Holier Than Thou
Holier Than Thou: How God’s Holiness Helps Us Trust Him
By: Jackie Hill Perry
“If there is anything I want this work to do, it’s to show you God. There is no one greater. No one better. No one worthy of our entire selves, and I believe that as you see him as he is, you’ll want to be just like him too. Holy.”
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” —Tozer
Jackie Hill Perry’s book Gay Girl, Good God is excellent, and I enjoyed hearing her teach a chapter in the book When You Pray, as well as hearing her live at a conference. JHP is a great communicator, especially in person.
This book is written in the same way as she would teach to you face-to-face. It has the poetic/spoken word feel that she is so good at. There were some parts periodically that I had to reread to grasp what her emphasis or point was because I’m reading it instead of listening to her say it with the right emphasis and inflection that drives the point home.
For the most part, that didn’t bother me. It was interesting to me to see how her version of describing or explaining a well-known-to-me concept or doctrine shed a new light and brought new life to it.
Here’s just a little snippet that shows part of her writing style, “You look at the dirt and see a home for your plants; he looked at it and knew he’d name it Adam.”
JHP writes with confidence and powerful belief because she is, like her last chapter encourages, beholding our God. Her way of communicating inspires you to want to see the Lord the same way she does.
As I was reflecting on this book, I was thinking about the title phrase— holier than thou. We typically use this phrase as a judgment against those that act like they’re better than us or people we perceive to have it all together and doing all the right things. We usually say it because we feel deficient or jealous and we want to bring the other person down to our level so we don’t feel so bad about our own choices.
This book rightly places us in the correct position in relation to God. He IS holier than us.
“How we live is the evidence of what we believe about God. If Lord, we serve. If Creator, we’re humble. If Savior, we trust… The problem with our nature is that it corrupts our minds, inflates our ego, meddles with our vision, and darkens our understanding so that when God decides to tell us anything, we determine its integrity by how we feel over who God has revealed Himself to be. That is not to say that all unbelief is emotional, but it is to say that our decision-making in regards to what we believe about God is never isolated from our affections.”
I think it’s common in today’s world for people to look at some of God’s commands and deem him immoral because that’s not a law they would put into practice. They believe they know better than God what is good and right. That’s the heart of all rebellion against God— to say ‘we don’t need you, we know better, we have a better plan.’
When we want to be ‘like God’, it’s not “in terms of righteousness but of rights”— because we want to be the ultimate authority. As if we could ever bear the weight of that.
This thought is convicting:
“The reason we… find the confidence to accuse God of injustice whenever his gavel falls too hard for our liking is because we have a ridiculously low view of sin and an equally mediocre grasp of the holiness of God.”
A low view of sin and a mediocre grasp of holiness.
We don’t want to be confronted with the true reality and gravity of our sin. And so to keep ourselves from feeling too bad about it, we have to thus deflate how we think of God and how we view holiness. It’s almost as if we look at God with the ‘holier than thou’ posture.
A right view of God’s holiness does not allow us a low view of sin because we see God for who he is. His immutability. His love. His justice. His self-sufficiency. His goodness. And we see how we measure up (if we can even call it that) to him.
The definition of ‘holy’ is set apart, “unique, different, other, and distinct from everything that exists”. We can’t be equal to God because there is none like him. He is other.
JHP is compelling as she uses logic and Scripture to walk us through understanding the holiness of God. To lead us away from a path of rebellion and to find the path of obedience and trust.
“If God is holy, then he can’t sin. If God can’t sin, then he can’t sin against me. If he can’t sin against me, shouldn’t that make him the most trustworthy being there is?”
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“If Jesus was as sinful as they claimed, everything He said about Himself would be a lie, justifying their unbelief. But if Jesus was as holy as He seemed, then everything He said about himself, God, their heart, their world, and the world to come was true and worthy to be believed.”
_____
“If through the power of another’s resurrection, we actually decide to finally agree with God, that He is the Creator of everything and therefore has claim on everything, including the heart, mind, and body, then we are obligated to give to God what He rightly deserves: our entire self. This is an impossible thing if in fact you believe what the devil has told you. That you are all the god you need. That every gift given to men, including everything from sex to the sun, is yours to exploit. To squeeze the beauty out of everything until it is no longer good but god. The inevitable consequence of not believing what God has said about Himself is to take what God has made and called it Lord… If He is just love and not judge, which is no love at all really, then we can rebel without accountability. This is the pseudo-freedom that sinners prefer. Life on their terms… If we are brave enough to actually believe that God is who He says He is, we are left with one choice: worship.”
She writes chapters focusing on different facets of understanding God’s holiness: moral perfection, transcendence, idolatry, justice, and vision.
All of these things are reminders and reasons for why we can trust God instead of rebel against him.
His moral perfection means he is good all the time. His love is completely untainted by a sinful nature. There is no temptation for God to act other than his very good nature.
His transcendence means he is independent from his creation. The wind and the waves obey him. He is self-sufficient and without need. We don’t have to ‘appease’ him and ‘be good enough’ to sustain him. All he does stems from love, not of need. His knowledge is transcendent— he knows everything.
Idols are manufactured, created things, that we look to instead of God for our worth or our security.
“But if a made thing didn’t make you then it surely can’t make you whole.”
Psalm 135 reminds us how impotent idols are: “They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.”
We may not have a Baal statue in our home, but our replacements (“sexual identity, sex, autonomy, intellect, relationships, money, marriage, legalism, politics, power, ethnicity, food, social media, children”) are equally impotent to save us. Nothing and no one is like our eternal, all-powerful, saving Lord.
His justice means that he “cannot be indifferent toward sin.” It means all wrongs will be made right. We all understand this when we see an injustice go unpunished. That passion is traced back to our Creator and his moral code that signals to us when righteousness has been discarded.
Knowing he is just also highlights his forbearance. His mercy toward sinners. We are not always on the right side of ‘justice’ and yet the Lord is patient as he waits for us to turn toward Him and realign our definitions of love and justice.
When JHP talks about holy vision she reminds us that we are dead in our sins and need a regenerated heart. We are blind and indifferent to all that is good and glorious until the Lord opens our eyes to see his beauty.
I’ve heard it taught before, but it’s no less true each time I hear it: We become what we behold.
“Beholding the Lord is fundamentally active. The sun in all of its radiance, shines above us on most days, but it will only be seen by those who decide to turn their faces up and look.”
“Where do we look? What can show us such glory that we might be changed by it?… It is the Holy Scriptures that put forth a constant picture of God, as He is to be seen and understood.”
And as we flesh out more and more of who God is, we are confronted with a truth that we would be foolish to reject: We can trust our God because he is holy.
The only response is trust, obedience, worship.
Sanctification. Becoming like Him who we behold. Becoming more like Jesus.
Read 1 Peter 1 and Peter reminds us of God’s law in Leviticus that we should be holy for he is holy. When he opens our eyes to who He is, we are to be transformed and set apart for his purpose.
JHP recalls how Jesus identifies himself as the bread of life and the living water. For those who never want to thirst or be hungry again.
“To be satisfied is to be full. To be full is to mean that there is no more room for anything else. So then, holiness begins to characterize those who trust Christ to fill them with Himself because all their needs, in body, mind, and soul, are met in God, which sets them free from depending on anything else in heaven and earth to do the same.”
It’s possible you read this book and find her writing style challenging or not your flavor. It is a different style than most theological writing. I hope it doesn’t keep you from meditating on God’s holiness. There are plenty of other books to try and I would also recommend these:
None Like Him by Jen Wilkin
The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul
Holiness by J.C. Ryle
The Hole in our Holiness by Kevin DeYoung
I also think D.A. Carson’s book The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God covers some of the same things JHP does in terms of God’s love and justice.
Jackie Hill Perry also has a Bible study called Jude: Contending for the Faith in Today’s Culture in both an adult and a teen version that I haven’t done yet but am interested in that you might want to check out as well!
Recommendation
This is a convicting and comforting book because it pulls us back from our tendencies to make idols and question God’s goodness and reminds us of who God really is.
If you don’t read many theology books or you read all of them, her presentation of theological concepts might be what helps you understand something that seemed incomprehensible or stale before.
Jackie Hill Perry renews the truths we’ve been taught and admonishes us to trust in our Holy God. What freedom there is to see God as he has revealed himself to be and to know that He has chosen us in love! Where else could we possibly go for he is the only path to life— life abundant, life eternal.
I’m sure this is a book I’ll come back to when my sin nature tries to turn my face from the Lord to look at my circumstances and pain. When I’m tempted to question God, this will be a good little shoulder shake: “Remember who He is!”
There truly is none like him and I definitely recommend this book to help you see how confident we can be in resting in that truth.
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