The Meaning of Holiness

 

This week is Holy Week – the week in the Christian Kalendar (liturgical calendar) that begins with Palm Sunday, ends with Holy Saturday, the eve of Easter, and includes Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.  Each of these days is a remembrance of important events that took place in the week immediately prior to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the event remembered on Easter itself.     The account of the events of this week and of the Resurrection itself occupy about a third of each of the Synoptic Gospels and just under a half of the Gospel according to St. John.   The Death and Burial of Christ, along with His Resurrection are the events proclaimed in the Christian Gospel (1 Cor. 15:3-4).   That it commemorates the most important events in Christian salvation history, the events at the heart of the Christian kerygma, explains why this week is Holy Week.  In this essay we will be considering the what rather than the why.   What does it mean to say that a week – or anything else for that matter – is holy?

 

Probably the most common mistake made about holiness – the condition of being holy – today is to regard it as being the same thing as purity.   It is a subtle mistake since holiness and purity are very much related.   The concept of separation or apartness is essential to both.   (1)     Purity, however, is a separation in which the from is emphasized.   Water is pure, when it is has been separated from all contaminants or, as we are more likely to think of it, when all contaminants have been separated from it, by a filter, for example.   Holiness, by contrast, is a separation that emphasized that for which something has been set apart.   Something is made holy by being set aside for God.    While holiness implies and includes the kind of separation involved in purity – you cannot separate something unto God without separating it from something else – the reverse is not the case, you can separate something from something else without separating it unto God or anything else.    That having been said, holiness, properly understood, does not have the same implications about that from which the holy has been separated as purity does.   When something is consecrated – made holy by being set aside for God – this suggests that everything that has not been consecrated, everything from which the holy has been set apart, is ordinary, everyday, common and mundane, but not necessarily that it is in some way bad.

 

The Fourth Commandment (2) illustrates this point:

 

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.   Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.  (Exodus 20:8-11)

 

The commandment is to keep the Sabbath holy.   The rest of the passage is the explanation of the commandment.     It would be absurd to read into this that the labour in which the Israelites were engaged during the rest of the week was bad or sinful.   That is obviously not what we are supposed to take away from this.   Rather, the point of it all is that for this day to be reserved for God, it had to be kept apart from the usage of ordinary weekdays, and hence from their labour, good and necessary as that may happen to be.  

 

The word “reserved” is an especially good one for explaining the meaning of holiness.   We all understand the concept of a restaurant table or a hotel room or a cabin at a ski resort being “reserved”.   This is what happens when the restaurant, hotel, or resort takes the table, room or cabin out of general availability and reserves its use for a specific party.   If you think of God as having made a reservation for one day out of the seven (the Sabbath), one nation out of the nations of the world (Israel), one tribe of priests out of that nation (the Levites), one building and its furnishings (the Tabernacle/Temple) so that they are no longer generally available but are set aside for His Own use this will give you a pretty good grasp of the notion of holiness as it applies to people, places, and things other than God Himself.        

 

The holiness of God Himself, it needs to be noted, cannot be explained this way.   Try it and you will see just how strange it sounds.   Earthly holiness, however, is the illustration God has given us of His Own holiness.    The better we understand earthly holiness – how the Sabbath, Tabernacle, etc. were holy – the better a picture we will have of God’s holiness, provided that we remember that as an illustration of God’s Own holiness, earthly holiness is rather like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave and that analogies can only go so far in what they say about God before they become mostly apophatic, that is, telling us what God is not like rather than what He is like.    When used of God Himself, holiness speaks of His supreme transcendence over all Creation that makes all earthly holiness seem ordinary and common by comparison.   A glimpse of it, such as that which the prophet Isaiah caught in his vision of the divine throne room and the seraphim singing the Sanctus, invites the prophet’s response: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seek the King, the LORD of hosts” (Is. 6:5).

 

In the Old Testament, the Ceremonial Law – the dietary restrictions separating “clean” from “unclean” animals, the designating of the weekly Sabbath and certain annual Feasts as holy days, the establishment of the Tabernacle/Temple, priesthood, and sacrificial system and the elaborate instructions for consecrating everything involved in these – well illustrates the earthly holiness, the setting of times and places and people and things aside and reserving them for God, that is itself an illustration of God’s transcendent holiness.    In the events that we remember in Holy Week, Jesus Christ fulfilled the Old Testament promises that God would establish a New Covenant that would be superior to the Mosaic Covenant of which the Ceremonial Law was a part.    In the Book of Acts and the epistles of St. Paul, the New Testament makes it quite clear that the Ceremonial Law of the Mosaic Code is not binding upon the Church established under the New Covenant.   The reason for this is also made clear – in the Church, believers in Jesus Christ whether they be Jew or Gentile, are united in one body and so that which had kept them apart is removed.

 

This does not mean that holiness is any less important under the New Covenant than under the Old.   The New Testament frequently speaks of holiness, most often in reference to God, with the vast majority of these references being mentions of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, i.e., the Holy Spirit.  The Scriptures, prophets, city Jerusalem, Temple, Sinaitic Covenant, and angels are all called holy.   There are also uses of the term that are distinct to the New Testament.    It is applied to both individual Christians and to Churches.  In the salutation at the beginning of almost all of his epistles, St. Paul addresses the members of the Churches to which he is writing as “holy ones”, or, as the Authorized Bible renders this expression, “saints”.  (3)    The Church is called a “holy temple”, a “holy priesthood” and a “holy nation” (4) and the root of her very name in the original Greek New Testament has connotations similar to those of the words meaning holy. (5)

 

In reference to Christian believers and Churches, holiness can either be something attributed to us on account of what Jesus Christ accomplished for us by His Death (Heb. 10:14) or it can be something to which we are called to strive (Heb. 12:14, 1 Pet 1:15-16).   Clearly there is a difference between these two kinds of holiness and the difference is comparable to that between two different kinds of righteousness that the New Testament also speaks about, that which St. Paul discusses at length in his epistle to the Romans as being credited to the believer on the basis of grace (Rom. 4) and that which St. James attributes to the believer’s works (Jas. 2:14-26).   It should not be assumed that because of this parallel usage in the New Testament holiness has become merely another word for righteousness.   Holiness retains its primary meaning from the Old Testament of being reserved or set apart for God.  By His Sacrifice on the Cross, Jesus Christ has reserved us who believe in Him, individually and as the spiritual society that is His Church, for Himself.   By the same Sacrifice He has taken away our sins and given to us the righteousness whereby we are accepted by God.    Although accomplished by the same Saviour in the same Sacrifice these are two different things and our understanding and appreciation of what our Saviour has done for us is diminished if we blur them into one.   Similarly, when St. Peter calls us to be “holy in all manner of conversation (6)” (1 Petr 1:15) the holiness of which he writes must be distinguished from what is often called practical righteousness.   Since both pertain to everyday behaviour it might be harder to conceptualize the difference here, but think of practical righteousness and practical holiness as two different aspects of the behaviour to which the Christian is called.   Practical righteousness is the aspect defined by it being right rather than wrong.   Holiness, however, is the aspect that sets it apart from the behaviour of the world.  The opposite of the holiness to which the Christian is called is worldliness.   Worldliness is the condition of being of the world.   “The world” in this sense of the word means neither “God’s Creation” nor “human civilization” but rather the evil that operates in these and which forms, along with the flesh in the sense of the evil in fallen human nature and the devil the triumvirate of the Christian’s spiritual enemies.   It consists, St. John tells us, of “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16).   Worldliness is conformity to these things, holiness is being set apart unto God from them.  

 

That the New Testament does not provide the Church with a lengthy and elaborate set of rules about consecrating places and times to replace the Ceremonial Law of the Old Testament does not mean that reserving these things for God is any less important under the New Covenant than the Old.   The Old Covenant operated on the principle of Law.   The New Covenant, the Covenant of the Gospel, operates on the principles of Grace and Liberty.   The Christian’s liberty, St. Paul tells us in several places, is not to be used as a license to sin and the Christian living out his liberty under the Gospel should, actually, manifest a higher level of righteousness than that attainable under the Law.   Since, as we have seen, holiness is no less important under the New Testament than the Old, what is true of righteousness is true of holiness as well.   Those who take Christian liberty to mean that the Church, no longer under the Ceremonial Law that separated Israel from the Gentile nations, ought not to consecrate the spaces and places in which she meets to God, or to reserve the day of Resurrection for God each week as the Lord’s Day, or to set Holy Feasts and Fasts in commemoration of the events of the Gospel such as those remembered this week have twisted the matter entirely beyond recognition.   Christian liberty means that the Church is free to do precisely this and since her appreciation of and capacity for holiness ought to be greater under the Covenant of Christian liberty than what was available under the Law and we should expect more places, people, and days to be reserved for God under the Gospel than under the Law rather than fewer and have no business sneering at the holy days celebrated in Christian liberty in remembrance of the Gospel as “man-made” or “pagan”.

 

   (1)   The primary words used for “holy” in the Hebrew Old Testament – קָדוֹשׁ (qadosh), Greek New Testament -  ἅγιος  (hagios), and in the Latin liturgy – sanctus, all belong to word families  that stress the ideas of  “separate”, “set apart” or even “cut”, as do the primary English synonyms for “holy” – “sacred” and the archaic “hallowed”   Oddly enough, this is not the case with the word “holy” and its German cognate heilig.   These belong to a family of words including “health” and “whole” which would seem to have almost the opposite flavor, that of completeness rather than separation.

   (2)   This is the Fourth Commandment by the Jewish, Reformed, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox systems of numbering the Commandments.   The Roman Catholics and Lutherans number it as the Third Commandment.

   (3)   Obviously this does not apply to the epistles addressed to individuals rather than Churches.   Interestingly though, in his epistle to Philemon he twice uses the same term to refer to the Christians in the Colossian Church to which Philemon belonged.   In his first epistle to the Thessalonians he uses a similar expression “holy brethren”, albeit at the end of the epistle when he gives instructions for its reading (5:27).   In Hebrews there is no formal salutation at the beginning of the epistles, but he calls those to whom he is writing “holy brethren” in one spot (3:1), and instructs his readers to “salute…all the saints” at the end (13:24).    This leaves the Galatians as the notable exception to the rule.

   (4)   St. Paul twice speaks about a “temple of God” in 1 Corinthians.   The second time, the nineteenth verse of the sixth chapter, would seem from the context to be talking about the literal, physical, bodies of the Corinthian believers.   The first time, however, in the third chapter verses 16-17, which begin with “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God”, the wording suggests that they are collectively the temple of God, meaning that the Corinthian Church is in view, which makes sense considering that schism is the topic that is being addressed in this earlier section of the epistle.   The references to the Church as a “holy priesthood” and “holy nation” come from 1 Peter, verses 2:5 and 2:9 respectively.   St. Peter is addressing the same mostly Jewish Christians in what we now call Turkey to whom St. Paul wrote the epistle of Hebrews and in these verses he makes his point by employing the Old Testament’s language regarding Israel.

   (5)    Ἐκκλησία when used in non-religious contexts would usually be translated “assembly”.   The legislative assembly of Athens, for example, was called by this word.   It was formed by adding the preposition meaning “out of” in both Greek and Latin to the verb καλέω which means exactly what it sounds like as it shares a common ancestor with its English equivalent “I call”.    The “assembly” is formed of those who are “called out” (cf. Rev. 5:9-10).       

   (6)   “Conversation” in the English of the Authorized Bible does not mean what it means in present day usage.   We use it to mean talking to each other.   In 1611 it meant conduct or behaviour as carried out in society, in the company of others.

The Righteousness of God and Man

Who is a good person?

This used to be a fairly simple question. Our society had standards which defined certain behavior as right and certain behavior as wrong. A good person was a person who behaved in the right way and a bad person was a person who behaved in the wrong way.

The question has become complicated because there have been radical changes over the half of a century in how our society defines right and wrong. Behavior that was once defined as “wrong” such as sexual intercourse outside of wedlock is now considered, if not to be “right”, to at least be “none of your business”. Meanwhile behavior that nobody would have dreamed of considering to be “wrong” one hundred years ago has jumped to the top of the totem pole of sin. Much of this behavior consists not of outward actions but of inward thought patterns.

Consider, for example, the terms “racism”, “sexism”, and “homophobia”. All of these terms are very recent additions to the English language. Racism entered the English language in the 1930s, sexism and homophobia were first used in the 1960’s, with homophobia not gaining widespread usage until the 1980’s and ‘90’s. All of these terms describe ways of thinking more than they describe ways of acting. Is there any doubt that these are considered to be the greatest of evils in society today – at least by politicians, teachers, the media, and liberal clergy?

Was our society more right in what it deemed to be right and wrong behavior one hundred years ago or today? (1)

In spite of these changes there remains a general concept of a “good person” as someone who is kind, considerate and helpful to others, who obeys the law and pays his taxes, and doesn’t hurt other people. If you were to ask most people if they consider themselves to be a good person you would get answers like “I try to be”, or “I’m as good as the next person”, or if the person is particularly self-righteous “Well I’m better than a lot of other people”.

What these answers demonstrate is the human concept of righteousness. We judge ourselves to be good or bad by comparing ourselves with others. We look at people who commit major violent crimes like murder, robbery, and rape and consider them to be the “bad people”. We look at people in general and judge ourselves to be better than most. We look at someone like Mother Theresa and feel guilty.

We also feel guilty when we take a look at our own behavior and realize that we have not lived up to the moral standards we profess. We then try to justify ourselves by justifying our behavior. We make excuses for ourselves. We concoct nice logical arguments as to why our bad behavior is really right behavior. This is generally our first response if someone else points out our bad behavior to us.

Who does God consider to be a righteous person? Does He judge us in the same way other human beings do or does He have His own standards of righteousness by which He judges us?

The Scriptural answer to this question is, of course, that God holds us accountable to His own standards. He does take our standards into consideration, in judging us, Jesus said:

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew 7:2)

This is the reverse of the way in which we judge ourselves and others. We tend to be easier on ourselves than on other people, excusing and justifying in ourselves, behavior that we would condemn if committed by someone else. Jesus says, however, that God will hold us accountable if we don’t live up to the standards whereby we judge others.

Is there even one among us who has such perfect integrity as to endure such a judgment and be deemed righteous?

In the Sermon in which Jesus made the remark quoted above He tells us what the righteousness which God demands from man looks like.

He said:

For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:20)

The scribes were the teachers of the Law in Israel. The Pharisees were a Jewish sect that dated back to the Maccabean revolt in the 2nd century BC, who stressed purity and strict adherence to the law. When Jesus says that our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees He is setting the bar very high indeed. We should not try to get around this verse by thinking “well, the Pharisees weren’t really that righteous”. To do so would be to miss Jesus’ point altogether.

After saying the above, Jesus goes on to comment on six Old Testament commandments. Each time His remarks are to the effect that mere conformity to the letter of the commandment is insufficient to meet the requirements of righteousness God demands of people. We are required to be righteous in our hearts, which are only seen by God, and not just in our outward behavior seen by other people. He brings this section of His Sermon to a close by saying:

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)

Jesus then went on to say that it is alms-giving, prayer, and fasting that is done in secret rather than in front of other people that God rewards (Matthew 6:1-18) and that we must make God’s kingdom and righteousness the chief ends of our lives, placing the pursuit of them ahead of concerns about basic human needs such as clothing, food and shelter, warning us that we cannot serve God and money at the same time (Matthew 6:19-34).

As Jesus brought this Sermon to an end, He described the way of righteousness He had been preaching as a straight gate, and a narrow way, leading to life, which few find, as opposed to the wide gate and broad way that leads to destruction. It is a straight and narrow way indeed. There is not a human being other than Himself who has ever walked it. None of the rest of us have come even remotely close. Friedrich Nietzsche was in this limited sense correct when he wrote:

The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding--at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. (2)

The Sermon on the Mount is recorded in the Gospel of St. Matthew. The word “Gospel”, from the Old English “godspel” means “glad tidings”, and translates the Greek “euangelion” – “good message” or “good news”. How can a Sermon proclaiming that God requires of us a righteousness which we do not come close to meeting, be considered “Good News”?

The answer lies in the rest of the story. In the very next chapter a leper comes and worships Jesus and says “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean”, an expression of faith. Jesus heals him. Then a centurion comes and tells Jesus that he has a servant at home suffering from palsy. Jesus says that He will come and heal him and the centurion says that he is not worthy to have Jesus enter his home but that if Jesus just speaks the word his servant would be healed. Jesus commends him for his faith, saying that He had not found such faith in Israel, and grants his request saying “Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee”. Later in that same chapter, Jesus and His disciples enter a ship and a tempest arises while Jesus is asleep in the boat. The disciples, in terror awake Him. He rebukes them for their lack of faith – then calms the sea.

Throughout this chapter we see that Jesus rewards faith. In the chapter following Jesus will tell the Pharisees that He is not come to call the righteous but “sinners unto repentance”.

In the New Testament, the righteousness of God is both something God demands of people (as we saw in the Sermon on the Mount) and something God gives to people who trust Him. The righteousness that God demands of us is a righteousness we cannot achieve. When Jesus told the Pharisees that it is the sick that need a physician, not the well, and that He is come to call sinners unto repentance, He was not telling them that they didn’t need Him. He had already given the Sermon which demanded a righteousness higher than their own. They, therefore, were sinners just like the publicans and sinners whom they objected to Jesus eating with.

Earlier, when I described our tendency to make excuses for our bad behavior, I used the word “justify”. The word “justify” means to “declare to be righteous”. When we, having been caught doing something wrong, try to justify ourselves, we try to come up with arguments to convince others and ourselves that we were actually right in doing what is wrong.

God does not engage in that kind of justification in Scripture. He does not call bad actions good. He does not call wrong behavior right.

He does, however, justify sinners. Throughout the Bible, God calls those who trust in Him, righteous. These are not people who meet the standards of righteousness Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount. In Genesis 15, God speaks to Abraham, who is old and childless, and tells him that he will have a son and from his son descendants as numberless as the stars in the sky will be born. Abraham believed Him, and according to verse 6, “He counted it to him for righteousness”.

In the Psalms, King David frequently distinguished between the righteous and the wicked and calls upon God to rescue the former and to punish the latter. Yet, in the Psalms King David also expresses a deep sense of his own sinfulness. Psalm 51, for example was written after Nathan the prophet had come to David and exposed his sin in the affair with Bathsheba. David had slept with another man’s wife, gotten her pregnant, then in his attempt to cover up his sin had had her husband killed. Psalm 51 expresses his sorrow and repentance, and calls upon God to have mercy upon him, and to cleanse him from his sin and to create a clean heart within him. In repenting David expresses His faith that God can cleanse him of his sins and make him righteous. The theme of trust in God is a dominant one in the Davidic Psalms. Psalm 16 for example, opens by saying:

Preserve me, O God: for in thee do I put my trust.

Jesus, throughout the Gospels, rebuked unbelief more frequently than He rebuked sin and rewarded faith. St. Luke records a parable in which He compared a Pharisee and a tax collector, who both went to the Temple to pray. The Pharisee prayed this way:

God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. (Luke 18:11-12)

The tax collector, on the other hand, smote his breast and said:

God be merciful to me a sinner. (v. 13)

It is the tax collector who went home justified, Jesus said, and not the Pharisee.

It is St. Paul in his Epistle to the Church of Rome who provides us with the most detailed account of the righteousness God gives to those who trust in Him through Christ. In the first chapter St. Paul writes that the Gospel of Christ:

[I]s the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. (vv. 16-17)

The Gospel of Christ, the good news that Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and rose again from the dead, brings salvation to everyone who believes it, Jew or Greek it is for everybody. The “righteousness of God” revealed in the Gospel, is both God’s personal righteousness, and the righteousness He gives to those who believe.

St. Paul expands upon this by first writing about the wrath of God, God’s anger against man’s unrighteousness, describing the general condition of men as having rejected the revelation of God in His creation, and turned away to worship idols, and commit all sorts of sin (1:18-32) He then goes on to argue in the next two chapters that both Jews and Gentiles are alike condemned, for the Law only justifies those who obey it, that it will condemn those who possess it and do not obey it, and will justify those who obey it even if they have never heard it, but that no one will be justified by the works of the law “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God”.

It is here that he introduces the concept of justification by grace through faith:

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. (3:24-26)

It is because of the death of Jesus Christ, that God can be righteous Himself, and at the same time declare those who believe in the Savior He has given us, to be righteous as well. Christ’s death satisfies God’s just wrath against sin (this is what propitiation means) so that He can declare those who trust Him to be righteous without compromising His own righteousness. The mechanics of how Christ’s death accomplishes this is not fully explained in Scripture, and is probably beyond human comprehension, but St. Paul and St. Peter do explain that it involves substitution. St. Paul wrote that God “made Him to be sin for us Who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). St. Peter writes that Christ “Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth… his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.” (1 Peter 2:22, 24). In His death, Jesus took our sins upon Himself, and suffered for us, paying the penalty we owed to God’s justice and satisfying God’s wrath.

St. Paul goes on to explain that our works do not contribute to the righteousness that God gives us through faith. If righteousness in the eyes of God is something we must strive for through our own actions, we would be able to boast if we achieved it. The righteousness of God, however, is a gift freely given to us.

Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. (Rom 3:27-28)

Note that St. Paul writes “without the deeds of the law”. A few verses later he writes:

Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. (4:4-5)

This is the doctrine of “justification by faith alone”, which was not invented by Martin Luther in the 16th Century, but was clearly taught by St. Paul in the first. It is false to say that St. Paul did not teach sola fide because the word “alone” does not appear modifying the word “faith” in this epistle. The “alone” in “faith alone” means “without works” not “without grace, without Christ, without the Atonement” or anything of the sort, and St. Paul clearly says “without the deeds of the law” and “to him that worketh not”.

What this means is that being righteous in the eyes of God, is not something God dangles before us, like a carrot before a horse, as an end for which we are to strive, in order to keep us on a perpetual treadmill of good works. It is something God has already freely given us in Jesus Christ and we are to simply trust Him (take Him at His word) about it. This righteousness is not something of which we are to boast, but is rather something that should humble us. It is also the only proper foundation for a life of good works. Remember that St. Paul said, quoting the Prophet Habakkuk “the just shall live by faith”?

This means that trusting Jesus Christ as Savior is not a one time act (3) but the ongoing foundation upon which the Christian life of good works is to be lived. We are to live for God based upon the conviction (another word for faith) that Christ has died for us, redeemed us to God, and risen from the dead, and that through this God forgives us of our sins and gives us His righteousness and everlasting life in accordance with His promise in the Gospel to all who believe.

It is only by trusting God in this way that we can come to love Him and it is only through loving Him that we can do works that are pleasing in His sight. Jesus said the first and great commandment is the commandment to love God with all our hearts. St. John says that this is only possible because of His love for us:

We love him, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:9)

We know of this love, because it is revealed to us in Christ, in the Gospel, which we receive through faith.

If our righteousness in the eyes of God, if our acceptance by God, depended upon our fulfilling the Great Commandment we would never be accepted by God. God deserves and demands that we love Him wholeheartedly. This we never do in this life and we cannot love Him at all if we strive to love Him in order to be accepted by Him. Love is not something that can be produced upon command. If, however, we trust in Christ, if we believe that God out of the love, kindness, mercy, and grace of His heart, has made us completely acceptable to Him in Christ already, through our faith God will work love for Himself in us. And out of that love will flow works that are pleasing in His sight. It is not those works that make the believe righteous in God’s eyes, however, but the work of Christ.

The traditional Christian distinction between “works of the law” and “works of love” is the fundamental distinction between the works acceptable to God and works that are not – but the distinction is lost if we make “works of love” the basis of our personal acceptance with God. If they are something we must do in order to be accepted by God then they are “works of the law” not “works of love”.



(1) A lengthy answer to this question would sidetrack this essay but my answer is that we have moved away, as a society, from a more right view of right and wrong towards a more wrong view of right and wrong.

(2) Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by H. L. Mencken, The Anti-Christ (Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006), p. 39.

(3) The evangelical practice of talking about one’s conversion as one’s salvation has pitfalls here. Faith is supposed to look away from the believer, away from his works, and away even from itself, to Christ. The Gospel is that Christ saved those who trust Him through His death on the Cross – not that we are to save ourselves by trusting in Christ. Thus, the familiar evangelical question of “do you know when you were saved” should be answered, by the believer, with “Yes – I was saved when Jesus died on the Cross” not by giving the date of the believer’s conversion. Likewise, the best answer to the evangelical question of “If you were to die tonight, and God were to say to you ‘Why should I let you into Heaven’?” is perhaps not what many evangelicals think it is. The answer is “Because You gave Your Only-Begotten Son to die on the cross for my sins, raised Him from the dead, and promised everlasting life to whoever believes in Him”.

Religion, Righteousness and Christianity

Several decades ago Fritz Ridenour wrote a popular study of St. Paul’s epistle to the church in Rome, entitled How to Be Christian Without Being Religious. (1) The title was cleverly worded. Everybody knows how to be religious without being a Christian – you join another religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc. To be a Christian without being religious, on the other hand, is a contradiction in terms. Ridenour, however, was writing in the ‘60’s, and the young generation he was writing to, were being portrayed in the media as rebels who rejected the society of their parents and its rules. Church and religion were part of the society they were rebelling against. To reach this generation with the gospel, Ridenour believed he had to separate the gospel and Christ, from religion.

Ridenour may not have been the first to distinguish between “Christianity” and “religion” in this manner, but he would certainly not be the last. It caught on like wildfire and today large segments of the evangelical church adhere religiously to the idea that “Christianity is not a religion”. Here, however, they have out-Ridenoured Ridenour, who opened his book by quoting Webster’s definition of “religion” as “a system of faith and worship” and saying that “Christianity is certainly that”.

Some evangelicals even go so far as to tell people that “God hates religion”.

What is religion?

People who separate religion on the one hand from the Gospel and Christ on the other hand usually define “religion” as “man trying to reach God through his own efforts”.

This is an incredibly tortured definition of religion however. It confuses an attitude towards religion, i.e., a belief that religion will make one righteous and acceptable in the eyes of God, with religion itself.

The defining element of religion is communal worship. Religion is people collectively, as a community, believing in and worshipping God. It, like marriage and family, is a universal institution of human society.

Does the Bible condemn religion?

No. In the Bible, God condemns certain kinds of religious worship, such as human sacrifice and the worship of idols (deities other than the one true and living God), and He condemns the hypocritical use of religion to mask unrighteousness and unbelief, but He never condemns religion itself. Indeed, in the Bible He established not one, but two religions.

In both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, as we shall see, there is a distinction between religion and righteousness. The Old Testament prophets warned God’s people of His displeasure over their sin, telling them that God preferred righteous behavior to the outward practice of religion.

In the New Testament, the Incarnate Son of God went even further. He preached that true righteousness is righteousness in the heart and not just outward obedience to the commandments. If outward righteousness is not enough to please God it is clear that neither religion nor righteousness can make a man acceptable to God, because all are sinners. That truth is fundamental to the Christian Gospel. Only the blood of Jesus Christ can make peace between a Holy God and sinful man. The Scriptures proclaim the Gospel, the Good News that God has shown His love to sinful mankind by giving us His Only Son Jesus, Who took the burden of our sins upon Himself as He died on the cross paying the penalty of our sins, and promises us that all repentant sinners who believe in the Risen Christ are cleansed from sin, declared righteous in the eyes of the Lord, and have everlasting life as the gift of God.

Does that mean then that if we have the Gospel we don’t need religion?

The New Testament clearly says that righteousness is not “optional” for the repentant sinner who trusts in Christ.

“What shall we say then?” St. Paul asks the Romans, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?”

The answer is “God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?”

The Apostle’s point is not that placing one’s faith in Christ makes one sinless in practice in this life or that good works help maintain one’s salvation after one has trusted Christ (the epistle of Galatians was written to refute the latter error). He is saying that we are not to use salvation by grace through faith as an excuse to sin. Grace does not operate by removing God’s requirement that we be obedient and righteous so that we are now licensed to sin. Grace operates by removing sin and guilt from the sinner who humbly repents and trusts in the salvation given in Jesus Christ.

If salvation by grace does not give us a license to be unrighteous neither does it give us a license to be irreligious.

Throughout the Scriptures we find God emphasizing that righteousness is more important than religion. In the sixth chapter of Hosea, God declares through the prophet “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” God Himself had established the Israelite system of sacrifice and burnt offerings as part of the Covenant He made with Israel at Mt. Sinai. When He says, therefore, that He “desired mercy, and not sacrifice”, this has to be understood as a comparative, as in the second clause “the knowledge of God more than burn offerings” rather than a disavowal of the religious system He Himself had instituted.

In the sixth chapter of Micah, God quotes Balak, King of Moab, as having asked Balaam:

Wherewith shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He then approves Balaam’s answer:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

Christ made reference to verses like these when He condemned the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. When the Pharisees asked His disciples: “Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?”

He responded by saying:

They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

In the 23 chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew we find Jesus rebuking the Pharisees by saying:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

The “weightier matters of the law”, according to Christ, are those which God is said to require of people in Michah 6:8, “judgment” meaning “justice” and faith corresponding to walking humbly with God. By saying that the Pharisees ought to have done these “and not to leave the other undone”, Christ is clearly saying that the fact that righteousness (justice, mercy, and faith) is more important than religion, does not mean the latter is unimportant.

That is not something that changed with the Cross and the establishment of the New Covenant. Under the New Covenant, however, God has established a different religion for His Church than that which He established for Israel in the Old Covenant.

At Mt. Sinai, God established a covenant with the people of Israel, in which He agreed to be their God, and they His people. He gave them a religion, which included a place of worship (the Tabernacle which was later replaced by the Temple), a priesthood (the tribe of Levi), sacrifices, holy days, and a special diet. The religion established in the Old Testament, according to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament, pointed to Christ. The Levite priesthood and the sacrifices of bulls and of goats, pointed to Christ’s eternal priesthood, and the sacrifice of His own blood, offered in the Holy of Holies in heaven, which effectively takes away the sins of those who trust Him.

In the Old Testament, God promised through His prophets that He would, when He sent the Messiah, provide a New Covenant, in which He would write His Laws upon the hearts of His people. This Covenant was accomplished by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. This Covenant established a new spiritual community, the Church, led by Christ’s Apostles. As recorded in the Book of Acts, God led the Apostles in the early days of the Church, to decide that circumcision and the dietary requirements of the Sinaitic Law, would not be religious requirements for the Church. Baptism became the initiation ceremony for the Christian Church, symbolizing repentance from sin and union with Christ in His death and resurrection. Christ’s death was the effectual true Sacrifice, which once and for all took away sin, doing away with the need for future sacrifices. In the place of sacrifices in the Christian religion, Christ Himself instituted Holy Communion, as a memorial of His sacrificial death, according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the first epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthian Church.

The idea that this does not comprise a religion is grotesquely erroneous. There is no sanction in Scripture for the idea that “Christianity is not a religion” or the notion that “God hates religion” any more than there is sanction for the liberal idea that religion is a “personal matter”. God created man with a need to worship his Creator, and He created man, not as a multitude of independent individuals, but as a social being, existing as families, communities, and societies. Man’s need to worship is an aspect of his collective as well as his individual existence, and thus man needs institutional, established religion. Salvation, is a gift of God, which we receive as repentant sinners, through faith in Jesus Christ. It is a gift God has given us, because He loves us and because we as sinners, need it. Religion is also a gift of God, given to us because He loves us, and because we need it.

(1) Fritz Ridenour, How To Be a Christian Without Being Religious, (Regal Books: Ventura, CA, 1967). Regal Books is an imprint of Gospel Light.