Holiness Means Wholeness, Not Separation from Sinners

The post argues that religious habits have shaped how many people understand holiness, and that this has left the church weak and disengaged. It describes a pattern where repentance becomes a matter of turning from sin, confession becomes reviewing one’s sins, and holiness becomes avoiding sinners. The author suggests that listening to God’s own language and treating Scripture as a guide to righteousness would lead somewhere better.

The author then challenges the common dictionary meaning of “holy” as sacred, consecrated, or religious. Those definitions, the post says, do not capture a holy God. Instead, holiness points to wholeness, fullness, and completeness. God lacks nothing and is entirely self-sufficient, so holiness describes the perfect and unbroken fullness of who God is, not a set of religious rules.

Drawing on the Old Testament and a sidebar about Jesus, the author notes that Israel was told to separate the holy from the profane, and that this idea grew into a sense that holiness means distance from sinners. The post points to Jesus, who befriended sinners and asked that his followers be made holy while remaining in the world. The author also critiques views that equate holiness with moral perfection earned through rule-keeping, arguing that such approaches lead to self-trust rather than real transformation.

Finally, the post traces the English word “holy” to an Old English root meaning whole and hale, which John Wycliffe and his associates understood when they translated the Bible into English in the fourteenth century. The author notes that Wycliffe’s view did not become common, and that many churchgoers today hear the Latin sense of “set apart.” The post then turns to the Old Testament, citing Leviticus 11:45 as the first biblical description of God as holy, and it begins to examine the Hebrew words for holy.

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