God Most Holy

Repetition is the mother of learning.

Roman proverb

"Mom, my head is pounding and I have to go to class. I drank a glass of water."

"Mom, I'm feeling so anxious about my exam. Will you pray for me? I drank a glass of water."

Two texts, received from two different college-age Wilkins on two different days in the same week. To someone not familiar with our family, these messages from the now-flown baby birds to the mama bird back at the nest are probably part self-explanatory and part weird. But to my kids, they make perfect sense. For their whole lives, a report of any ailment has been answered with the suggestion, "Try drinking a glass of water."

I've been teased by my kids a fair amount for this home remedy advice. They joke that if they were to text me that they have lost a limb, I would advise them to hydrate.

So imagine my glee as I sat watching the evening news, my youngest child seated to my right, and heard a doctor report that the best first step for headaches and other common discomforts is ... you guessed it. The look on Calvin's face indicated that he had drawn the correct conclusion: there would be no living with me now. Luckily for him, he graduates this year. Perhaps by the time he leaves the nest, I will have received my honorary medical degree from the proper authorities.

"Try drinking a glass of water" is just one of many phrases etched into the psyches of my kids. Parents repeat things. Lots of things. Especially to small children. When we would leave the kids with a sitter, my last words were always, "Be ye kind one to another!" Before they could play at a friend's house, the standard question was, "Is your room clean?" And at bedtime, "Have you brushed your teeth?"

We repeat what we want others to remember. And we learn what we hear repeated.

As my children got older, they didn't wait for the reminder. A request to go to a friend's house would begin with, "Mom, my room is clean and I finished my homework." Because repetition had done its work.

It's no wonder that the repository of the greatest wisdom on earth utilizes this tool with regularity. By paying attention to what the Bible repeats, we gain an understanding of what it most wants us to learn and remember.

Who Is God?

My explicitly stated intention for this book is that we learn to identify God's will for our lives.

Our inclination is to discern God's will by asking, "What should I do?" But God's will concerns itself primarily with who we are, and only secondarily with what we do. By changing the question and asking, "Who should I be?" we see that God's will is not concealed from us in his Word, but is plainly revealed.

The Bible plainly answers the question "Who should I be?" with "Be like Jesus Christ, who perfectly images God in human form." God's will for our lives is that we conform to the image of Christ, whose incarnation shows us humanity perfectly conformed to the image of God. In this book, we will consider how we can demonstrate a resemblance to our Maker. But since the Bible's answer to "Who should I be?" is "Be like the very image of God," we must ask, "Who is God?"

Theologians have mined the Scriptures for centuries to answer this question. Stephen Charnock, Arthur Pink, A. W. Tozer, and R. C. Sproul have all explored the limitless character of God to my great benefit, and to lengths that I am not competent to go. Any systematic theology text lists and explores God's attributes. But I hope in these pages to take the lofty view of God presented elsewhere and ask a further question: "How should the knowledge that God is ______ change the way I live?"

I have elsewhere explored the implications of ten of God's incommunicable attributes that could fill that blank, those traits that are true of God alone. Only God is infinite, incomprehensible, self-existent, eternal, immutable, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and sovereign. When we strive to become like him in any of these traits, we set ourselves up as his rival. Human beings created to bear the image of God aspire instead to become like God. We reach for those attributes that are only true of God, those suited only to a limitless being. Rather than worship and trust in the omniscience of God, we desire omniscience for ourselves. Rather than celebrate and revere his omnipotence, we seek omnipotence in our own spheres of influence. Rather than rest in the immutability of God, we point to our own calcified sin patterns and declare ourselves unchanging and unchangeable. Like our father Adam and our mother Eve, we long for that which is only intended for God, rejecting our God-given limits and craving the limitlessness we foolishly believe we are capable of wielding and entitled to possess.

To crave an incommunicable attribute is to listen to the Serpent's lure, "You shall be like God." It is the natural inclination of the sinful heart, but as those who have been given a new heart with new desires, we must learn to crave different attributes, those appropriate to a limited being, those that describe the abundant life Jesus came to give to us.

We call these God's communicable attributes, those of his traits that can become true of us, as well. God is holy, loving, just, good, merciful, gracious, faithful, truthful, patient, and wise. When we talk about being "conformed to the image of Christ," this is the list we are describing. It is this list I intend to explore, ten attributes that show us how to reflect who God is as Christ did. The more gracious I become, for example, the more I reflect Christ, who perfectly images God.

But where should such a reflection begin? What should be the first thing that comes into my mind when I think about God? Is there even a right answer? I would argue that there is. We just have to lend an ear to the mother of learning — repetition.

First Things First

If it's true that we repeat what is most important, one attribute of God emerges clearly as belonging at the top of the list: holiness. Holiness can be defined as the sum of all moral excellency, "the antithesis of all moral blemish or defilement." It carries the ideas of being set apart, sacred, separate, of possessing utter purity of character.

Following the rule of repetition, the Bible wants our first thought about God to be that he is holy. The word holy appears almost seven hundred times in the Bible. Its verb form, sanctify, appears an additional two hundred times. Those mentions of holy in all its forms are related to things and people and places, but its ties to God himself are striking. No other attribute is joined to the name of God with greater frequency than holiness. Twenty-nine times the Bible mentions his "holy name." He is called the "Holy One of Israel" twenty-five times in the book of Isaiah alone.

God's holiness, his utter purity of character, is what distinguishes him from...