like Himself.

7. Saints: Declared Holy in God's Courtroom

This is also why the New Testament can call ordinary believers "saints" — literally, "holy ones." The saints of Scripture were not a special class of people canonized by the church for extraordinary lives. They were ordinary believers who had been declared holy because Jesus had died for their sins. Every Christian, however weak, is a saint in this sense, because holiness in its first and deepest sense is a gift God grants, not a status we earn.

The legal word for this is justification, and it helps to picture a courtroom. To be justified is to be declared free before God's bar of judgment. But notice carefully why the verdict is "free." It is not because we are found innocent — we are not innocent, and God does not pretend otherwise. It is because the penalty for our guilt has already been paid in full by Christ. The Judge can righteously declare us free because justice has been satisfied at the cross. So we begin the Christian life already declared holy in Christ, and only then are we summoned to live out, day by day, the holiness that has been credited to us.

8. The Goal Is a Person, Not an Action

This brings us to the heart of the matter, and it is easy to miss. When we hear "be holy," we instinctively turn it into a checklist of actions to perform and sins to avoid. But the goal of holiness is not finally an action at all. The goal is a Person, and the Person is Jesus Christ. We strive to be holy as He was holy; holiness is, at bottom, Christlikeness — being conformed to Him. There is a well-loved worship chorus built entirely around a single cry for holiness, and that longing, rightly understood, is a longing for Christ Himself.

This changes the whole character of the pursuit. If holiness were a list of actions, we would either grow proud at keeping it or despair at breaking it. But because the goal is a Person, the pursuit of holiness becomes the pursuit of Jesus — loving Him, beholding Him, growing to resemble Him. We do not chase an abstract standard; we follow a Savior, and as we look to Him, we are changed into His likeness. Holiness is not less than moral seriousness, but it is much more: it is becoming like the One we love.

9. Set Apart in This World

What does such holiness look like in everyday life? It looks like being genuinely different — set apart unto God, with no appetite for the distractions that consume everyone else. Consider John the Baptist, who lived in the wilderness, refused to look or sound like his world, and was wholly set apart unto God, wanting nothing that would pull him from his calling. His life was strange to his neighbors precisely because it was devoted; he was a man marked out for God, and his very difference was his message.

So the command stands, and it is not as crushing as it first sounded. To be holy is to be different because God is different; to be set apart because He has set us apart; to be honest that we have not yet arrived, and hopeful because one day we shall be like Him; to rest in the holiness already declared ours in Christ, and to spend our days pursuing the One who is our holiness. And so the deepest longing of the believer, the longing that chorus puts into song, turns out to be a longing for a Person — and His name is Jesus.

Submit Exam & Check Pass Reset Unit