Holier Than Thou - HOW GOD'S HOLINESS HELPS US TRUST HIM written by Jackie Hill Perry (Author of Gay Girl, Good God)

Holier Than Thou - HOW GOD'S HOLINESS HELPS US TRUST HIM written by Jackie Hill Perry (Author of Gay Girl, Good God)

Chapter Seven p. 151-168

                        Holy How? : Behold, We Become


AS WE'VE EXPLORED, OUR becoming like Christ is called sanctification, or as many say, "transformation."  To put
this in front of you again:  "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into
the same image from one degree of glory to another:  (2 Cor. 3:18, emphasis added).  Switching languages for a second
exposes the fullness of the word and how it is used in another place.  What do I mean?  That in the original language,
transformation is the same as transfiguration.  It is probable that in Paul's mind, he is connecting the transfiguration
of Christ with the transformation of Christians.  The metamorphosis that Jesus underwent before the three disciples was
different from us in the sense of His transfiguring was His glory being unveiled.  When His face "shone like the sun"
and His clothes became "white as light,"  it was the inner glory of Christ's nature shining through the embodied flesh that
concealed it (Matt. 17:2).  As one commentary puts it, it is

        not that he showed his Divine nature, or laid aside his human body;  his bodily nature remained
        in its entirety, but permeating it was an effulgence which indicated the Godhead.  Perhaps it might
        be said, as an old writer puts it, that the Transfiguration was less a new miracle than the temporary
        cessation of an habitual miracle;  for the veiling of his glory was the real marvel, the Divine restraint
        which prohibited the illumination of his sacred humanity.  [Joseph S. Exell, general ed., The Pulpit
        Commentary, Matthew 17 (2019 Kindle edition).]

    What the disciples beheld was the inner essence of God, the source of all divine light coming out, transforming
the visual appearance of Jesus.  Just as, but different from, Moses who after being with God, the appearance of Moses'
face was changed, shining with a visible light.  The difference is that the glory on Moses' face was a reflected glory.
With Jesus, the transfiguration displayed His inherent glory.  [R. C. Sproul, Sermon:  "Transfiguration (Mark 9:2-12)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzSSdijKz_l&t+1033s
So it is with any Christian who beholds the glory of the Lord;  they are only able to reflect what they have actually
seen.  Deeper than that, they are only able to be holy, a visible and discernible state of being, if they have been gifted
with a holy nature.  We can only be what we really are, and if born anew, we have an inner glory shining forth from
the Spirit of the living God who is the agent of our very own transfiguration.  Bright enough for the world to see.  Real
enough to prove that to be a Christian is to be authentic and thus display the holiness becoming of a new creature.

    It's important to state that although the Spirit is the one that causes us to see, regenerating our nature, converting
our souls, empowering us to walk as "children of light" (Eph. 5:8), there is yet and still an obligation on our part to
participate with the Spirit in the process of sanctification.  That is to say that our growing in holiness is not passive in
any way.  Philippians 2:12-13 speaks to the paradox that sanctification can be when it says, "Therefore, my beloved,
as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure."  Once
we are raised from the dead, it would be silly to assume that we can and should do nothing to grow in living as God does
just as it would be foolish to think that a planted seed can grow without the soil being watered.  Beholding the Lord is
fundamentally active.  The sun in all of its radiance, shines above us on most days, but it will only be seen by those who
decide to turn their faces up and look.

    But where do we look?  What can show us such glory that we might be changed by it?  Where we look is simple,
accessible, and not hidden from us.  It is the Holy Scriptures that put forth a constant picture of God, as He is to be
seen and understood.  Inspired by the Holy Ghost, preserved by Him, and interpreted with His illuminative help too,
it is there, in the pages scattered with narratives, songs, poems, and letters, that we can behold Christ.  He is the glory
in all of the above.  The sacrificial system, the scapegoat, the blood-red doorpost, the tabernacle, and the holy place.  He
is the rejected brother with His Father's robe.  He is the one with slingshot in hand, the savior of a timid people.  He is the
morning manna and evening light.  He is Isaac and the ram, Jacob's ladder, and David's King.  He is the serpent lifted up
and the God brought low.  He is the law's source and fulfillment.  He is the psalmist's delight and the epistle's explanation.
Someone might say that I've just take the familiar stories of Scripture and make them be other that what they are, but truly,
I'm only bearing witness to the Gospel of Luke where it says, "And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] interpreted
to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27).

    Where does Jesus go when trying to show His disciples the glory of who He is?  How does He help them behold all He has
fulfilled from them?  Scripture.  We cannot behold Him as clearly in any other place than in the Word He has given to us, and as
it's read and believed, we are transformed.  As Piper would put it:

        This is how God designed the Scriptures to work for human transformation and for the glory of God: 
        the Scriptures reveal God's glory.  this glory, God willing, is seen by those who read the Bible.  This
        seeing gives rise, by God's grace, to savoring God above all things--treasuring him, hoping in him, 
        feeling him as our greatest reward, tasting him as our all satisfying good.  And this savoring transforms 
        our lives.  [John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 141.]

    By saying that we behold God in God's Word and are thus transformed by what we see, I am not implying that just seeing
is enough.  There is and has always been a kind of deception among the religious that the mere reading of God's Word is 
sufficient in and of itself to make its readers into godly people.  That in the morning, when we open our leather-bound Bible 
or swipe left and right to access an app, we are changed simply by reading.  God knows I wish it were as simple as that, but
haven't we known (or been) those who can quote the Bible with ease while still managing to live like an embodied demon?  Even
they--demons, that is--know what is biblically true about God.  During Jesus' earthly ministry, demons were quicker to acknowledge
the validity of who Jesus was before humans did.  Before begging to possess pigs, they called Him "Son of the Most High God"
(Mark 5:7).  The demon that made his home in a man visiting the synagogue said to Jesus, " I know who you are--the Holy One of God!" (Luke 4:34).  James sarcastically commended the fruitless "faith" of the recipients of his letter when he wrote, "You believe that God is one;  you do well.  Even the demons believe--and shudder!"  (James 2:19).  Which says to me that a demon may very well hear Deuteronomy 6:4 quoted from his favorite pulpit, which says, "Hear, O Israel:  The LORD our God, the LORD is one," and with demonic fervor say "Amen." 

    How we interact with what Scripture tells us distinguishes us from demons only if and when we believe what it is that we see.  Demons have shown themselves to know the right facts about Jesus,  they rebel against what they know, revealing that their knowledge of God is superficial in that it may cause them to acknowledge Him but it doesn't lead them to glorify Him.  Just as it was with the religious leaders in Jesus' day.  They knew more than most and lived worse than them too.  You'd think that being an "expert of the law" would lead to a particular holiness, birthed from all of that knowledge, but it only worked to teach them how to look holy without actually being so.  They were "whitewashed tombs,"  a dead version of purity and light, with hearts similar to that of a cemetery, full of "dead people's bones and all sorts of impurity"  (Matt. 23:27 NLT).


                            Beholding and Believing

    When exposing their ignorance and hypocrisy, Jesus often reminded the Pharisees of their titles to show the inconsistency of
knowing so much and living so unrighteous.  They dedicated their lives to the study of God's Word, searching them as if they'd find
eternal life in the very words themselves when, in fact, if they only believed what they knew, they'd know that eternal life was found 
in Christ and Christ alone.  To them, Jesus said, "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life;
and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life" (John 5:39-40, emphasis added). 
And why after searching the Scriptures did they refuse to come to this Jesus who Scripture bore witness to?  It's because they
didn't believe what they read.  "For if you believed Moses, you would believe me;  for he wrote of me.  But if you do not believe his
writings, how will you believe my words?"  (John 5:46-47, emphasis added).  Beholding Christ, they did not become like Him
because they did not see nor believe what was already written about Him.

    There is an incredible connection between beholding and believing and how these things precede becoming.  Remember
when we talked about the folks who worship idols and how they look like whatever they look to?  How they therefore become 
just as lifeless as the gods they love?  Did you notice how the psalmist describes the reason for this transformation?  He says, "Those who make them become like them;  so do all who trust in them"  (Ps. 115:8, emphasis added).  It is not as though they are simply putting their eyes toward the idols, like a man does an attractive face or a child does an unclaimed piece of candy.  No. Their eyes are a metaphor for where they've placed their faith.  They look because they believe.  Lovers of idols do so because they trust that the created thing can provide, satisfy, help, protect, and so on.  And even if such faith if futile, it is still faith, one that transforms see-ers into the image they believe most.  Their misplaced faith informs their way of life because what we believe governs how we behave.

    After feeding 5,000 people a good helping of bread and fish, Jesus told the returning crowd that He was the true food.  That what they ate, though satisfying for now, would not last beyond the moment.  Similar to the manna their ancestors knew would rot before they woke, just in time for another meal from heaven.  This bread, just like theirs, would be gone before the next morning.  Against the backdrop of their once-fed, now-empty stomachs, a parable of their sometimes-full, easily emptied souls, Jesus says that He is the bread of life.  If the average listener were anything like the average Bible reader, Jesus' testimony about Himself would become nothing more than a good verse to quote, an encouraging caption to have, or a wonderful tattoo to live with, but what He said about Himself wasn't intended to just be heard or seen but to be believed because it's in the believing where the words are experienced.

    Jesus tells them who He is and continues to describe what happens when His words about Himself are treated as true:  "I am the bread of life;  whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst:  (John 6:35).  "Whoever comes" is the same as "whoever believes."  To paraphrase the Lord's words, He is saying, "Whoever believes in Me will never hunger and never thirst because they have come to Me and I have filled them."  

    Jesus doesn't want them or us to just have an intellectual relationship with the words themselves, but rather, that by believing, we'd bear fruit that's consistent with knowing the person who holds the title.  Consider your most besetting sins and how they reveal the parts of you that are hungry or thirsty.  There is a world of passions within us, waging war against our souls by tempting the eyes of our hearts to look to (trust in) everything else as a means to quench its thirst and quiet its growl.  We are a needy folk, and this is nothing to be ashamed of because needlessness belongs to God and God alone.  And if God has no needs, then God is completely sufficient in and of Himself, which is to say that He has endless resources that He will never need another to restore or preserve.  If this is what it means for God to be bread--that He is truly able to satisfy in such a way that our hunger is replaced with fullness, our thirst quenched, too--then it is not enough to tell you to "stop sinning."  Instead, I will say, "Behold Christ, He is the bread of life.  Go to Him and be filled."

                        Believing and Becoming

    How does believing that Jesus is the bread of life make the believing one holy?  Continuing with the metaphor of food, bread
in particular is not a light thing to eat (if it's made rightly, of course).  It's heavy, dense, glutenous, and easy to stretch.  Give a family
bread and you have given them a food that will fill the belly quick.  Once it's consumed, the stomach left with no room in it, the body
is satisfied to the point that it can see another piece of bread, or meal, or money, or sexual temptation, or opportunity for the ego,
and not confuse the want with need.  To be satisfied is to be full.  To be full is to mean that there is no more room for anything else.
So then, holiness begins to characterize those who trust Christ to fill them with Himself because all their needs, in body, mind, and
soul, are met in God, which sets them free from depending on anything else in heaven and earth to do the same.

    The psalmist Asaph knew this to be true, which is why he said to God, "Whom have I in heaven but you?  And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.  My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever" (Ps. 73:25-26).  It is not as if the psalmist had no other desires.  He, like us, was an image-bearer, and the very image He was privileged to bear was that of God, who also has the capacity to feel.  Being able to feel at all finds its origin in God Himself.  So our affections are not foreign, nor are they fundamentally evil.  They make us humans with the power to love and be loved, weep with those who weep, enjoy our lovers and our friends.  But sin's mishandling of them is what drives us to do inhumane things.  When sin is intertwined with our affections, it causes conflict, lust, envy, jealousy, sexual immorality, drunkenness, sorcery, fits of anger (Gal. 5:19-21).  We sin because we feel like it, and we sin because we love it.  No wonder we resist the call to holiness like a bad dream because we have too many desires competing for our whole heart.  

    What are we to do with such sins, or desires to sin?  We must dethrone them first, by way of repentance, coming to terms with their incompetence and the impossibility of them being a worthwhile love, a heavy bread.  When the Spirit regenerates our hungry soul, He doesn't leave it empty like the tomb Jesus left to itself.  Instead, we are given a new heart, as we now know, and with it comes an affection for God that sits enthroned above all others.  Thomas Chalmers famously put it this way when he wrote, "We have already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from it;  and thus reduce itself to a wilderness.  The heart is not so constituted;  and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection, is by the expulsive power of a new one."  [Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection (Wheaton, IL:  Crossway, 2020)]  Our love of sin is rooted in our unbelief in God and our weak affections toward Him.  By weak, I am referencing C.S. Lewis when he said, "It would seem that  Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us."  [C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York:  HarperCollins, 1949, 26.)]  When God is believed to be bread, savior, sustainer, provider, comforter, Lord, King, and everything else He has revealed himself to be, the heart will say, "There is nothing on earth that I desire besides you."  Because it has found the person that has everything the heart needs. Desiring God above all things is the soil from which holiness is grown.  We are already empowered to flee sin through the Spirit, and we will want to and choose to put to death what is earthly in us when we believe God is infinitely better than everything we are tempted to leave Him for.

    Beholding God's glory in God's Word and believing all that it shows you transforms you into "that same image."  This language of imaging God began in Genesis when the Godhead proclaimed, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness"  (Gen. 1:26).  This theme is also present throughout the Epistles, in relation to looking like Christ, being holy as He is.  Romans 8:29 says, "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son..." (emphasis added).  The "old self"  as Paul calls it in Colossians 3, refers to the person and behaviors that shaped who we were before the Spirit made us new.  Prior to our regeneration, we were as evil as the night is long, but with being made alive, we are told and miraculously able to disrobe ourselves of that ancient way of life.  Instead we are clothed by the  "new self" which is "being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator" (Col. 3:10, emphasis added).  Beholding Christ motivates us to holiness by our observing the moral purity and transcendent beauty of Jesus, but through this vision, we are also taught the way of Jesus.

        But that is not the way you learned Christ!--assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in
        him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt
        through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after
        the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.   (Eph. 4:20-24, emphasis added)

    I would hope that we know what God looks like by now.  If we don't, the world and the flesh will give us deficient ways to image Him, telling us that we can look like God and Satan at the same time.  Worldliness is nothing less than the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1John 2:16);  this being the very pulse of whatever context we call home, we must never take our cues from a dying thing on how to live.  If we are unclear about "the truth" as told and revealed in Christ, the world will inevitably woo us back to itself.  David Wells, explaining how convincing the world can be, says, "The world is that system of values whose source is human sinfulness and whose expression is cultural.  It is that collective life which validates our personal sin.  It is everything in society that makes sinful attitudes and practices look normal.  [David Wells, God the Evangelist:  How the Holy Spirit Works to 
Bring Men and Women to Faith (Grand Rapids:  Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1987), 115.]  But sin will never be normal.  It is and will always be offensive to God.  If we behold the world and its ways more than Christ, be not surprised when you look more like it than you do Jesus.

    Looking to Christ, we know what God is like.  Who and how He is--this is the end goal of our "becoming."  Remember God, good in every way.  Set apart from everything that there is, being in a class all by Himself, enthroned on high, He sits where the angels sing His praises.  Let us recall and think on His holiness yet again:  He is totally free to be who He is and He can never be who He is not.  Nothing in heaven or on earth controls the sovereign God.  This freedom is expressed in His creating us, in love.  God didn't create because anything outside of Himself told Him to or convinced Him that He should.  It wasn't out of need that He made the world, as if God was dependent on what He's made to be whole.  No.  He created the world and all that's in it because it pleased him to bring into being creatures that would share in the love He has always had for His Son through the love-bond of the Spirit.  "Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world"  (John 17:24, emphasis added).  And "I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them:  (John 17:26, emphasis added).   God is self-giving in that way, to make us so that we may know Him.  God's love for us in Christ, as poured out by the Spirit (Rom. 5:5), has brought us into fellowship with Him and the Son;  from there, we have come to behold the beauty of His holiness, and by beholding it, we become as lovely as He is.

    Looking to Christ, we too are set apart from the world and the things it delights in.  To God we belong, giving Him our bodies as a living sacrifice, our mouths as His ambassadors, our feet to bring His good news.  Believing God to be the all-satisfying bread of life that He is, He fills us and frees us from being enslaved to everything and everybody.  Being satisfied in God makes us totally "independent of our environment"  since we are no longer needy of people or circumstances to make us happy or whole.  [When I speak of being independent of environment, I do not mean we do not need external things like food or water or the community of faith;  rather, I draw from  R. A. Torrey in his book The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit (2013).  On page 56, when exploring the filling of the Holy Spirit, Torrey says once a person receives the Spirit, He then fills us with a well of water that is forever springing up, "satisfying us from within" regardless of circumstances like " health or sickness, prosperity or adversity."  Thus, we are "independent of our environment," no longer needy of it to make us happy.  In other words, the Spirit of God satisfies to such a degree that we aren't dependent on our circumstance to do so.]  As "people who are free"  we are liberated to love as generously as God does, not repaying evil for evil but turning our cheek, while pursuing moral purity with all that we have.  Clothed in the newness of Christ, we "put to death therefore what is earthly....sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry"  (Col. 3:5).  And put on, as God's chosen ones, "holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another..."  (Col. 3:12-13a).  This heaven-empowered love toward God and our neighbors may set us at odds with the world around us, but even then, as God's peace is, ours is too--settled and safe.  It is the world that Christ has overcome, and through Christ, we will overcome it too.  Of the saints, He says, "The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne"  (Rev. 3:21).  And there, finally, after we have breathed our last, we will see why our dying is gain.  Opening those eyes that were once blind, now seeing, He will finally appear, and do you know what well happen next?  "We know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is"  (1 John 3:2, emphasis added).

    Beholding, we become;  holy.