ATTRIBUTES TO GOD'S HOLINESS






  In a fact of God Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason: the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting. God is not under law, nor above law. God is law.


  Let’s talk for a moment what Satan has chosen to do in the face of this. He has chosen to kill and to steal anything that would allow the works of God to lead us. He will try to destroy the true church and undertake the development of true holiness the way God is.The Word of God is not paper and ink. It is God’s plan for man. God is righteous by nature and necessity…God is the source and author of law for all moral beings. Satan has been so clever in keeping our saints attention on things that look so easy and so humanly natural.

  We may have a better definition of holiness by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God’s being and God’s will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being (saints) and also that holy being logically precedes holy willing.

  Important: God’s nature - a fixed unchanging law of activity or mode of manifestation. Laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought - activity. They do no rule intellect, but only express what intellect is.

 I must maintain that, as truth of being logical precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. Bible knowledge and pure motive being the teacher is totally necessary. The leader must not circumvent any script that he doesn’t like, or call unnecessary. Whether you can stop yourself from trying to be equally happy in wrong is more than I can say. Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consists in, and result from, God’s volition's eternally. I must believe that God’s is ever unchanging. I cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil.

 The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith more than on the object of faith. In regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God’s being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity and he ceases therefore to be God.
 If God uses fear and not respect then he is unwilling to trust teaching and developing character that is developed by strong but loving establishing soul disciple. I can truly say I trust in God - the Right shall be the right and wrong will be the wrong, while he endures.

 Biblical revelation is a disclosure of the power that the Holy Spirit’s have the ability to develop righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine of love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.


  Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate, love to the highest person and to his ends and objects.

  Holiness and Energy of Will - This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.

  As there is a higher mind than our mind, and a greater heart than our heart, so there is a grander will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the stainless blue of the summer sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movements. 

  “It is a glassy sea” (Rev. 15:2) “And I saw something like a sea of glass mingled with fire and those who have the victory over the Beast, over his image and over his Mark and over the number of his name, standing on the sea of glass, having hearts of God.” A glassy sea mingled with fire Holiness is not a dead - clean purity of the perfection of the faultless marble statue.

  Without true Holiness we will never understand the mysteries of God that are hidden in Christ Jesus and reveled by the Holy Spirit. Life as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are without fault before the throne are they who follow the lamb wherever he goes - holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.

  God is a perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free: God cannot do otherwise than his own essential nature. The center of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling and feeling has its end in willing. So I must make feeling subordinated to willing and happiness to righteousness. It must “will” with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness.

2 Thessalonians 2:15 -
Therefore, Brethren, stand fast and hold the biblical traditions which you were taught, whether by word or by epistle.

  Mind must first get its impression from the object; then to find what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react...all faiths and philosophies, moods and systems subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage action.

  What is true of man is even more true of God. all the wills of men combined, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all the man-made doctrines, cultures and ages present and come is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, and no partakers.

  Does God will the good because it is the good or is the good “good” because God wills it?
In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the later case, good as something arbitrary and changeable. I say that neither of these is true; I hold that there is no prior good before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will. The good is the good for God, not before but in his self-determination.

  There is a contrary that both are true because God has no mere simple form of being whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated and reciprocally conditioning itself. That is the Godhead being both necessary and free.

  God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct doctrine and theology. We must accept this because we know that we worship a jealous God who is not content to be one of many. This jealousy really signifies that God is the very being to whom moral distinctions are real.
Self-affirmation - holiness is God's self-willing. His own Purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is Holy in that his infinite moral excellence affirms asserts itself as the highest possible motive end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Godhead (Col. 2:9).

  Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy = a similarity between like features to two things on which a comparison may be based. So we see in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, and self assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of “Job.” In his best moments the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness.

  Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is.) In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely good being - his being like himself.

  The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. It is the part of goodness to protect goodness. We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Godhead. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as a knowledge and love. The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. They must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of one moral nature. Since we are made in His image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God’s acts are acts of love but are all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication which we call God’s holiness is only faintly reflected in such utterances as Job 27:5-6.

  The fact that the spirit of God has nominated the Holy Spirit to teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is Holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's Holiness moreover since it is a self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end and that all things will serve his purposes. Rom. 11:36

Holiness - purity, sanctity. You're ready to go into the court of heaven and plead your cases.

Referencing scriptures:
Exodus 15:11, Exodus 28:36, 1 Corinthians 16:29, Psalms 48:8, Psalms 89 :35, Psalms 93 :5, Amos 4:2, Obadiah 17, Romans 1:4, Romans 6:19, Colossians 7:1, Ephesians 4:24, 1st Timothy 2:15

Thank you for Reading! Blessings to you! 
Pastor James P. Norman Jr.

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