11 - What Is Holiness?
What Is Holiness?
"Man’s moral nature and God’s are essentially one. God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. The man of pure heart is light also . . . True it is that of no Christian can it be said, as of God, that in him is no darkness at all. The pure in heart all have defects. Nevertheless their purity is real, and so highly valued of God that in Scripture dialect the man of pure heart is called ’perfect’, his infirmities notwithstanding."
A. B. Bruce
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"God created man in His own image"— Genesis 1:27.
"Being renewed after the image of Him that created him"—Colossians 3:10.
"We . . . are being changed into the same image"—2 Corinthians 3:18. The centre-point of these studies is the question: What is holiness? or, more particularly, what is the holiness to which the New Testament calls Christian believers? That is the enquiry which is before us in this present chapter.
Holiness, however, like many other intangibles, is not easy to define so as to bring a vivid image of it before the eyes of the mind. It is easier to describe than to define. Some, perhaps, might define it negatively as absence of sin, or positively as absolute virtue. Or maybe some would define it ethically as impeccable righteousness, or more spiritually as moral perfection. Yet all such definitions are abstract and unpictorial and therefore elusive. We need somehow to apprehend holiness photographically; and with this in mind I do not hesitate to affirm that the truest preliminary description is, Holiness Is Likeness To God, or, more precisely, likeness to the moral character of God.
This, so I believe, in both Old and New Testaments, is the centric idea in the call to holiness. Away back in Leviticus, there we see it, gleaming over the vestibule of the Israel theocracy, as the first and supreme requirement: "Ye shall be holy; for I JEHOVAH YOUR GOD AM HOLY" (Leviticus 19:2). It was this which first gave coherence and sanction to all the Levitical enjoinments and prohibitions, ceremonial, sacrificial, hygienic, social, moral and spiritual. The Ten Commandments are simply an amplification of it in ten aspects: "Ye shall be holy, for I JEHOVAH YOUR GOD AM HOLY." This challenge: "Ye shall be holy, for I JEHOVAH YOUR GOD AM HOLY," surely rebuts those teachings which would persuade us that in most of the Old Testament the idea of holiness does not have an ethical content. Disappointingly enough, some of our ablest scholarship seems to be still captivated by this misconception that in the Old Testament, especially its earlier parts, holiness is merely religious separation, tribal, ritual, sanitary, dietary, and non-ethical.[It will be understood, of course, that I wholly reject the higher critical late-dating of Leviticus, or any other part of the Pentateuch. I believe that archaeological, historical and New Testament testimony are all against it. Those suppositionary penmen of the Pentateuch, E and J and D, and their anonymous redactors, are to me the furtive phantoms of a misguided scholarship. Nor need we shrink from claiming, with the four Gospels open before us, that in speaking thus "we have the mind of Christ"— for our Lord’s testimony to the Old Testament, and to the Pentateuch in particular, is not only clear, but ample, and should be accepted as final.] The truth is, that all the Mosaic regulations, whether concerning clean versus unclean animals, physical defilements and purifications, or abstention from the licentious customs of surrounding nations—all have a reflex reference to holiness of character. Not one whit less than that is implied in the words, "Ye shall be holy, for I JEHOVAH YOUR GOD AM HOLY." Would anyone have the temerity to tell us that when God said, "I Jehovah your God am holy," He intended no more than "I, Jehovah your God, distinguish between clean and unclean animals; between the hygienic and the unhygienic"?—or some other such meaning? Nay, He meant no less than this: "There shall be in your character that which corresponds to Mine." That nothing less was meant is confirmed by the New Testament quotation of it in 1 Peter 1:14-16.
So, as a beginning, we say that the holiness to which we are called, as Christians, is moral likeness to God. What, then, is such God-likeness? In the New Testament there are three verses which tells us what God "is"—
God is spirit —John 4:24 God is light —1 John 1:5 God is love —1 John 4:8
Those three definitions remarkably concentrate the teaching of the Bible, and at the same time give a first answer to our question, What is holiness?
"God is Spirit"
Take the first of them: "God is spirit." Throughout Scripture, "spirit" and "matter" are contrastively distinguished. They are not merely rarity and density of the same substance; they are different in nature. Spirit is not rarefied matter. Our Lord did not say, "God is matter in its most refined form." Nor does the Bible anywhere countenance the Communist dictum that the human soul is merely "matter in motion". The old notion, modernly sponsored by Communism, that "spirit" is simply matter thinned out in subtle attenuation, is a convenient philosophy for atheists, but it is not science, for it has no basis whatever in ascertained fact. It becomes clearer than ever that the material universe was created by a vast Mind, and that therefore mind cannot be mere extenuation of matter. Nay, since mind controls matter, how can it be a product of matter? It is even more difficult to see how mental states such as hope, fear, anger, desire, or other such abstract realities can be merely refined matter! But why labour the point speculatively when we are solely concerned with it Scripturally! The Word teaches that spirit and matter are essentially different; and that the God who created all things is Himself spirit. This means that God views everything in an essentially spiritual way, inasmuch as matter, even in its largest dimension and longest duration, is not permanent reality. One God-conscious, non-material, human soul is of bigger significance than Orion and Pleides and all the stellar myriads of the Milky Way. That is why the incarnate Son of God once bled on this tiny pebble of a planet to save us.
Now just as God himself, before anything else, is essentially spiritual, so the first mark of holiness in any of ourselves is a corresponding spirituality in outlook, attitude, desire, and sense of values. With opened eyes we perceive that it is the intangibles which are the imperishables. In the words of 2 Corinthians 4:18, "we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal." This spirituality is the first prerequisite of holiness.
There is a "holiness" which is "of the flesh"—a sanctimony of "touch not; taste not; handle not"; but it is a counterfeit; and Paul’s indictment of it is: "Which things have indeed a show of wisdom in will-worship and humility, and severity to the body; yet not in any honour [to God], but only for the gratifying of the flesh"—i.e. by a reputation for superior sanctity (Colossians 2:23). Any of us can verify by observation that the unvarying signature of genuine holiness is spiritual-mindedness. All the Enochs who have "walked with God" have revealed so. It has been their choice of the spiritual in preference to the material, and their disenchantment with the things of this present world, which have made them an exasperating enigma to the loud men of earth’s "Vanity Fair".
Yet this spirituality is never self-advertising. It is seen in the set of the sails, rather than heard through the skipper’s megaphone. It expresses itself through the soul’s reactions, rather than by oral announcements. It sounds no horn; on the contrary, it is a silent diffusion, as the fragrance of a rose. Even more, what atmosphere is to the lungs, this spiritual-mindedness is to holiness.
"God is Light"
Halt now at the second of those three New Testament concentrates: "God is light." John’s full word runs, "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all"—light sheer and shadowless.
"God is light." This is definition by parallel. What light is to the natural world, God is in the spiritual. Only in light can we see; yet light itself cannot be seen; it is transparent. It may be prismatically broken up into its primary and secondary spectra, but light itself is invisible.
John has in mind the two main properties of light, as his references show, (1) Light is manifestant; it reveals the things which are, making them visible to natural sight. (2) Light is transparent; which further means that where there is light with "no darkness at all", the transparency is utter.
Light is the opposite of "darkness", which conceals and deceives and which therefore represents moral evil. "For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light lest his deeds should be exposed" (John 3:20). The deepest darkness is hate. Twice over it is written, "He that hateth his brother is in the darkness" (1 John 2:9, 1 John 2:11). By the same parallel, also, truth is the light, and error is darkness. "He that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest" (John 3:21).
So, then, the analogy, "God is light," means that holiness, or moral likeness to God, is (1) such purity of mind as exposes in sharp distinguishment the beauty of goodness and fhe ugliness of evil; (2) a sheer transparency—of motive, purpose, and desire Yes, holiness (moral likeness to God) is transparent purity and sincerity of the mind.
"God is Love"
Thirdly, "God is love." [In a preceding chapter we stressed the need for a right approach to the Bible. How important is our attitude to revelation and inspiration when we encounter such an assertion as, "God is love"! If inspiration is no more than "religious genius", or "extra-sensory perception", or "mystical insight", or anything else less than direct divine communication, then the statement that "God is love" is no more, even at best, than a speculative deduction. If, however, it is the utterance of authentic divine inspiration, it is the profoundest and sublimest "multum in parvo" ever penned.] What this means can be known only by observing how John in particular and the New Testament in general refer to the love of God. Some of us may be rather surprised to learn that in every instance where the divine love is described, it is not a passive, inward emotion, but an active, outreaching benevolence; not a self-contained complacence, but a self-emptying otherism; not a contemplative sublimity of feeling, but a redeeming compassion toward the unworthy and unlovely, the denied and deformed; a love which gives and gives and gives again.
Here are a few of the texts which represent the New Testament teaching: "God so loved the world that He gave.. . ." (John 3:16); "The kindness of God our Saviour, and His love toward man, appeared . . . according to His mercy He saved us" (Titus 3:4); "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10).
I suspect that many of us, in our quest after holiness, have imagined that being filled with the love of God would flood our consciousness with a kind of contemplative rapture, or a sense of infinite satisfaction. That is why many have developed a "holiness" turned inward instead of outward; mystical instead of practical; self-centred rather than God-centred; sentimental rather than evangelistic; and egoistic rather than altruistic. The love which John means when he writes, "God is love," is the most self-forgetting otherism in the universe, and when it is indeed "shed" within us (Romans 5:5) it lifts us right out of ourselves into a magnanimous solicitude for the wellbeing of others.
Moral God-likeness
What we are saying, then, is that Christian holiness, in its first aspect, is moral likeness to the Holy One who calls us. In fact, that is word-for-word what 1 Peter 1:15 says it is, according to the A.S.V. margin: "Like the Holy One who called you, be ye yourselves also holy in all manner of living." What is God like? "God is spirit." "God is light." "God is love." What, then, is Christian holiness? It is (1) spiritual-mindedness of outlook, appraisal, desire, and choice; (2) transparent purity of aim and motive; (3) self-forgetting outreach to bless others. Thus described how much (or how little) genuine, practical, Christian holiness is there?
Divine Holiness Incarnated
Yet although holiness may be introductorily described as moral likeness to God, do we not all feel that if we are truly to know it, we need somehow to see it? We need not only to have it described, but to see it revealed. The mysterious wonder of New Testament revelation is, that we can and do see it, lived out before our watching eyes, in One who comes to us clothed in our own humanity yet saying, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." In Him the divine holiness "comes alive" to us, not merely as some new definition, but in visible incarnation. In Him, in His humanhood, in His deeds and words, in His passive reactions and active responses, in His miracles and parables, in His public and private behaviour, in His sympathies and aversions, in the way He lived and the way He died; in Him, from His Jordan baptism in water to His Calvary baptism in blood, we see the holiness of heaven expressed in human form on earth. Would we know what true likeness to God is? Then we must look and learn of Him who said, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father."
What, then, is it that we see in Jesus? He was often in secret prayer, but He was no mystic. He was fond of periodic solitude, but He was no monastic. He was abstemious, but He was no ascetic. He had nothing in common with the religious "Zealots" and their contentious violence; yet neither did He ever once visit the nonpartisan "Essenes" in their cloistered isolationism. There was moral apartness, yet no social aloofness. There was sanctity, but no frigidity. He abhorred hypocrisy, but was overflowingly sympathetic where there was contrition. He neither fawned on the rich nor despised the poor. He neither coveted wealth nor condoned poverty. He never compromised principle a hair’s breadth, yet He was a congenial mixer with a keen aliveness toward people and things. He had boundless compassion, friendship, understanding, for boys and girls, for the aged, for the sick, for the suffering, for the bad who wanted to be different, and the good who wanted to be better. He saw God everywhere and in everything; and His master-passion was to do the Father’s will. He was utterly guileless in His self-abnegating outreach of heart to heal and mend and bless others. He was the sublimest embodiment of gracious otherism ever known: and, most significant of all, in revealing the one true Godhead, He revealed also the one ideal manhood. There is no mistaking Him, except by the blind: He is "God manifest in the flesh"; sinless in essence, stainless in conduct, guileless in motive, quenchless in love. In Jesus the ideal and the actual are one. He is the superb norm of true humanhood, that is, humanhood as originally created and divinely intended. As Professor Henry Drummond said, with a permissible touch of refined colloquialism, "Jesus is the perfect Gentleman"—the exquisite blend of "gentle" and "man", of tenderness and virile heroism; "meek and lowly in heart," but with an awesome flash of ire in His eyes before which the temple money-traffickers cowered and slunk away.
Years ago, at a large gathering in Manchester, England, a minister prayed a prayer which has had a decided influence on my thinking ever since: "O God, make us intensely spiritual, but keep us perfectly natural, and always thoroughly practical—even as Jesus was." That prayer was finely photographic. It captured the dominant lineaments of our Lord’s holy manhood: "intensely spiritual"; "perfectly natural"; "thoroughly practical"; the living expression of "God is spirit," "God is light," "God is love." Yes, that was Jesus; and that was the divine holiness incarnate. So then, holiness, which we have preliminarily described as moral likeness to God, may now be more concretely represented as likeness in heart and life to Christ.
Holiness Inwrought The crowning-point of New Testament revelation on this subject is reached in its doctrine of the Holy Spirit. That holiness which is likeness to God, and is exhibited in Christ, is now inwrought by the Holy Spirit within the fully possessed Christian believer. With what reverent awe ought we to worship in the presence of such a divine mystery! How glibly we sometimes talk about the supernatural operations of the Holy Spirit in regeneration and sanctification! Let us "put off our shoes", for the place whereon we stand is "holy ground".
There may be inwrought in you and me, a real heart-holiness from God, through Christ, by the Holy Spirit. That is not just a nostrum or theory; it is the truth of the Word. In the Old Testament holiness is demanded. In the Lord Jesus it is provided. By the Holy Spirit it is imparted. Of course, that which is absolute in God can be only relative in ourselves. Yet just as ethical righteousness is basically the same whether in God or the creature, so is it with holiness. Not Wholly Instantaneous
Yes, holiness may be inwrought; but how? Can we accept that it is inwrought instantaneously as a "second blessing"?
Those who teach that the sin-bias in human nature can be "eradicated" have maintained that at the "second blessing" there is an instantaneous extinction of "indwelling sin", and a consequent full restoration into the image of Christ. Others have preached a moderated version of this; yet they too have held that in response to consecration and faith there comes an instantaneous "rendering inoperative" of the "old man", and an inward renewal into holiness. Such teachings are astray, for they are based on the usual misinterpretation of Romans 6:6, that our "old man" is a supposed "old nature", separable from the basic human ego, and treatable as an entity in itself. The eradicationist idea creates a comic-serious predicament. With the so-called "old nature" extirpated, and the unable-to-sin "new nature" left completely unopposed, the believer (at least theoretically) is less able to sin than Adam and Eve before the Fall! In desperate sincerity, many have claimed to live sinlessly; though even they could only claim so by resorting (as Wesley did) to an accommodated view of sin, i.e. that there is no sin apart from volition.
Others, who hold that the so-called "old nature" cannot be "eradicated" but only "counteracted" or "rendered inoperative" through an inward co-crucifixion with Christ, precipitate an even stranger problem. In fact, so it appears to me, their theory becomes a circus in which our "old man" is the sleekest acrobat who ever performed. According to some, he is on the Cross, but still wriggling and never quite dead. According to others, he can be off and on the Cross again and again. According to still others, he is not only "crucified", but "dead" and "buried", yet like Bram Stoker’s vampire, Count Dracula, he keeps coming back to life, in different forms, working evil, and then sneaking back to his coffin again! According to others, he is "dead indeed", but only so long as we keep "reckoning" so. Such makeshifts are self-evidently wrong, and (let me re-emphasize) it is because sin is viewed as a kind of foreign "body" or separable evil "nature" in us.
Complete Possession
Then what is the instantaneous something in the deeper work of sanctification to which many have testified? It is COMPLETE POSSESSION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT, in answer to the believer’s complete self-yielding. There can be degrees of yieldedness to Christ. The instant we reach the final point of utter-yieldedness, there is a correspondingly instantaneous possession by the Spirit—though not always with accompanying emotional transports (for instantaneousness is not synonymous with tumultuousness).
Various aspects of this infilling we shall consider later. Here we are concerned with only one aspect, namely, how holiness is inwrought by it. Many who have known this infilling as a sudden pervasion have experienced such inward rapture that they have supposed it to be a complete deliverance from inbred sin; but they have been mistaken, as many of them have later admitted. The all-important point is, that although this oft-called "second blessing", this infilling by the Holy Spirit, is itself instantaneous, it does not effect an all-at-once holiness; it is only the starting-point of inwrought holiness. From then onwards the Holy Spirit has unobstructed opportunity to develop His deeper work of holiness in the now fully-possessed believer. To ask anyone (as used to be often asked): "Have you had the second blessing?"—as though it were an all-in-one operation, is quite off-line. That is because, as we keep saying, our hereditary sin-disease is not a local growth or foreign "body" which can be dealt with in one isolated crisis; neither must we think of it as an aggregate of evil which can be heaved overboard like contraband cargo from a freighter. Sin is a diffused infection of thought, desire, motive, impulse, inclination, and even of instinct, right through our moral nature. But from the moment the Holy Spirit fully possesses us, He begins to correct, purify, refine, inbreathe and renovate all the qualities, tempers, urges, propensities, and functionings of the mind, the emotions, and the will. That is how holiness begins and continues to be inwrought. Alas, the very explaining of it tends to make it sound complicated. Yet it is only in analysis that it is so: the experience of it is simple when the Holy Spirit is given a wide-open door.
This, we must add, of course, that although inwrought holiness is a progressive renewal, there is a wonderful introductory experiencing of holiness as soon as the Holy Spirit really infills us. Think who He is! He is the unutterably Holy Spirit of God. That He should transfuse His life into ours is itself a precious mystery which may well subdue us to adoring worship; and that He should completely suffuse the consecrated heart cannot but bring rich foretaste of heaven. As soon as He fills us, His very presence inwardly atmospheres us in holiness, so that our whole consciousness is elevated, illumined, and spiritually expanded. But still, that is His holiness, not ours. The deeper miracle is that He comes to effect holiness in me. Sublimating as His infilling presence may be, that by itself does not effect holiness in my own nature, any more than flushing a room with fresh air cures it of dry-rot in its walls. There are grain warehouses today in which a new device is being used against night-time raiding by rats. Strong ultra-violet-ray lamps are turned on, the light from which is such torture to rats that they will not expose themselves to it. Perhaps that is not the pleasantest of illustrations, but by parallel it vivifies the distinction which we are here making. When the Holy Spirit infills the yielded mind, evil thoughts, desires, motives, cannot openly endure the pure light of His transfused holiness, yet they still lurk deep in the human nature. I need not only the infilling presence of His holiness, but holiness inwrought by Him in my own being; and such inwrought holiness is what He graciously intends. He comes not only to infill me, but to renew me. A Misleading Deviation At this point we cannot speak too earnestly about an aberration which has had quite extensive vogue, especially during the past hundred years; an error the more deceiving because it seems puristically spiritual and jealously honouring to Christ. Its banners are "Christ our holiness", "Christ our life", "Christ our all", "Christ our victory". Its New Testament coupling-links are such texts as 1 Corinthians 1:30, "Christ ... is made unto us ... sanctification"; Galatians 2:20, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me"; Colossians 3:4, Colossians 3:11, "Christ ... is our life"; "Christ is all." Its special accent is, that Christian holiness is Christ Himself infilling the believer. I cannot be holy in myself; interior holiness is Christ in me. For instance, the excellent Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith [Author of the famous little book, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life] writes in good Quaker style to her son, in 1873,
"But do not expect, dear boy, ever to find thy old nature any better or any nearer thy ideal; for thee never, never will. Thee thyself, that is, thy old nature, will always be utterly vile, and ignorant, and corrupt; but Jesus is thy life now. It is with thee, ’No more I,’ but Christ who liveth in thee. And is not this glorious—to lose thy own life, and find Christ’s diviner life put in its place?" (Record of a Happy Life, p. 88).
It will be noted that Mrs. Smith’s comments here are based on the usual hand-down, that there are "two natures" in the believer, one of which, although incorrigibly vile, inheres ineradicably until life’s last hour on earth. The letter also identifies that corrupt nature as the real human person, in the words, "thee thyself, that is, thy old nature," which incidentally provokes the queer query: How then did that utterly evil self of mine receive Christ as Saviour before I had the new nature? There was nothing else in me (according to the theory) which could have received Him, unless I already had two natures before my conversion (a naughty little knot for certain holiness expositors to untie!). Or could it have been that the Holy Spirit worked upon that imperviously evil "thee thyself" to receive Christ and be converted? No; for we are warned again and again (in theory) that the only thing which God can do with that evil old nature is to condemn it and finally destroy it! And next, Mrs. Smith, with a strange blend of mysticism and literalism, actually substitutes Christ for the human personality, making Paul’s words, "No more I," mean, "to lose thy own life; and find Christ’s divine life put in its place." That is an ultra-spiritual over-straining of Paul’s words, to the neglect of the "me" and the "I" which complete the text. Indeed it makes Christian holiness to be so exclusively "in Christ", that it is altogether not a renewal of our own nature into holiness.
"Victorious Life" This well-known form of "Higher Life" teaching reaches intensification in the "Victorious Life" movement promoted by Mr. Charles G. Trumbull. Years ago, when I was searching for the truth as to sanctification, I read his tract, "The Life that Wins," in which he goes so far as to say—
"I realized that Jesus Christ was actually and literally within me; and even more than that: that He had constituted Himself my very being. . . . My body was His, my mind His, my spirit His; and not merely His, but literally a part of Him. . . . Jesus Christ had constituted Himself my life—not as a figure of speech, remember, but as a literal, actual fact."
It needs to be said plainly: such talk is not Scriptural spiritual-mindedness, but an extrusion beyond the Word. Scripture does not teach that Jesus "constitutes Himself my very being", or that my mind becomes "literally a part of Him". Such intense deviation from the sound sense of Scripture may startle us by its seemingly keen spiritual perception, but it betrays the unwary into bogs of make-believe, and leaves faith floundering without any foothold in reality. Apparently, even eradication "of sin" is not enough: there is supposedly an abolition of individuality!.
Similar quotations might be added plentifully, but we forbear. The focal error in this "Higher Life" and "Victorious Life" concept is that it gives Christian holiness a wrongly exaggerated Christocentricity. According to it, the Christian life is not lived by the believer at all, but by Christ Himself in and through the believer. Upon my "letting go and letting God", Christ takes over my life and lives it for me. In reality it is not sanctification, but substitution. We ourselves do not battle against temptation, but (according to Trumbull) "simply let Christ dispose of it, while we stand by like onlookers".
Actually that is no "victorious life" at all. It certainly is not victory for me. No, for Christ has supplanted me. He is the actor in all my actions. There is absolutely no education or development of my own character. Nor is there any victory for Christ Himself, since the temptations aimed at me, have no appeal to Him, who is already the divine Victor. Nor does Christ have the joy of seeing communicated victory in me; for instead of sanctifying me, He is merely superseding me the human "me" is no longer there to be a victor!
One wonders how such strained concepts can secure a hold, but they are like bewitching Delilahs to thousands, at least for a time, until the hard facts of experience hit back in bitter reprisal. Colossians 3:4 truly enough says that "Christ... is our life"; but it does not say that "Christ is each of our selves". He is our life in the sense that all the sources and resources of our regenerate life are in Him, and in the further sense that He also now indwells us by the Holy Spirit; but community of life in Him does not mean personal identity with Him. He is He, and you are you, and I am I, as separately conscious individuals, for ever. Destroy that, by supposed fusion into one identity, and at a stroke you have destroyed the very purpose of both our creation and our redemption, i.e. fellowship. Of course, the above-quoted recipe for the "Higher Life" and the "Victorious Life" is inevitably a criss-cross of contradiction. It brings neither a higher life nor a victorious life, for it brings no deliverance from inward sin. Mr. Trumbull’s tract, "Victory in Christ," tells us that our sinfulness must unchangeably remain in us: "You must realize that in yourself you are just the same old worthless self—as Billy Sunday has said, so black that you could make a black mark on a piece of anthracite." What a deliverance!—your very self ("yourself") continuously blacker than anthracite. To expect real victory with such an inward corruption is as naive as expecting an evil tree to bring forth good fruit. The fact is, that despite the ensign, "Victorious Life," the theory offers no victory over indwelling sin, but only over active sinning, and even then the victory is not that of the believer, but of Christ who has taken over the human self. An Axiomatic Truth
If we are to be truly Scriptural, we simply must believe this, that THE HOLY SPIRIT DOES A RENEWING WORK WITHIN OUR HUMAN NATURE ITSELF. This must be axiomatic to all our thinking on this subject of holiness. Take the following texts, which leap readily to mind because they are so well known, each of which denotes a Spirit-wrought effect within our very nature.
"Regeneration and renewing of [or by] the Holy Spirit."—Titus 3:5.
"Ye are an epistle of Christ, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God . . . in the heart."—2 Corinthians 3:3.
"We are transformed into the same image . . . even as from the Lord the Spirit."—2 Corinthians 3:18.
"Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind."—Romans 12:2.
"Righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit."—Romans 14:17.
"Strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inward man . . .according to the power that worketh in us."—Ephesians 3:16, Ephesians 3:20.
"Be renewed in the spirit of your mind."—Ephesians 4:23.
"The fruit of the Spirit [i.e. produced by the Holy Spirit in and through human character] is love, joy, peace, longsuffering ..."—Galatians 5:22-23.
Mark those verses well, for they represent the teaching of the Epistles in general, that the Holy Spirit not only indwells us or even infills us, but that He effects within us an inwrought renewal, transformation, sanctification. Sad marvel, many Evangelicals seem to begrudge allowing that the Holy Spirit can do any such work in our human nature! They allow that regeneration is indeed a supernatural work, but they minify it into meaning no more than the annexing of a (so-called) "new nature", from which time all the territory formerly existing as "Me" is called the "old nature"—an evil "me" which cannot be changed, and with which the (so-called) "new nature" must indecisively wrestle until my last gasp on earth, when, through a mysterious metamorphosis in death, I struggle free, like a butterfly-worm from its pupa-cocoon, and flutter heavenwards on wings of sinless perfection.
It is time we flung that foible to the moles and the bats. It is one of the ragged-urchin errors inflicted on us from the usual misinterpretation of Romans 6:6 and its fictive by-product of "two natures" (supposedly) in the believer. Are we not going to be sinless in our nature itself amid the heavenly realms? Who will make us so? None other than the Holy Spirit. Only He can do it. Then why cannot He change us here and now, at least in degree? Someone may ask: "If the Holy Spirit can effect holiness within us here and now, in degree, why should we not trust Him to do so to the point of sinlessness?" The answer is, that we are not to presume beyond what Scripture provides for the present. Nowhere does our New Testament promise or even suggest complete sinlessness either of nature or conduct in this present life yet it does teach a true holiness, inwrought by the Holy Spirit. As to the nature and degree and other aspects of this inwrought holiness, we shall say more later. What we are here underlining is, that the New Testament really does teach an inwrought renovation of our own moral and spiritual nature.
Holiness Is Restoration
Finally, if holiness may indeed be thus inwrought by the Holy Spirit, as the New Testament undeniably teaches, then let us gratefully recognise that it is a restoration—a restoration of our human nature itself to its truest humanhood. In recognising this, of course, we cut right across the usual holiness teachings, that our natural selves, or what we are in our so-called "old nature", cannot be sanctified, but only crucified. As I have said two or three times already that ghoulish figment of an "old man" supposedly inside the human self yet not identical with it should be flung away for ever, along with its companion deceit that our human nature is essentially evil.
There are those who think that the blacker they make man, the more they glorify God; but they are wrong. To make man more demon than human casts a libel on the God who made him. Although our inherited sin-bent is inborn, it is not a constituent element of human nature itself. Let us be as anti-Pelagian as Augustine or Calvin, but let us never allow our doctrine of "original sin" to blur the fact that human nature itself was created entirely good (Genesis 1:31), and that besides transmitted evil, there is transmitted good. We must not make the mistake of saying that the virus and the victim are the same. Because a patient has a disease, we must not say that the patient is the disease. However intricately connected the parasite may be to the living organism with and in and on which it lives, the two must never be identified as one. We must carefully distinguish between what our human nature has, and what it is. If we say that our human nature is now fundamentally evil, how explain all the good in the world—quite apart from those who are regenerated?
However chronic, adhesive, permeative, sin may be in our nature, it is not of our human essence. The moment we dare to say that it is, we make our humanhood unredeemable. However corrupt, vile, wicked, sin may have made us, unless we are to malign our very Maker we must believe that our human nature itself is not fundamentally rotten, but fundamentally good-ward, and that this is the "tendency which makes for righteousness" in our world, despite all its wickedness. Even the modern "lie detector" tests bear a new scientific witness to the fact that human nature itself is basically set to the right and true; otherwise a lie would register no slant of the needle away from the basic moral nature.
Let no one misunderstand: this is not to say that fallen man has any goodness or merit which can avail to save him, whether from the guilt or the penalty or the power or the pollution of sin; for as we have already emphasized, fallen man is spiritually dead, morally diseased, and physically dying. But we must believe that human nature itself is still basically good; for it is that, and only that which makes man redeemable, renewable, and recoverable.
There are many evidences of this all around us, and pages might be filled with illustrations; but we mention only two. First, will anyone deny the basic goodness of self-sacrificing mother-love? Think carefully: the Bible does not deny it, but praises it. Second, man cannot regenerate himself, but he can appreciate and respond to that which does regenerate him (indicating a basic moral worth). If we deny this, we make all the Gospel welcomes and warnings to the unconverted a theatrical unreality, and charge God with hypocrisy.
These considerations are far more vital to an understanding of Christian holiness than many may realize. It is through disregard of them that holiness teaching has been vitiated by the morbid misconceit of an incurably vile "old man" or rotten "old nature" which must co-exist within us, in irreducible filthiness, to the day of our death.
Everything depends on the view which we take of human nature itself, basically and essentially. The old saying has it, "We call the chess-board white, we call it black." But what of human nature? What is the foundation colour of the whole? Is our fallen, human nature white spotted on a basic black? or black smeared on a basic white? Is man a child of the devil, whom God is trying to steal? or is he a son of God whom the devil has tricked and fouled?
Some, doubtless, impatiently demur, "What matter, whether it was the bad which intruded on the good, or vice, versa? Is it not enough to accept and confront the motley and medley just as it now is?" The answer is a capital NO. As has been well said, in this mixed-up world of ours everything depends on whether Peace or War is the intruder; whether Liberty or Slavery has the original right of possession; and in our individual life everything depends on whether it is Falsehood which has invaded the sovereign domain of Truth, or Truth which has intruded into the domain of Falsehood. Unless I strangely misread the New Testament, the vital assumption underlying its whole idea of redemption and salvation is that the realm fundamentally belongs to Truth and Goodness; that the Lie, with all its resultant evil, is everywhere the intruder; that because this is so, the invaded territory may be recovered; and that the salvation of our human nature is the restoration of man from his perverted self in sin, to his true self, in Christ.
We need to see it clearly and grasp it firmly: holiness is RESTORATION—the restoring of our nature to its true human-hood. It is not a never-ending inward crucifixion of the human self, but a renewing of it. Neither is it a grinding suppression of what we naturally are, but the purifying and renovating of it into the image of Jesus. Once for all: Christian holiness is not abrogation but completion. Sanctification theories have been so occupied with the so-called "old nature" which must supposedly be destroyed, that they have overlooked the native humanity in us which may be restored. How different from them is the New Testament, with its clear ring that Jesus brings to man redemption, restoration, and true fulfilment! [See Excursus at end of chapter.] But there are those who will still be contradicting me, and bombarding me with the hackneyed old sayings, "God never patches up the old nature; He gives us a new nature"; and, "What men need is not ’reformation’, but regeneration." So stereotyped is their thinking, they cannot even suspect that the rigid "mold" from which it comes may itself be wrong. Let me cordially challenge them. If by the "old nature" they mean a "nature" which is not our total human self, but a separable something within it, then, as we have shown, they are unscriptural; for neither Romans 6:1-23 nor any other passage teaches so. Or, if by the "old nature" they mean all that we are by nature, apart from regeneration, then to say that God does not "patch up" that is a deceiving slang, for God does repair and restore and re-beautify what we are by nature as human beings. He does this by regeneration—which is the infusion of new spiritual life, and through an inwrought holiness effected by the Holy Spirit. That old epigram, "What men need is not ’reformation’ but regeneration," is a foggy play on words. The real sense of it is that men need more than self-reformation. Who would deny that the very purpose of regeneration is our moral and spiritual re-formation in Christ?
Regeneration reaches into the whole human personality. It diffuses its healthful new life through every part. It is just as coextensive with our whole moral and spiritual being as our hereditary sin-infection is. It does not regenerate merely one part, to the exclusion of an ugly old bag of filth called the "old man", or the "old nature", or the "body of sin", always hanging on me, tied to my mind with strings of hereditary catgut which only death can sever. Regeneration quickens, and inwrought holiness fulfils, all that is truest and best in what we are by the very essence of our nature as human beings. Christian holiness is the true man; the renewed, restored, completed human character, after the image of the Lord Jesus. In Him, the Son of Man and the Son of God, we are meant to see how each son of man is meant to be a son of God.
Here let me register my disapproval of the sharp distinction which is commonly drawn between the so-called "natural virtues" and the "spiritual graces". One gets rather tired of being told that genuine human virtues in the unconverted, such as moral courage, self-denying devotion, patience despite provocation, integrity amid temptation, long-suffering love and loyalty, are "of the flesh", or merely of the "natural man", and that even in the regenerate they must be carefully distinguished from the "fruit of the Spirit" ... To talk of holiness as a separate something not belonging to the intrinsic human virtues, and consisting in a certain special sort of qualities which must be injected from outside, makes holiness a foreign country to me—a foreign country occupied by the Peculiarites, and the Superiorites, the Unnaturalites, the Exclusivites, and the Unattractivites. A sense of strangeness and unreality hangs like an obscuring vapour over the entrance port to it, causing me to wonder whether I as an ordinary human being have any business there.
How wrong we are, to make holiness thus remote by a false distinction! Holiness is not a foreign country; it is the prodigal coming home, to live where he really belongs. It is the claiming of our life and nature through and through for God again, by the Holy Spirit, and the flowering into Christ-like sublimation of all our natively human possibilities for good. It is not the abrogation, but the fulfilment of our true humanity. The more truly a man is holy, the more truly he is man. The sad wonder, yes, the unnaturalness, is that any child of God should live outside it, and never become that true self.
Let us renounce, then, the artificial distinction between the "natural virtues" and the "spiritual graces". Those nobler human impulses, responses, aspirings, volitions, such as moral bravery, long-forbearing, unselfish giving, sacrificial serving, the returning of good for evil, the magnanimous forgiveness of injuries; those, I say, quickened by the new life of regeneration, purified in the Shekinah flame of the indwelling Holy Spirit, and supremely motivated by adoring love of Christ, are the true "graces" of Christian holiness. Or, conversely, the "graces" of the Christian life are the "natural virtues", baptized into Christ, liberated, refined, enriched, and lifted up into higher and lovelier expression. When I read in Galatians 5:22-23, "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering ..." whose love is it? and whose are the other eight qualities mentioned? Is it His love, and not mine? Or is it not rather an outreaching capacity already in my own human nature, which He now kindles to purer flame, and awakes to higher impulses, and interpenetrates by His own sanctifying presence? Can we not now commit ourselves to the following definition? HOLINESS IS MORAL LIKENESS TO GOD, AS REQUIRED BY HIS WRITTEN WORD, AS REVEALED IN HIS INCARNATE SON, AND AS INWROUGHT BY HIS HOLY SPIRIT. It is inwrought in suchwise as to penetrate and purify our whole moral and spiritual nature, without excluding any part as being imperviously and irrecoverably corrupt—such as that phantom "old Adam" of the usual holiness theories. This inwrought holiness transforms the whole man. It may operate in differing degree, but its extent is always the entire moral being. That is why, as earlier noted, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, the apostle Paul prays for the sanctification of the whole, without allowing or even hinting, much less suggesting, any excludable or unsanctifiable part. In succeeding chapters we shall consider particular aspects of this inwrought holiness; but even now do we not find ourselves longing and praying in such lines as the following?—
Break through my nature, holy, heavenly love;
Clear every avenue of thought and brain;
Flood my affections, purify my will, Make all I am Thy sanctified domain.
Thus, wholly mastered and by Thee possessed, Forth from my life, spontaneous and free Shall flow a stream of tenderness and grace, Loving because Thy love lives on through me.
Excursus On Holiness As Restoration
Let no one equate this restoration with the dictum of Thomas Aquinas and the Thomists, that grace perfects nature ("Grace does not abolish nature, but presupposes it and perfects it"). In rejecting the erroneous we must not let slip that which is truly taught in the New Testament. According to the New Testament, holiness is undoubtedly restoration of our true humanhood. It is not, however, a restoration backward, to the level of unfallen Adam, but a. forward-looking development into the likeness of JESUS, who, as the "second Adam" (1 Corinthians 15:45,