From The Existence and Attributes of God (edited by Mark Jones)
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Doct. Holiness is a glorious perfection belonging to the nature of God. Hence he is in Scripture styled often the Holy One, the Holy One of Jacob, the Holy One of Israel. More often is he entitled “holy” than “almighty,” and set forth by this part of his dignity more than by any other. This is more affixed as an epithet to his name than any other. You never find it expressed, his “mighty name” or his “wise name” but his “great name” and, most of all, his “holy name.” This is his greatest title of honor. In this does the majesty and venerableness of his name appear. When the sinfulness of Sennacherib is aggravated, the Holy Spirit takes the rise from this attribute, “You have lifted up your eyes on high, even against the Holy One of Israel” (2 Kings 19:22)—not against the wise, mighty, but against the Holy One of Israel, as that wherein the majesty of God was most illustrious. It is upon this account he is called light, as impurity is called darkness. Both in this sense are opposed to one another. He is a pure and unmixed light, free from all blemish in his essence, nature, and operations.
1. Heathens have owned it. Proclus calls him the undefiled governor (Ἄχραντος ἡγεμών) of the world. The poetical transformations of their false gods and the extravagancies committed by them were (in the account of the wisest of them) an unholy thing to report and hear.8 And some9 vindicate Epicurus from the atheism wherewith he was commonly charged, that he did not deny the being of God but those adulterous and contentious deities the people worshiped, which were practices unworthy and unbecoming the nature of God. Hence they asserted that virtue was an imitation of God and that a virtuous man bore a resemblance to God. If virtue were a copy from God, a greater holiness must be owned in the original. And when some of them were at a loss how to free God from being the author of sin in the world, they ascribe the birth of sin to matter and run into an absurd opinion, fancying it to be uncreated, that thereby they might exempt God from all mixture of evil. So sacred with them was the conception of God as a holy God.
2. The most absurd heretics have owned it.10 The Manichees and Marcionites, who thought evil came by necessity, would yet free God from being the author of it by asserting two distinct eternal principles, one the original of evil, as God was the fountain of good. So rooted was the notion of this divine purity, that none would ever slander goodness itself with that which was so disparaging to it.
3. The nature of God cannot rationally be conceived without it. Though the power of God be the first rational conclusion drawn from the sight of his works, wisdom the next from the order and connection of his works, purity must result from the beauty of his works. It is thus maintained that God cannot be deformed by evil, who has made everything so beautiful in its time. The notion of a God cannot be entertained without separating from him whatsoever is impure and bespotting, both in his essence and actions. We may conceive him infinite in majesty, infinite in essence, eternal in duration, mighty in power, wise and immutable in his counsels, merciful in his proceedings with men, and whatsoever other perfections may dignify so sovereign a being. Yet if we conceive him destitute of this excellent perfection and imagine him possessed with the least contagion of evil, we make him but an infinite monster and defile all those perfections we ascribed to him before. We would then characterize him a devil rather than a god. It is a contradiction to be God and to be darkness or to have one mote of darkness mixed with his light.
It is a less injury to him to deny his being than to deny the purity of it. The first makes him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and detestable God. Plutarch said not amiss that he should count himself less injured by that man who should deny that there was such a man as Plutarch than by him who should affirm that there was such a one indeed but he was a debauched fellow, a loose and vicious person. It is a less wrong to discard any acknowledgments of his being and to count him nothing than to believe him to exist but imagine a base and unholy deity. He who says, “God is not holy,” speaks much worse than he who says, “There is no God at all.”
Let these two things be considered:
1. If any, this attribute has an excellency above his other perfections. There are some attributes of God we prefer because of our interest in them and the relation they bear to us. We may esteem his goodness before his power, and his mercy, whereby he relieves us, before his justice, whereby he punishes us. As there are some we more delight in because of the goodness we receive by them, so there are some that God delights to honor because of their excellency.
(1) None is sounded out so loftily, with such solemnity, and so frequently by angels that stand before his throne as this. Where do you find any other attribute trebled in the praises of it as this? “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa. 6:3); and, “The four beasts rest not day and night, saying, ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty,’” etc. (Rev. 4:8). His power of sovereignty as Lord of hosts is but once mentioned but with a ternal11 repetition of his holiness. Do you hear in any angelical song any other perfection of the divine nature thrice repeated? Where do we read of the crying out, “Eternal, eternal, eternal” or “Faithful, faithful, faithful, Lord God of hosts!” Whatsoever other attribute is left out, this God would have to fill the mouths of angels and blessed spirits forever in heaven.
(2) He singles it out to swear by: “Once have I sworn by my holiness, that I will not lie unto David” (Ps. 89:35); and, “The Lord will swear by his holiness” (Amos 4:2). He twice swears by his holiness, once by his power in Isaiah 62:8; once by all, when he swears by his name (Jer. 44:26). He lays here his holiness to pledge for the assurance of his promise as the attribute most dear to him, most valued by him, as though no other could give an assurance parallel to it, in this concern of an everlasting redemption, which is there spoken of. He who swears, swears by one greater than himself. God, having no one greater than himself, swears by himself. And in swearing here by his holiness, he seems to equal that single attribute to all his other attributes, as if he were more concerned in the honor of it than of all the rest. It is as if he should have said, “Since I have not a more excellent perfection to swear by than that of my holiness, I lay this to pawn for your security and bind myself by that which I will never part with, were it possible for me to be stripped of all the rest.” It is an implied cursing of himself, “If I lie unto David, let me never be counted holy or thought righteous enough to be trusted by angels or men.” This attribute he makes most of.
(3) It is his glory and beauty. Holiness is the honor of the creature—sanctification and honor are linked together (1 Thess. 4:4)—much more is it the honor of God; it is the image of God in the creature (Eph. 4:24). When we take the picture of a man, we draw the most beautiful part, the face, which is a member of the greatest excellency. When God would be drawn to the life, as much as can be, in the spirit of his creatures, he is drawn in this attribute, as being the most beautiful perfection of God and most valuable with him. Power is his hand and arm, omniscience his eye, mercy his bowels, eternity his duration, his holiness is his beauty: “should praise the beauty of his holiness” (2 Chron. 20:21).12 David desires to “behold the beauty of the Lord, and inquire in his holy temple” (Ps. 27:4)—that is, the holiness of God manifested in his hatred of sin in the daily sacrifices. Holiness was the beauty of the temple: “holy and beautiful house” (Isa. 64:11) are joined together—much more the beauty of God that dwelt in the sanctuary.
This renders him lovely to all his innocent creatures, though formidable to the guilty ones. A heathen philosopher could call it the beauty of the divine essence and say that God was not so happy by an eternity of life as by an excellency of virtue.13 And the angels’ song intimates it to be his glory: “The whole earth is full of your glory” (Isa. 6:3)—that is, of his holiness in his laws and in his judgments against sin, that being the attribute applauded by them before.
(4) It is his very life. So it is called: “alienated from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18)—that is, from the holiness of God, speaking of the opposite to it, the uncleanness and profaneness of the Gentiles. We are only alienated from that which we are bound to imitate, but this is the perfection always set out as the pattern of our actions: “Be you holy, as I am holy” (Lev. 11:44; 1 Pet. 1:16). No other is proposed as our copy, alienated from that purity of God, which is as much as his life, without which he could not live. If he were stripped of this, he would be a dead God, more than by the want of any other perfection. His swearing by it intimates as much. He swears often by his own life: “‘As I live,’ says the Lord”; so he swears by his holiness as if it were his life, and more his life than any other. “Let me not live” or “Let me not be holy” are all one in his oath. His deity could not outlive the life of his purity.
2. As this attribute seems to challenge an excellency above all his other perfections, so it is the glory of all the rest. As it is the glory of the Godhead, so it is the glory of every perfection in the Godhead. As his power is the strength of them, so his holiness is the beauty of them. As all would be weak without almightiness to back them, so all would be uncomely without holiness to adorn them. Should this be tainted, all the rest would lose their honor and their comfortable efficacy—as at the same instant that the sun should lose its light, it would lose its heat, its strength, its generative and quickening virtue.
As sincerity is the luster of every grace in a Christian, so is purity the splendor of every attribute in the Godhead. His justice is a holy justice, his wisdom a holy wisdom, his arm of power a “holy arm” (Ps. 98:1), his truth or promise a “holy promise” (Ps. 105:42). “Holy” and “true” go hand in hand (Rev. 6:10). “His name,” which signifies all his attributes in conjunction, is “holy” (Ps. 103:1). Indeed, he is “righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works” (Ps. 145:17). It is the rule of all his acts, the source of all his punishments. If every attribute of the Deity were a distinct member, purity would be the form, the soul, the spirit to animate them. Without it, his patience would be an indulgence to sin, his mercy a fondness, his wrath a madness, his power a tyranny, his wisdom an unworthy subtlety.
This attribute gives a decorum to all. His mercy is not exercised without it, since he pardons none but those who have an interest by union in the obedience of a mediator, which was so delightful to his infinite purity. His justice, which guilty man is apt to tax with cruelty and violence in the exercise of it, is not acted out of the compass of this rule. In acts of man’s vindictive justice, there is something of impurity, perturbation, passion, some mixture of cruelty, but none of these fall upon God in the severest acts of wrath. When God appears to Ezekiel in the resemblance of fire, to signify his anger against the house of Judah for their idolatry, “from the appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his loins even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the color of amber” (Ezek. 8:2). His heart is clear in his most terrible acts of vengeance; it is a pure flame wherewith he scorches and burns his enemies. He is holy in the most fiery appearance.
This attribute, therefore, is never so much applauded as when his sword has been drawn and he has manifested the greatest fierceness against his enemies. The magnificent and triumphant expression of it in the text follows just upon God’s miraculous defeat and ruin of the Egyptian army: “The sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters.” Then it follows, “Who is like you, O Lord, . . . glorious in holiness?” (Ex. 15:10–11). And when it was so celebrated by the seraphims (Isa. 6:3), it was when “the posts moved, and the house was filled with smoke” (Isa. 6:4), which are signs of anger (Ps. 18:7–8). And when he was about to send Isaiah upon a message of spiritual and temporal judgments, that he would “make the heart of that people fat, and their ears heavy, and their eyes shut, waste their cities without inhabitant, and their houses without man, and make the land desolate” (Isa. 6:9–11). And the angels, which here applaud him for his holiness, are the executioners of his justice and here called seraphims, from burning or fiery spirits, as being the ministers of his wrath.
His justice is part of his holiness, whereby he does reduce into order those things that are out of order. When he is consuming men by his fury, he does not diminish but manifest purity: “The just Lord is in the midst of her; he will do no iniquity” (Zeph. 3:5). Every action of his is free from all tincture of evil. It is also celebrated with praise by the four beasts about the throne, when he appears in a covenant garb, with a rainbow about his throne and yet with thunderings and lightnings shot out against his enemies (Rev. 4:8 compared with 4:3, 5), to show that all his acts of mercy, as well as justice, are clear from any stain.
This is the crown of all his attributes, the life of all his decrees, the brightness of all his actions. Nothing is decreed by him, nothing is acted by him but what is worthy of the dignity and becoming the honor of this attribute."
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Doct. Holiness is a glorious perfection belonging to the nature of God. Hence he is in Scripture styled often the Holy One, the Holy One of Jacob, the Holy One of Israel. More often is he entitled “holy” than “almighty,” and set forth by this part of his dignity more than by any other. This is more affixed as an epithet to his name than any other. You never find it expressed, his “mighty name” or his “wise name” but his “great name” and, most of all, his “holy name.” This is his greatest title of honor. In this does the majesty and venerableness of his name appear. When the sinfulness of Sennacherib is aggravated, the Holy Spirit takes the rise from this attribute, “You have lifted up your eyes on high, even against the Holy One of Israel” (2 Kings 19:22)—not against the wise, mighty, but against the Holy One of Israel, as that wherein the majesty of God was most illustrious. It is upon this account he is called light, as impurity is called darkness. Both in this sense are opposed to one another. He is a pure and unmixed light, free from all blemish in his essence, nature, and operations.
1. Heathens have owned it. Proclus calls him the undefiled governor (Ἄχραντος ἡγεμών) of the world. The poetical transformations of their false gods and the extravagancies committed by them were (in the account of the wisest of them) an unholy thing to report and hear.8 And some9 vindicate Epicurus from the atheism wherewith he was commonly charged, that he did not deny the being of God but those adulterous and contentious deities the people worshiped, which were practices unworthy and unbecoming the nature of God. Hence they asserted that virtue was an imitation of God and that a virtuous man bore a resemblance to God. If virtue were a copy from God, a greater holiness must be owned in the original. And when some of them were at a loss how to free God from being the author of sin in the world, they ascribe the birth of sin to matter and run into an absurd opinion, fancying it to be uncreated, that thereby they might exempt God from all mixture of evil. So sacred with them was the conception of God as a holy God.
2. The most absurd heretics have owned it.10 The Manichees and Marcionites, who thought evil came by necessity, would yet free God from being the author of it by asserting two distinct eternal principles, one the original of evil, as God was the fountain of good. So rooted was the notion of this divine purity, that none would ever slander goodness itself with that which was so disparaging to it.
3. The nature of God cannot rationally be conceived without it. Though the power of God be the first rational conclusion drawn from the sight of his works, wisdom the next from the order and connection of his works, purity must result from the beauty of his works. It is thus maintained that God cannot be deformed by evil, who has made everything so beautiful in its time. The notion of a God cannot be entertained without separating from him whatsoever is impure and bespotting, both in his essence and actions. We may conceive him infinite in majesty, infinite in essence, eternal in duration, mighty in power, wise and immutable in his counsels, merciful in his proceedings with men, and whatsoever other perfections may dignify so sovereign a being. Yet if we conceive him destitute of this excellent perfection and imagine him possessed with the least contagion of evil, we make him but an infinite monster and defile all those perfections we ascribed to him before. We would then characterize him a devil rather than a god. It is a contradiction to be God and to be darkness or to have one mote of darkness mixed with his light.
It is a less injury to him to deny his being than to deny the purity of it. The first makes him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and detestable God. Plutarch said not amiss that he should count himself less injured by that man who should deny that there was such a man as Plutarch than by him who should affirm that there was such a one indeed but he was a debauched fellow, a loose and vicious person. It is a less wrong to discard any acknowledgments of his being and to count him nothing than to believe him to exist but imagine a base and unholy deity. He who says, “God is not holy,” speaks much worse than he who says, “There is no God at all.”
Let these two things be considered:
1. If any, this attribute has an excellency above his other perfections. There are some attributes of God we prefer because of our interest in them and the relation they bear to us. We may esteem his goodness before his power, and his mercy, whereby he relieves us, before his justice, whereby he punishes us. As there are some we more delight in because of the goodness we receive by them, so there are some that God delights to honor because of their excellency.
(1) None is sounded out so loftily, with such solemnity, and so frequently by angels that stand before his throne as this. Where do you find any other attribute trebled in the praises of it as this? “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa. 6:3); and, “The four beasts rest not day and night, saying, ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty,’” etc. (Rev. 4:8). His power of sovereignty as Lord of hosts is but once mentioned but with a ternal11 repetition of his holiness. Do you hear in any angelical song any other perfection of the divine nature thrice repeated? Where do we read of the crying out, “Eternal, eternal, eternal” or “Faithful, faithful, faithful, Lord God of hosts!” Whatsoever other attribute is left out, this God would have to fill the mouths of angels and blessed spirits forever in heaven.
(2) He singles it out to swear by: “Once have I sworn by my holiness, that I will not lie unto David” (Ps. 89:35); and, “The Lord will swear by his holiness” (Amos 4:2). He twice swears by his holiness, once by his power in Isaiah 62:8; once by all, when he swears by his name (Jer. 44:26). He lays here his holiness to pledge for the assurance of his promise as the attribute most dear to him, most valued by him, as though no other could give an assurance parallel to it, in this concern of an everlasting redemption, which is there spoken of. He who swears, swears by one greater than himself. God, having no one greater than himself, swears by himself. And in swearing here by his holiness, he seems to equal that single attribute to all his other attributes, as if he were more concerned in the honor of it than of all the rest. It is as if he should have said, “Since I have not a more excellent perfection to swear by than that of my holiness, I lay this to pawn for your security and bind myself by that which I will never part with, were it possible for me to be stripped of all the rest.” It is an implied cursing of himself, “If I lie unto David, let me never be counted holy or thought righteous enough to be trusted by angels or men.” This attribute he makes most of.
(3) It is his glory and beauty. Holiness is the honor of the creature—sanctification and honor are linked together (1 Thess. 4:4)—much more is it the honor of God; it is the image of God in the creature (Eph. 4:24). When we take the picture of a man, we draw the most beautiful part, the face, which is a member of the greatest excellency. When God would be drawn to the life, as much as can be, in the spirit of his creatures, he is drawn in this attribute, as being the most beautiful perfection of God and most valuable with him. Power is his hand and arm, omniscience his eye, mercy his bowels, eternity his duration, his holiness is his beauty: “should praise the beauty of his holiness” (2 Chron. 20:21).12 David desires to “behold the beauty of the Lord, and inquire in his holy temple” (Ps. 27:4)—that is, the holiness of God manifested in his hatred of sin in the daily sacrifices. Holiness was the beauty of the temple: “holy and beautiful house” (Isa. 64:11) are joined together—much more the beauty of God that dwelt in the sanctuary.
This renders him lovely to all his innocent creatures, though formidable to the guilty ones. A heathen philosopher could call it the beauty of the divine essence and say that God was not so happy by an eternity of life as by an excellency of virtue.13 And the angels’ song intimates it to be his glory: “The whole earth is full of your glory” (Isa. 6:3)—that is, of his holiness in his laws and in his judgments against sin, that being the attribute applauded by them before.
(4) It is his very life. So it is called: “alienated from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18)—that is, from the holiness of God, speaking of the opposite to it, the uncleanness and profaneness of the Gentiles. We are only alienated from that which we are bound to imitate, but this is the perfection always set out as the pattern of our actions: “Be you holy, as I am holy” (Lev. 11:44; 1 Pet. 1:16). No other is proposed as our copy, alienated from that purity of God, which is as much as his life, without which he could not live. If he were stripped of this, he would be a dead God, more than by the want of any other perfection. His swearing by it intimates as much. He swears often by his own life: “‘As I live,’ says the Lord”; so he swears by his holiness as if it were his life, and more his life than any other. “Let me not live” or “Let me not be holy” are all one in his oath. His deity could not outlive the life of his purity.
2. As this attribute seems to challenge an excellency above all his other perfections, so it is the glory of all the rest. As it is the glory of the Godhead, so it is the glory of every perfection in the Godhead. As his power is the strength of them, so his holiness is the beauty of them. As all would be weak without almightiness to back them, so all would be uncomely without holiness to adorn them. Should this be tainted, all the rest would lose their honor and their comfortable efficacy—as at the same instant that the sun should lose its light, it would lose its heat, its strength, its generative and quickening virtue.
As sincerity is the luster of every grace in a Christian, so is purity the splendor of every attribute in the Godhead. His justice is a holy justice, his wisdom a holy wisdom, his arm of power a “holy arm” (Ps. 98:1), his truth or promise a “holy promise” (Ps. 105:42). “Holy” and “true” go hand in hand (Rev. 6:10). “His name,” which signifies all his attributes in conjunction, is “holy” (Ps. 103:1). Indeed, he is “righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works” (Ps. 145:17). It is the rule of all his acts, the source of all his punishments. If every attribute of the Deity were a distinct member, purity would be the form, the soul, the spirit to animate them. Without it, his patience would be an indulgence to sin, his mercy a fondness, his wrath a madness, his power a tyranny, his wisdom an unworthy subtlety.
This attribute gives a decorum to all. His mercy is not exercised without it, since he pardons none but those who have an interest by union in the obedience of a mediator, which was so delightful to his infinite purity. His justice, which guilty man is apt to tax with cruelty and violence in the exercise of it, is not acted out of the compass of this rule. In acts of man’s vindictive justice, there is something of impurity, perturbation, passion, some mixture of cruelty, but none of these fall upon God in the severest acts of wrath. When God appears to Ezekiel in the resemblance of fire, to signify his anger against the house of Judah for their idolatry, “from the appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his loins even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the color of amber” (Ezek. 8:2). His heart is clear in his most terrible acts of vengeance; it is a pure flame wherewith he scorches and burns his enemies. He is holy in the most fiery appearance.
This attribute, therefore, is never so much applauded as when his sword has been drawn and he has manifested the greatest fierceness against his enemies. The magnificent and triumphant expression of it in the text follows just upon God’s miraculous defeat and ruin of the Egyptian army: “The sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters.” Then it follows, “Who is like you, O Lord, . . . glorious in holiness?” (Ex. 15:10–11). And when it was so celebrated by the seraphims (Isa. 6:3), it was when “the posts moved, and the house was filled with smoke” (Isa. 6:4), which are signs of anger (Ps. 18:7–8). And when he was about to send Isaiah upon a message of spiritual and temporal judgments, that he would “make the heart of that people fat, and their ears heavy, and their eyes shut, waste their cities without inhabitant, and their houses without man, and make the land desolate” (Isa. 6:9–11). And the angels, which here applaud him for his holiness, are the executioners of his justice and here called seraphims, from burning or fiery spirits, as being the ministers of his wrath.
His justice is part of his holiness, whereby he does reduce into order those things that are out of order. When he is consuming men by his fury, he does not diminish but manifest purity: “The just Lord is in the midst of her; he will do no iniquity” (Zeph. 3:5). Every action of his is free from all tincture of evil. It is also celebrated with praise by the four beasts about the throne, when he appears in a covenant garb, with a rainbow about his throne and yet with thunderings and lightnings shot out against his enemies (Rev. 4:8 compared with 4:3, 5), to show that all his acts of mercy, as well as justice, are clear from any stain.
This is the crown of all his attributes, the life of all his decrees, the brightness of all his actions. Nothing is decreed by him, nothing is acted by him but what is worthy of the dignity and becoming the honor of this attribute."