I’ve never been a picky eater. My family’s dinner rule was that you ate what mom cooked and didn’t ask for something different. It was simple and I loved practically anything that my mom cooked. My sister was different. She was a very picky eater.
I can remember countless times where she wouldn’t want to eat what was made or she didn’t like how it was placed on her plate. She hated when food groups touched and she ate one item at a time until it was finished and then moved on to the next thing. I slopped through my plate at record speeds and hardly noticed what the different things tasted like so I didn’t understand her way of doing things. She wanted to taste each thing without something else muddying up her taste buds.
Now that I’m older I can understand better why she ate, and still eats, that way. She likes to enjoy each group for the particular savory flavor that it brought to the equation. Her idea of a meal was not a slathering of different tastes into a single blended mound of food, but instead was a succession of differing tastes that made up a dining experience. She understood that each item had its own qualities that added to make the entire eating experience exquisite.
That’s the state of mind I want to take when thinking of the attributes of God. Most of the time I admit I don’t think that way, but I try to. The majority of the time I add up all of the things that I try to understand about God and then sum them up by saying, “God you’re just awesome.” I don’t take time to examine each quality of God and savor the enormity of the experience that comes from trying to comprehend a single attribute of God.
Holiness is one of those attributes. It can be examined and compared with the other attributes that are of God’s character, but if I look at it as a stand-alone descriptor it is much more sweet. Holiness is the completeness and the purity that comes from and describes our Creator. I don’t want to add up the qualities and say that makes Him whole, instead I want to focus on God’s holiness as a single idea.
God as holy means there is no blemish, no lacking, no more, no less, no next thing, no change. God as holy means He is complete and perfect, pure. There is no part of God that needs to be trained or grown through time to be increased. There is no part of Him that is not pure or imperfect. Nothing is part of God that is not exactly like every other part of His being. He is complete in everyway.
God’s holiness is beyond our understanding. We are so far on the opposite side of the spectrum that we can’t comprehend what being complete really means. He is the Alpha and Omega and has been before forever existed. He has been complete and can never not be. He is, was, and will always be perfect.
God isn’t like a plate of carrots, peas, and steak. There is no effort involved to make sure that some of God’s attributes don’t accidently dip together and make Him better or worse. His infinite attribute, love attribute and mercy attribute mix well with his justice attribute. He is perfect, whole and pure.