Holiness can sound like the very thing that keeps you at arm’s length from God. Jackie Hill Perry reads it differently. In Scripture, God’s holiness has two sides: his moral purity, meaning there is nothing false or cruel in him, and his otherness, meaning he is not limited the way creatures are. A God who is wholly good and not limited is the safest person there is to trust. The distance you feel is real, but it describes you more than him.
That is a strong claim, and it should be tested against the text rather than accepted because it sounds hopeful. So the question here is narrow. When the Bible calls God holy, what does it mean, and does that meaning actually give a reason for trust? Perry’s answer rests on a few specific passages, and they are worth reading slowly.
What is the word holy doing in the Bible?
Many people learned holiness as a set of rules. Perry grew up in churches where it meant dresses and not pants, no movies, no secular music, and no card games. She does not dismiss obedience. Her complaint is that the rules shrank the word. As she puts it, “many people develop a framework of holiness that is completely centered around just be right. Do the right thing.” If holiness is only a standard for your behavior, then God becomes mostly the one checking it, and keeping your distance makes sense.
Perry’s correction starts with the idea of separateness. She says, “So the root word of holy is to cut or to separate.” A word’s origin does not settle its meaning, so the better evidence is how Scripture uses it. Perry offers one illustrative case, the first place the idea appears. Genesis 2:3 says, “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 set that day apart as unique and distinct from the other days. The seventh day keeps the same hours as any other day. What changes is that it now belongs to God in a distinct way.
One verse cannot define a word for the whole Bible, and Perry does not treat it that way. But the example is telling. At its first appearance, holiness has nothing to do with a person failing a test. It describes something marked off for God. So when Scripture calls God himself holy, a fair starting point is not strictness. It is that God is distinct, in a class of his own.
Purity and otherness: why you need both
Perry names two categories that make up God’s holiness. The first is moral purity. She lists what that includes: he is sinless, righteous, good, honest, faithful and 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 just behave better than we do. He exists in a different way. He does not get tired, run out, or depend on anything outside himself.
Each side alone would leave you unsure about trust. A God of perfect character who lacked power could sympathize with you but might not be able to help. A God of unlimited power whose character was uncertain would be frightening. Perry’s point is that biblical holiness holds both together, and trust needs both.
She tests this on a familiar verse. 1 Peter 5:7 says, “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.” Read through God’s purity, the promise is honest. Perry says that purity means “it means he has compassion. He’s not apathetic.” Read through his otherness, the promise has power behind it. She continues: “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 one receiving your cares means what he says, and nothing you hand him is beyond his reach.
Scripture itself refuses to let God’s otherness turn into absence. In Hosea 11:9, God says, “for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee.” Both truths sit in the same sentence. He is unlike us, and he is with us. Perry does not cite this verse, but it fits her reading. Being set apart does not mean God has stepped away from his people.
Where the idea of trusting holiness comes from
The subtitle of Perry’s book, Holier Than Thou, is How God’s Holiness Helps Us Trust Him. She says she drew that idea from two passages. Her goal was to move holiness out of abstract theory, because she believes “God’s holiness is actually an incentive for our faith.”
The first passage is Jeremiah 2:5: “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?” The setting matters. Jeremiah 2 is a prophetic speech that reads almost like a court case. God is charging Israel with leaving him for other gods. The archaic words need a gloss. Vanity here means emptiness, something with no substance, and are become vain means they have become empty themselves. Perry paraphrases the verse as Israel going after worthlessness and becoming worthless, which captures that sense. The question in the verse is aimed at a betrayed relationship: what fault did you find in me that made you leave? God expects the answer to be none.
The second passage is John 8:46, where Jesus speaks to his opponents: “Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?” In the KJV, convinceth means proves guilty. Other translations render it as convicts. The logic is short and tight. If no one can show sin in him, then nothing in his character gives a reason to doubt his words.
Perry notices that the two passages make the same move. In both, she says, “you have God presenting his moral purity as the reason why He’s worthy to be trusted”. The passages do not ask for blind trust. They point to God’s character and ask what grounds there are for doubting him. That is what makes her thesis more than an inspiring phrase. The link between holiness and trust is an argument the texts themselves make.
She draws the conclusion in God’s voice: “God is saying that there is nothing in me that is bad”. She adds, “There is nothing in me that is limited.” Then she contrasts this with idols. “Idols are always held up as profitless as useless.” The reason, she says, is that “they’re insufficient to be God, therefore they cannot be holy.” This matches Jeremiah 2. The prophet’s charge is not just that Israel broke a rule. Israel traded a God with no flaw for gods with no substance, and became like them.
Doesn’t holiness also make God dangerous?
This is the strongest objection, and the Bible itself gives it weight. Holiness in Scripture is not soft. Perry names the stories that unsettle readers. Uzzah reaches out and touches the ark and dies (2 Samuel 6). Ananias and Sapphira lie and fall dead (Acts 5). When the stakes look like that, being far away can feel safer than being near.
Perry does not explain these accounts away. She goes to Exodus 34, where God reveals his 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 the next verse adds that he is the God “that will by no means clear the guilty.” Both statements belong to the same self-description. Mercy and justice are not two moods that switch on and off. They are one character.
What struck Perry was not that God judges. It was how rarely, compared with what people deserve. She looks at her own life next to those sudden judgments and says that “God has been more forbearing and patient towards us than we are willing to give him credit for.” The KJV word in Exodus 34:6 is longsuffering, which means patient over a long time. She admits that this convicts her, because she is quick to cut people off, while God himself is slow to anger.
Lisa Fields adds a careful observation about those dramatic stories. Readers meet Uzzah or Ananias at one moment, the moment of judgment. They do not see what came before. People, she suggests, “could have been living filthy their whole life, and God was merciful to them.” This is an inference, not something the passages report, and it should be held as one. But it is a fair caution about reading. A single scene does not tell you a whole history, and the narratives do not present these deaths as God’s ordinary pattern.
This also undoes a common split between an angry God early in the Bible and a gentle God later. Fields sums up the whole story this way: “God’s always been merciful.” Perry adds that “you cannot understand much of the New Testament without knowing the old.” She asks how anyone could understand Hebrews, Romans or Jude otherwise, since those letters keep referring back to the earlier Scriptures. The God who described himself in Exodus 34 is the same God the apostles proclaim.
So the objection is right that holiness is serious. It is wrong if it concludes that holiness makes God untrustworthy. A God who is just will not treat evil as harmless. A God who is pure will not lie to you about it. Those are the same qualities you would want in anyone you trust.
Why holiness stings when it gets specific
Perry is honest that holiness becomes uncomfortable once it stops being an idea. She says, “I think holiness in the abstract is not offensive.” The trouble starts with texts like Romans 12:1: “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.” She also mentions Paul’s charge in 1 Corinthians 10:31 to do everything, even eating and drinking, for God’s glory. At that point, she says, holiness touches people’s idols and sin patterns.
Notice the order in Romans 12:1. Paul appeals “by the mercies of God.” He has spent eleven chapters on what God has done before he asks for the reader’s body. The command to be holy is a response to mercy already given, not a fee paid to get it. That order is what separates biblical holiness from the rulebook version Perry grew up with.
She also makes an observation that turns the objection around. People who resist holiness still expect it from everyone else. We want neighbors who do not lie to us, steal from us, or treat us greedily. Those are holy standards. In her words, “we really do want holiness. We just don’t want it at the expense of ourselves.” This does not prove God is trustworthy, but it does show that the longing to be treated with honesty and faithfulness is a longing for the very qualities Scripture calls holy.
What holiness does not promise
Trusting a holy God does not mean you will be spared pain. Perry says this plainly, and she grounds it in Jesus. The Spirit drove him into the wilderness, and God laid on him the sin of everybody. If the sinless Son suffered, then holiness cannot be a guarantee against suffering. Her words are direct: “to be in Christ does not mean that I won’t suffer.”
What holiness offers is narrower and sturdier. It means God will never be anything less than good toward you, even inside hardship. Perry’s claim is that a God who is both sovereign and good will use suffering for our good and his glory. That claim does not explain any particular loss. It does not say when or how the good will appear. It says who is present in the pain, and that is a different kind of comfort from an explanation.
This is why Perry insists the doctrine is not academic: “this ain’t just so you can learn a bunch of stuff. It’s literally so that your faith will be stronger.” Scripture does not hide the distance holiness exposes. When Isaiah saw the Lord, he cried out that he was undone (Isaiah 6:5), and Peter begged Jesus to depart from him because he was a sinful man (Luke 5:8). In both scenes the holy one does not leave. Isaiah is cleansed and sent, and Jesus tells Peter not to fear. The God who is unlike us is the Holy One in the midst of his people, and his question in Jeremiah 2 is still open to anyone who has kept their distance: what iniquity have you found in me?