We’d almost made it out the door of church on Sunday when I was pulled into a conversation by a friend who was engaged in a discussion with someone I didn’t know. The discussion concerned a “short answer” for those whose response to “God loves us” was to ask where God’s love was when He told Israel to kill all the Canaanites (as one example). According to the person asking the question, this is a common attack point on TikTok, and he wanted a quick comeback that was also TikTok-sized (short).
My response was that God’s actions with respect to Israel and Canaan, and other similar circumstances in Scripture, e.g. Ananias and Sapphira, were due to God’s holiness. The person didn’t think much of that, and said, as part of his response: “Nobody cares about God’s holiness.”
I haven’t been able to get those words out of my mind for several reasons, starting with the utterly dismissive way in which they were said. What’s most concerning is the feeling that the words are accurate, and further, as this conversation demonstrated, accurate inside the church as well as out. (As I said, I don’t know him, so I don’t know his thoughts on God’s holiness in general. But he was definitely dismissive of it being relevant to the discussion at hand.)
One of the difficulties with God’s holiness is that we don’t really have a starting point for understanding it. We can somewhat grasp God’s love (or think we can) because we love. We can somewhat grasp God’s wrath because we get mad. We at least have a starting place for (most of?) the rest of God’s attributes. We have no basis for understanding holiness, though, because we are not holy, even in the smallest part, and no one else is, either.
Lest you think I came to this on my own, let me dispel that with prejudice. Almost forty years ago, the pastor of the church I was a member of asked a question of the Sunday night attendees in the middle of his sermon. He would occasionally engage in some back and forth on Sunday night—he was (a little) more relaxed than on Sunday morning. His question that night was, “What is God’s defining characteristic?” (To repeat, it’s been almost forty years, so that’s as close an approximation to the question as I can remember.) The congregation responded with the expected: “Love,” “righteousness,” and so forth. He let it go on for a minute or so, got a dozen or more responses, and finally said, “Nope, no one’s gotten it. I asked my wife earlier this week and—she is such a godly woman—she came out with it immediately: holiness. His defining characteristic is holiness, because only He is holy.” A decade or so later I co-taught Sunday School with his widow for a couple of years, and I can confirm the accuracy of his statement—she is an extraordinarily godly woman! (Hi Cheryl!)
The church in America, of my lifetime at least, has an infatuation with love that we imported from the world (“all you need is … love”). We think God’s love for us is the basis for all of His actions, that His love has predominance over all of His other attributes. This is what allows us to so quickly look past our sin, because after all, He loves us, so it will be fine.
It’s also why the American church has a tendency to struggle with the very things the TikTokers are apparently1 attacking with, because if love is your only point, the argument falls apart pretty quickly. We seem to forget, or don’t notice—it’s not the Loving Spirit, it’s the Holy Spirit. (As an aside, and something I also said Sunday morning—don’t engage in sound bite arguments. Not on TikTok, not on Facebook, not on the Nazi hangout formerly known as Twitter, not anywhere. Have conversations, with actual people, in person.)
There’s a whole lot in the Bible that can be easily explained by God’s holiness that can’t be explained any other way. By attempting to explain it in some other way, Christians become part of the problem, rather than pointing to the solution. Further, God’s instructions to us rarely involve love. Micah’s famous trilogy, from 6:8, of things God calls us to do includes loving chesed (God’s covenant faithfulness, variously translated as lovingkindness, mercy, kindness, etc.), but not loving, full stop. The Beatitudes do not include “Blessed is he who loves.” Jesus did not say in the Great Commission, “Go and love all the nations.”
When He did tell us to love, we ignore Him: “But I tell you, love your enemies, pray [positively] for those who persecute you.” (Emphasis mine.)
(To forestall the inevitable—I didn’t say God doesn’t love us or that we shouldn’t love others. Merely that it’s not all that’s going on, and often not even the primary thing that’s going on.)
Isaiah understood. He heard the angels tell each other, “Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh of Hosts.” His response was the only appropriate one—“I am not (holy)—I am the opposite, a man of unclean (unholy) lips, and so is everyone around me.”
“Nobody cares about God’s holiness.” Let’s change that, one somebody at a time.