God’s holiness means that he is set apart. He is pure in character, with nothing false or cruel in him. He is also different in kind from everything he made, with nothing limited in him. Many of us learned to hear holiness as distance, as if it were the reason God keeps us at arm’s length. This guide works the other way. It moves in order: first what holiness means, then why it gives grounds for trust, then how a person answers it in worship. Each step depends on the one before it, so take them in sequence.
You can work through it alone with a Bible and a notebook, or with a group over one long session or two shorter ones. The teaching draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Jackie Hill Perry about Perry’s book Holier Than Thou. Read the Scripture passages aloud where you can. Several of them make their point through the order of their words.
Begin with the picture you already carry
Before any teaching, finish this sentence in writing: When I hear that God is holy, I picture… Do not polish it. In a group, everyone writes privately, and sharing is optional. You will come back to this sentence at the end, so keep it.
Perry names the most common answer she meets: “I feel like one of the primary ones is that holiness is just about rule keeping.” She grew up in churches where holiness meant dresses and not pants, no movies, no secular music and no card games. The problem with that picture is not that obedience is unimportant. The problem is that it makes holiness mostly about your performance. Then God becomes mainly an inspector, and inspectors are people we keep our distance from. If your sentence sounds like a list of rules, you are in good company. The next steps give you something better to put in its place.
Step one: holy means set apart
The first thing to learn is the basic sense of the word. Perry says, “So the root word of holy is to cut or to separate.” A word’s history cannot settle what it means in a given sentence, so the stronger evidence is how the Bible actually uses it. Perry points to the first place holiness appears. Genesis 2:3 reads, “And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.” In older English, sanctified means made holy. Perry explains that God “sets it apart as unique and distinct from all the other days.”
Pause on one observation question. When God sanctified the seventh day, what changed about it, and what stayed the same? The day kept the same hours and the same sunrise. What changed is that it now belonged to God in a distinct way. Notice also what is missing. No one fails a test in Genesis 2:3. The first time Scripture uses the idea, holiness describes something marked off for God, not someone kept away from him.
Step two: two sides that belong together
Once holiness means set apart, the next question is how God himself is set apart. Perry gives two answers. The first is moral purity: “he is sinless, he’s righteous, he is good, he’s honest, he is faithful, he is consistent.” The second is transcendence, which she describes as “the fact that he exists differently than us. That he’s not creaturely in any way.” God does not only behave better than we do. He exists in a different way. He does not tire, run short or depend on anything outside himself.
One picture may help, if you hold it loosely. Suppose you hand someone your car keys for a long night drive with your children asleep in the back. Two things must be true before you can rest. The driver must care about you and tell you the truth, and the driver must be able to handle the road. A kind friend who cannot drive will not do, and neither will a skilled driver you cannot trust. Here the picture breaks. Every human driver is still limited and can get tired or distracted. God’s otherness is not a higher level of skill. He is a different kind of being altogether. Keep the two requirements and let the car go.
Perry tests the two sides on 1 Peter 5:7: “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.” Because God is pure, she says, “it means he has compassion. He’s not apathetic.” Because he is transcendent, she adds, “because he’s sovereign over your circumstances and sovereign over your cares, he can actually use them to work out for your good in his glory.” The verse asks you to hand over what weighs on you. Purity means the one receiving it means what he says. Otherness means nothing you hand him is beyond his reach.
Try this: Rewrite your opening sentence so that it includes both sides. Then compare the two versions. Which one would make you more likely to pray honestly?
Step three: correcting the distance assumption
Here is the misconception this guide exists to undo: holiness means God stays far away. It is worth taking seriously, because Scripture does show holiness creating real distance. Read Isaiah 6:1-8 slowly, all the way through.
Isaiah sees the Lord and hears the seraphim cry, “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:3). His response is immediate. Isaiah 6:5 records him saying, “Woe is me! for I am undone.” The distance he feels is not imaginary. A sinful man has seen a pure God, and he knows it.
Now read on. In Isaiah 6:7 a seraph touches his lips with a coal from the altar and says, “Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.” The holiness that exposed Isaiah is the same holiness that moves toward him to cleanse him. By verse 8 he is answering God’s call. The distance was real, but it was not where God left things. It describes the creature’s condition, not God’s intention.
Perry sees the same pattern elsewhere in Scripture. She describes God “presenting his moral purity as the reason why He’s worthy to be trusted, worthy, to be loved, worthy, to be near.” Notice the last phrase. In her reading, purity is a reason to come close.
Step four: from knowing to trusting
Knowing what holiness is does not yet tell you why it should change how you trust. Perry’s claim is that “God’s holiness is actually an incentive for our faith.” She draws that claim from two passages, and both are worth reading closely.
Jeremiah 2:5 reads, “Thus saith the LORD, What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me, and have walked after vanity, and are become vain?” In this verse, vanity means emptiness, and are become vain means they became empty themselves. John 8:46 records Jesus asking, “Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?” The archaic convinceth means proves guilty; other translations render it convicts. In both passages God does not demand blind trust. He points to his own character and asks what grounds anyone has for doubting him.
Try this: Write God’s question from Jeremiah 2:5 in your own words. Then answer it honestly in three columns. In the first, list anything you believe God has actually done wrong. In the second, list times God did not do what you wanted. In the third, list wrongs done to you by people who claimed to speak for God. Many of us have filed items from the second and third columns under the first. Moving them does not make the pain smaller. It does make the question clearer.
For groups: the third column can bring up real church hurt. Do not argue anyone out of it. The failures of leaders are real and serious, and they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Let people keep their columns private unless they want to talk.
Step five: the hard edge of holiness
A careful learner will object here. Holiness in Scripture can be frightening. Perry names the stories herself: Uzzah touching the ark in 2 Samuel 6, and Ananias and Sapphira lying in Acts 5. All three die suddenly. If holiness looks like that, distance can feel like the safe choice.
Perry turns to Exodus 34, where God proclaims his own name to Moses. Exodus 34:6 reads, “And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” and verse 7 adds that he is the one “that will by no means clear the guilty.” Longsuffering means patient over a long time. Mercy and justice sit inside one self-description. What struck Perry was how patient God has been: “God has been more forbearing and patient towards us than we are willing to give him credit for.”
Lisa Fields adds a caution about those dramatic scenes. We meet these people only at the moment of judgment, and she suggests “they could have been living filthy their whole life, and God was merciful to them.” The narratives do not report that, so treat it as a reasonable inference rather than a fact from the text. Its value is as a reading habit. One scene does not tell a whole story.
One more limit belongs here. Trusting a holy God does not mean being spared pain. Perry points to Jesus, driven into the wilderness and bearing the sin of others, and says plainly, “to be in Christ does not mean that I won’t suffer.” Holiness does not explain any particular loss. It tells you who is present in it.
Step six: holiness that ends in worship
Perry observes, “I think holiness in the abstract is not offensive.” It becomes uncomfortable when it reaches your body, your habits and your time. Romans 12:1 is where that happens: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Look at the order. Paul appeals by mercies already given before he asks for anything. Holy living answers mercy. It does not purchase it. That order is the difference between worship and the rulebook.
Here is a practice for the next seven days. It takes about ten minutes.
- Read one passage from this guide each day: Genesis 2:3, Isaiah 6:1-8, 1 Peter 5:7, Jeremiah 2:4-13, John 8:42-47, Exodus 34:5-8, then Romans 12:1-2.
- Write one sentence about God’s purity that the passage shows you, and one about his otherness.
- Name one specific care you have been carrying instead of casting, and hand it over in a sentence spoken aloud to God.
- Name one concrete act of obedience for the next day, and write beside it the mercy it responds to.
Some days the passage will seem dry. Perry’s counsel on reading Scripture applies here: “you may not get everything the first time, but that’s okay.” Staying with the text is part of the practice.
Questions for discussion
- Where did your first picture of holiness come from, and what did it teach you to expect from God?
- Which side of holiness do you tend to forget, purity or otherness? What happens to trust when one side goes missing?
- In Isaiah 6, what does God do with the distance Isaiah feels? What would change if you read your own sense of distance the same way?
- Which column in the Jeremiah 2:5 exercise was hardest to fill in honestly, and why?
- Do the stories of Uzzah and Ananias make you trust God less, more, or neither? What in Exodus 34:6-7 bears on your answer?
- Perry says people resist holiness for themselves while expecting it from others. Where do you see that pattern in your own life?
Return to your first sentence
At the end of the week, take out the sentence you wrote at the start. Write a new one without looking at your notes. Then set the two side by side and ask what changed. If the new sentence still sounds like distance, go back to the step where the change stalled and read that passage again. Perry put the purpose of all this simply: “this ain’t just so you can learn a bunch of stuff. It’s literally so that your faith will be stronger.”