Rev Alexander McPherson
1. The negative aspect: sin is to be forsaken. The principal hindrance to growing in godliness is the tendency to sin which remains in those who seek deliverance from it and have undergone a saving change. As a result of remaining sin, their prayer continues to be while they are left in this world: “Me cleanse from sin, and thoroughly wash, from mine iniquity”. They know that salvation has taken place in two respects. Justification has already freed them from sin’s penalty and it has brought them into a permanent state of righteousness. Regeneration has freed them from the dominion of sin and made them aware of its evil nature. The convert will be in full agreement with Christ’s words to the man healed at Bethesda: “Sin no more”, and with every similar injunction in God’s Word. I quote only two of them: “Awake to righteousness and sin not” (1 Cor 15:34); “Let everyone that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity” (2 Tim 2:19).
It is hard to imagine a person moved to repentance, love and gratitude by a faith’s view of Christ crucified who does not set before himself the ideal of ceasing from sin. And the newly-saved sinner goes forth to life within the family, at work, and in the church desirous of being fully saved from sin.
Soon, however, the Christian becomes aware of failures and moral weakness. In some directions, the quest for holiness makes progress; yet other habits keep their grip. The matter is complicated by enlarged views of the nature of sin, by discovering new sins and by perceiving, as time goes on, that sin exists in thoughts, imaginations, motives, aims, desires, speech and attitudes. Still the ideal is not lost. The aim is not abandoned, divine help is given and the quest continued. But people are apt to make concessions to the idea that the attainment of piety can be regarded as very gradual. This hindrance to growth in grace is very common and deserves special attention.
The fact that growth is gradual has already been noted, but that is different from the believer taking comfort from the fact and adding to gradual the intensifier very. There is a great difference between thinking, I am not to sin; God says so – and, on the other hand, I must sin as little as possible. Once that qualification establishes itself, the way is open for all kinds of considerations to impede sanctification – such things as: This other habit is too strong; I don’t know when I shall overcome it; This other habit is an inherited weakness; This shortcoming really does no one any harm; I measure up to the
1The previous article, last month, introduced the subject.
standard of present-day piety; One has to live with others and cannot be aggressively different; I commit this sin less than I used to and can hope that it will gradually stop. In all these, the deceitfulness of the heart can be seen.
One or two texts forbidding sin have been mentioned. There is another whose emphasis is very striking. It is: “My little children, these things I write unto you, that ye sin not” (1 Jn 2:1). “Sin not” means, Do not sin at all; do not transgress God’s holy law. This is different from: I must sin as little as possible“. In principle the believer approves of “Do not sin”. He wishes that he would not sin. But should his policy become, “I must sin as little as possible”, he accepts that there must be some sin and some commission of particular sins. With God’s help, however, sinning will be kept to a minimum. Is it not clear that this attitude softens the command, “Sin not”, and takes the urgency out of the quest for personal piety?
Before I leave the negative aspect of pursuing piety, the duty of forsaking sin, I may mention a few other hindrances to the ardent pursuit of holiness (piety). One is putting the interests of self ahead of duty to God and man. Another is giving too little time to reading God’s Word and prayer. The last point I mention is condoning sin.
2. The positive aspect: holiness is to be sought earnestly. There is a connecting link to the positive aspect that I must mention. Orthodox Christianity is often disparagingly described as a religion of “don’ts”. People say, Whoever takes up with it will encounter an endless series of prohibitions, such as: Don’t do this; you mustn’t do that; the other thing is wrong. Those who disapprove of this emphasis think it puts a blight upon life. In its place, they say, ought to be placed what they consider more enlightened counsel: Do good; do the best you can; do as you would be done by. That is what the world would call positive morality.
In its thoughts about how people, and Christian people especially, ought to behave, the world wishes to avoid the subject of sin. But “don’ts” have very much to do with that subject; the moral law, with the exception of the Fourth and Fifth Commandments, is expressed in negatives. “Thou shalt not” is over and again repeated, for the simple reason that the law is addressed to sinners, whose nature it is to break the law. It is the negative aspect of seeking piety that I have just been speaking about, because those who are saved are sinners still; and if they are to become more godly, they must perseveringly cease from sin. Yet this practice does not put a blight on their lifestyle because, as new creatures in Christ Jesus, they must willingly engage, with God’s help, in ceasing from sin.
So, on the one hand, their life is motivated by “Sin not” and, on the positive side, by “Seek holiness”. The two aspects are one divinely-commanded
activity. Now what is this holiness that must be sought as a goal? As it applies to the Most High, holiness is a word that contains great depths of meaning but, as it applies to man, it means moral perfection. That is the meaning in all 13 uses of the word in the New Testament and also in some of its Old Testament uses. The same meaning attaches to the adjective holy in most of its New Testament occurrences.
The quest for piety therefore has this shape: stop sinning and strive to be morally perfect. This quest is thus very demanding but – as we have noted in the negative aspect, it is summed up in the words, “Sin not” – anything less than acquiescence in the greatness of the goal will mean feebleness of effort. Moral perfection, conformity to the moral law, perfect goodness – that is the goal to which God’s Word directs, and its height may well produce the exclamation, Who is sufficient for these things? The answer is, No one, but there is a divine Helper whose function I will come to shortly.
But a still greater solemnity attaches to the goal of holiness. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Saviour commands His people, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect”. Our holiness ought to be like God’s holiness! Is that what the Christian has to aspire to? It is. The command is repeated in greater detail in 1 Peter 1:14-16: “As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance, but as He which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation: because it is written, Be ye holy for I am holy”. I said that God’s holiness has great depths of meaning; if we are to understand in any degree what “Be ye holy: for I am holy” means, we must peer a little into those depths.
A A Hodge states that “the holiness of God is not to be conceived as one attribute among others; it is rather a general term representing the conception of His consummate perfection and total glory. It is His infinite moral perfection crowning His infinite intelligence and power. There is a glory of each attribute, viewed abstractly, and a glory of the whole together.” When you turn to Robert Dabney, he deals with the subject quite briefly along the same lines, finishing in this way: “His holiness is the collective and consummate glory of His nature as an infinite, morally pure, active and intelligent Spirit”. William Shedd deals with God’s holiness a little more fully than the previous two theologians; he says that it is conformity to His own perfect nature and that it expresses itself in giving righteous laws to men and in God’s feelings regarding right and wrong.
It is another matter when you take up James Henley Thornwell, as he deals with the holiness of God in connection with “the state and nature of
sin”2 Thornwell agrees with Hodge and Dabney in the fact that God’s holiness is not another of His attributes like justice or goodness, but rather includes them all. His attributes spring from His holiness and are determined by it. His holiness could be called a transcendental attribute that runs through all the rest and casts a glory on them. It is the lustre and glory of His other perfections; He is glorious in holiness. Thornwell then goes on to state the climax of his findings on the subject: God’s holiness is His delight in being what He is – the supreme good. His holiness is the fulness of love to His own perfections, which determines Him to express them and to stamp them in some degree on every work of His hands.
Now we must resume our search for the best way to think of how man’s holiness in some way agrees with God’s. The command is: “Be ye holy, for I am holy”. What is the equivalent in man, the creature, to the holiness of the infinite God? When Thornwell turns to holiness in man, he speaks of it, not as a separate attribute, but as a nature which governs the whole manner of life. It pervades the soul, affecting all its faculties and all its activities. Human holiness has its highest delight in God’s holiness; it is supreme love to God, the supreme good. Must we not then say that this definition clearly locates human holiness in heaven?
Yet, in the quest for it on earth, Scripture says that there can be something going before, which is described in at least two texts. One is in Psalm 73: “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.” Another is in Psalm 17: “I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness”. As God’s holiness is delight in His own perfection, so the saved sinner’s holiness is delight in the same thing: delight in God as God. That ability will come into its fulness when sinning ceases and completed salvation is experienced, in the world to come. This is what the Christian is to seek to reach; it is the pursuit of personal piety: sin not and seek holiness.