Last time we talked about how our understanding of holiness must take into account the fact that God created us to be human beings. It wasn’t like, that’s our starting point, and then later, if we were good, we’d be upgraded to “angelic beings.” We were made human and that was “good.” Being human is good. Being humans who desire god-like capacity and aim to achieve it on our own through life-hacking analytics and will-power is not good.
The quest to be like a god without recognizing that we were made “in the image” of the One True God is what Adam and Eve’s sin was about. It’s what so many of our sins continue to be about. Call it pride, ingratitude, folly: it is these and more. And yet it continues, in Christians, as we “pursue holiness” as if it were a project to rid ourselves of our creatureliness and break through into a Gnostic ideal of purity: “all that is human, put off.”
This does a disservice to what we’ve received from God in our design. It’s living with an ingratitude and unhappiness about precisely what God meant for our good. And it keeps us from genuine holiness. The Gnostic urge to free ourselves from humanness is in direct competition with the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives.
What the Spirit is Doing
The Spirit of Jesus Christ is at work in our lives. What is the Spirit of holiness doing? “Renewing us in the image of our Creator.” (Col 3: 10) The Spirit is restoring us to our essential humanity, returning us to “the image of God.”
This work of redemption does not erase our creatureliness or our createdness. It restores it. We become real humans again!
We discover ourselves to be created creatures; that is, essential loved and thought of and cared for and looked after. We discover ourselves to be creations; that is, specially thought of, important to someone, made for a reason.
And so we may come to be at peace with ourselves and with all things, because we now know ourselves to be living in a world that is overseen by a good, loving, wise, knowing Creator-God. We see His care everywhere. And where we don’t see His care, well, we see enough of it in enough places to be able to trust Him for the places where the intricacy of His design is too fine for our limited intelligences to discern.
Coming Away and Going Further
And isn’t this holiness? We become utterly separate from the Babel-ish violence, greed, and fear of the world. We pull out of the station, leaving the world’s disobedient striving, clawing, grabbing, pushing, worrying, abuse, misuse, and destruction behind. We become separate from their motives, their loves, their fears, their ambitions, because we know ourselves to be something other, in a world that is new.
And in this separateness, we become gifts. We become shining lights, radiating comfort and hope, Good News, to the world. Now we too, like Jesus, can touch the sore-ridden terrified and hopeless and see them changed. For we have been changed by the Spirit of Jesus. But not into something higher than a human, but into, at last, precisely a human.
The Splendor of Holiness
I find it so interesting how disappointing this all sounds to my spirit! I don’t want to be a “mere” human! But there’s nothing “mere” about it. Listen:
“I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made! Wonderful are your works, my soul knows it very well.” (Psa 139:14)
Receiving the limits and boundaries implicit in our design is a good thing. But, as so many mature Christians have observed, these are limits that don’t reduce but enlarge, boundaries that don’t enclose but unleash. As Lewis wrote: “the inside is bigger than the outside.”
There is fear and wonder awaiting the soul who can learn the ways of the works of God waiting to be disclosed in the design of how we are made. Holiness lies dormant and broken in our humanity. But the Spirit of God is here, at last. And all things will be made new. And we shall worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness.
Does your soul know how carefully and wonderfully made you are? Has that settled you, removed anxiety and fear-of-missing-out? Has that stirred your spirit to be what God has made you to be—what Irenaeus is credited as describing as "man fully alive"? May you know the care with which God made you, the love with which He leads you and pursues you, the attention of His Spirit to your gracious restoration, and may you be at once calmed and thrilled.
Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash
