Three Faces of Holiness

From my 1-2 Peter and Jude in the Everyday Bible Study series, with questions by Becky Castle Miller.

The Three Faces of Holiness

1 Peter 1:13–2:3

1:13     Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming. 14 As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. 15 But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; 16 for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”

17       Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear. 18 For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. 20 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. 21 Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.

22       Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart. 23 For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.

24 For,

         “All people are like grass,

                  and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;

         the grass withers and the flowers fall,

25                but the word of the Lord endures forever.”  

 And this is the word that was preached to you.

2:1      Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. 2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3 now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.

         Did you grow up in a church that sang these words? (I did. Every Sunday, if you care to know.)

Holy, holy, holy!
Lord God Almighty
Early in the morning
Our song shall rise to Thee
Holy, holy, holy!
Merciful and mighty
God in three persons
Blessed Trinity!

I vividly recall the low and high voices in our church in deep resonance and harmony. A reverence shaped the mood as we sang Reginald Heber’s much-loved song. That word “holy” was sacred, the kind of word that could stop you in your tracks. And if it didn’t, a person was surely in need of repenting or reforming, or probably both. I did not know the meaning of “holy” when we sang it, but I felt something I could call “holy.” What did I feel? Reverence. Awe. Pay attention. Serious.

Many too easily explain the word “holy” as separation, but that’s only half or less of its meaning. The fundamental idea of holy or holiness is, first, this: God is holy, and holiness belongs exclusively to God and to God’s presence. That’s why Peter quotes an Old Testament anchor verse: “Be holy, because I am holy” (1:16; from Leviticus 11:44, 45; 19:2). To “be holy” means to be devoted to the God who is holy. So, second and third: those devoted to God are fit for God’s presence, and in entering into God’s presence they separate themselves from the world. So, God and God’s presence, devotion, and separation. In that order. Those devoted to God must turn their backs on sin and worldliness. To begin at the end, with separation, gets it backwards in more than one way. To begin at the end turns holiness into a negative idea, and it also begins with our experience instead of who God is. God is holy; anything in God’s presence must be devoted to God and fit for God’s presence; and anything devoted to God must be removed from the common, the profane, and the sinful. One, two, three. Only that order explains what holiness means in the Bible.

         One: God alone is holy (presence)

         Two: Devotion to God means commitment to holiness (devotion)

         Three: Devotion to God requires turning from sin (separation)

         Peter has just sketched a biography of salvation in 1:3-12. He now turns to a core theme for how the Christians of Asia Minor need to live if they are going to be faithful in the empire. That theme is holiness, and we will look at today’s passage through the lens of holiness. The central instruction, “so be holy,” is found in verses fifteen and sixteen in today’s passage, but Peter turns this term over and over and each time a fresh term becomes visible: set your hope, do not conform, live … in reverent fear, obey the truth, sincere love, rid yourselves, and crave pure spiritual milk. Holiness, like wisdom, appears with many faces on the stage of life. But we can only see the many faces of holiness if we remember the “one, two, three” above. When the moment is right, the right face appears. Some of the faces are positive, the devotion theme in set your hope, love, crave, and others are the negative, the separation theme, seen in do not conform, live in reverent fear, rid yourselves. We begin, as holiness itself does, with the positive theme of devotion to God, but with the reminder that the negative is the inevitable result of the positive. The one devoted to God turns toward God and, in doing so, turns from the negatives.  

Holiness has fallen on hard times today. The lack of calls to holiness is not heard because many of us grew up in a kind of Christian fundamentalism that was too much “don’t do” (negative) and not enough “do good, do justice, do love, do peace” (positive). Obsessions with micro-ethics – you can name the ones in your world –turned many toward a freedom, and at times the kind of freedom that had no limits. Such a way of life was and is not in line with the apostle Peter’s teaching in this letter. We would all do well both to listen to him, and to strive to recapture a healthy, wholesome understanding of holiness. But holiness is not a “rules ‘n regs” legalism, and holiness is not fundamentally negative. There is a balance to be discovered between leave-me-alone freedom and fundamentalist legalism’s obsessions with the negative side of holiness. Without the one and two, every three leads astray.

The face of devotion

         Peter dashes in from the angels aching to look into redemption (1:10-12) to an image in 1:13 that nearly all translations cover with a more English-y expression. Behind “with minds that are alert” Peter wrote, literally, “surrounding your mental waist [with your robe]” (1:13; Second Testament). The image is a cloak or robe or tunic being pulled up from the bottom and tucked into the person’s waist-belt or even wrapped around one’s waist. This gave the legs room to move. Peter added to that image a term connected to sobriety. But both tucking in and sobriety are aimed at the redemption of “minds.” That is, the exiles and temporary residents need a clear-headed, clear-thinking approach to life. That life can be reset if they “set [their] hope on” the grace that completes our salvation when Jesus returns (1:13). The image, when the pieces are glued together, inspires a mentally alert working life. Paul Achtemeier, who wrote an intense academic commentary on 1 Peter, jumped out from behind a rostrum to announce that “Drunken people in long garments are not very good at hard labor” (Achtemeier, 1 Peter, 118). Notice, Peter believes one’s hope in the return of Christ resets a person’s life toward holiness. While many have turned the Second Coming into speculation, a genuine grasp of the Second Coming does not lead to speculation: it leads to living now in a way that his holy, that is devoted to the ways of God, to justice, to righteousness, and to love. Holiness involves clear, sound thinking leading to the two and three of holiness.

         A second face of devotion in today’s passage appears down in verse twenty-two. Peter begins with their past salvation, “Now that you have purified yourselves,” and that happens for the believer “by obeying the truth.” Faith and obedience merge here into a single response to the grace of God in Christ: the believer’s faith is obedience to the truth. But notice something here: the NIV’s “purified” translates a verb that could be translated “holy-fied” (Greek, hagnizō). That is, they have been made holy. Because they have been made holy, another face of holiness appears: the art of Christian love. He calls it “unmasked sibling-love” (Second Testament) or “sincere love” for one’s siblings in Christ (1:22). The word used for love here is philadelphia, which broken into part means “love for one’s siblings.” Holy-fied people have the capacity to love sincerely, or without hypocrisy, feigned, pretended love. To love is live in an affective commitment with another person, and that involves spending time with them and growing with them into Christlikeness. Easier to describe than do. Peter knows the challenges of loving Christian siblings, so he clarifies such love with the splendid little term “stretchingly,” which is my more graphic translation of the term (Second Testament; the NIV has “deeply”). Holy-fied pops up again with his next expression: they have unmasked, stretched love because they do so “from clean hearts.”

Notice how anchored Christian behaviors are in salvation. Salvation makes us fit for God’s holy presence and empowers us for devotion to God. Peter’s battery of instructions are preceded by the grace and power of God at work in us. The God who will judge them “impartially” (1:17) and lead then into the kingdom of God, the new heavens and the new earth, is the God who saved them. Peter tells us how God’s salvation happened: “with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect” (Hebrews 9:12, 14). Jesus lived our life, he died our death, and he was raised for our resurrection into the presence of God for eternity. Paul’s letter to the Romans, especially chapter three, has attracted all the attention on how God redeemed us, but today’s passage deserves some attention too. So central is Christ to salvation, Peter tells them Jesus was appointed by the Father before creation and just recently “revealed … for your sake” (sounds a bit like 1 Peter 1:10-12). As Catherine González reminds us, “We need to remember that what they are called to be [the faces of holiness] is totally based on what God has already done for them” (González, 1 Peter, 32).

And we are not done with salvation at verse twenty-two: “For you have been born again” (1:23). The devotion theme of holiness flows from the salvation work of Father, Son, and Spirit, and a means of that work is the “living and enduring word of God” (1:23-24). You and I can be forgiven if we think this refers to our Bibles. It does, but only indirectly. Peter makes it clear he’s referring to the gospel preaching they heard and responded to when he finishes off our chapter one with “this is the word that was preached to you” (1:24). Herein is a lesson for all of us: your Bible and mine resulted from gospel preaching. Maybe we should not be saying that we preach the Word of God (Bible), but that the Bible preaches the gospel to us!

Which is why Peter calls the believers of Asia Minor to “crave pure spiritual milk” (2:2). The NIV’s “spiritual” prevents us from seeing the connection of four terms: “word” (logos) and “word” (rēma) and “word” (rēma) and “spiritual” (logikos) in 1:23, 25 twice, and 2:2. To make this connection clearer I prefer “word-shaped milk” for 2:2 (Second Testament). Peter’s idea of the gospel-word reveals another element of what salvation means and how it occurs. Those who crave this word-shaped milk will be nourished and will thus “grow into [a more complete, present] salvation” (2:2). As I have often stated in this Everyday Bible Study series, the gospel is first and foremost a message about Jesus Christ and only secondly a message of salvation for us. The gospel sermons of Peter in Acts (2, 3, 4, 10-11) were sermons about Jesus, and those who experienced that gospel were the ones who came to know that “the Lord is gracious” (2:3; Second Testament; NIV has “good”).

This theme of devotion, which is the second face of holiness, elicits from us a desire to approach God, to worship God, to know the goodness of God, to obey God, to love God – and to love others straight from one heart to another. Devotion to God establishes direction for us. As we move into God’s presence, we turn our backs on sin, Satan, and systemic evil and injustice. This is the face of separation, the third face of holiness.

The face of separation

         Holiness is about God, about God’s presence, about what is devoted to God, and about separation from the common and profane. Which is why when Peter is about to instruct the believers to be holy in 1:15-16, he calls them to be “obedient children” who “do not conform” to their pre-salvation days (1:14). In today’s passage we are introduced to three negative requirements and each of those requirements reveals what the past of these believers were like (1:14, 17-18; 2:1). The three negatives are “do not conform” and “live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear” and “rid yourselves.” Synthesized this means, As you devote yourself to God’s presence, flee from evil, sin, and systemic injustices. These were the sins of the past for these exiles and temporary residents. This gives us insight into their pre-Jesus lives. They were marked by (1) “the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance,” (2) “the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors,” and (3) “all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.” If one has any questions about whether Peter’s audience is Jewish or gentile, the answer is found in the first two expressions. They were gentiles. If you want more, read ahead at 1 Peter 4:3.

         It has been said by experts that the two most concerning sins in the church planting work of the early apostles were immorality and idolatry. In our world, immorality is easier to spot than idolatry, but Kathleen Norris can help us spot the second term: “I no longer think idolatry is a problem of primitive people in a simpler time, those who worshipped golden calves in fertility rites. I have only to open a newspaper to contemplate the wondrously various way in which idolatry is alive in the here and now” (Norris, Amazing Grace, 92). A couple pages earlier she described idolatry as the undoing of loving God, self, and others by exaggerating or obsessing over one or the others. If love is the center of life for God and for God’s creation, then idolatry is distorted love becoming the god we worship. If Norris wrote that piece today, she would definitely include social media’s temptation to promote ourselves, a promotion too easily generated by comparing ourselves to the self-presentation of others.

The not-conforming will evoke for many of us the same term in Romans 12:2. But instead of Paul’s “the pattern of this world,” Peter calls them not to be controlled by their former ignorant desires (cf. Acts 3:17). And even more, they had been liberated from their ancestral religious, social, ethical, political, familial, and cultural world. Sociologists call this “primary socialization,” meaning the world into which we are nurtured by our families that was inscribed in our hearts and minds reality itself. If our family inscribed goodness, love, holiness, and justice, those were our reality. If our family inscribed hatred, disrespect, suppression of emotions, stealing, hypocrisy, and other toxicities, those toxicities became our reality. The believers to whom Peter writes learned idolatries, immoralities, desires, envies, hypocrisy, deceit, slanders, and ignorance. Their natural inclinations were to return to what ordered their world during the days of their primary socialization.

The good news was that salvation ushered them into a secondary socialization called holiness. For salvation-shaped-holiness to become their lived reality would require discipleship, and discipleship would require time to devote themselves more fully to the holy God and thus to separate themselves from the world’s systemic grip. It required intentionally not conforming, living in reverent fear before God, and shedding like snakeskin the dysfunctional way of life they learned in their past, primary socialization. They were growing in a life that said “No” to a dysfunctional past, and they were learning to say “Yes” to the world God reveals in Jesus Christ.

Questions for Reflection and Application

1. What does it change for you to think of holiness in terms of aspect one and two (God’s presence and devotion to God) instead of just in terms of aspect three (separation from sin)?

2. How does holiness impact our ability to love in relationships?

3. For further study on the theme of judgment in 1 Peter see 1:7, 9, 17; 2:12, 23; 3:12; 4:5-6, 17-19. Record your observations.

4. What are the micro-ethics in your world? What are you told not to do in order to be holy?

5. How is the secondary socialization of discipleship helping you shed idolatry, immorality, and other inclinations as you move toward holiness?

Paul Achtemeier, 1 Peter: A Commentary on First Peter (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996). I found this quotation in Edwards, 1 Peter, 55.

Reginald Heber, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Public domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy,_Holy,_Holy!_Lord_God_Almighty#cite_note-CanterburyHymnology-2

Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead, 1998).