College Study #48: "God's Holiness: a Voice from the Past"

‘Behold, the Lamb of God’

ide o amnos tou theou

College Study

48^th teaching

8.26.2013

 

“God’s Holiness”

a Voice from the Past

 

 

 

          Introductions.

Project Scriptura:

          Announce next week’s topic (God’s Patience), challenge each person to find ONE Bible verse about this attribute of God to share next week, you may use any resource as long as you find just one verse.

Review:

          Yesterday, in explaining what we’ve been doing at this college study, I tried to remember all of God’s moral attributes we’ve recently looked at. So far, we’ve considered God’s Love, Jealousy, Moral Perfection, Veracity, Wrath, Justice and Mercy. Mercy, then, was our subject last week. Let’s review:

          Who was known as the Weeping Prophet? Who wrote the book of Lamentations? What is Lamentations about? We talked about a cycle that recurs throughout Scripture: what forms this cycle? Why are wrath and justice necessary “foundations” for studying God’s mercy? What is mercy? What ancient Hebrew artifact helps to illustrate what mercy does? What does the word kapporeth mean? What did the lid of the ark, known as the mercy seat, cover? Who are the objects of God’s wrath? Who are the objects of God’s mercy? Based on the fact that God’s wrath and mercy have different targets, there is no contradiction to say that God is both wrathful and just and also merciful. What sin can prevent us from coming to God to receive mercy?

          End Review

 

          Tap dancing. It’s a dying art.

          Not many entertainers tap dance anymore. I would venture to say there are very few people left in the world who even know how to tap dance. Can you name even one or two modern tap dancers? When was the last time you saw a tap-dancer perform? When did you last see a pair of tap-dance shoes? Turns out, tap dancing is disappearing from the world.

          In much the same way, the subject of Holiness is slowly disappearing from Christian doctrine, Christian teaching and practical Christian experience. Today, Christianity is totally flooded with mainstream teachings about how to get blessings, how to get wealthy and how to be successful, maybe even teachings about virtue and building character, but where has holiness gone? Similarly, the modern concept of God as a loving push-over, a grandfather figure, a genie-like Deity there to dote on your every whim is far removed from the biblical imagery of the God known as the Holy One of Israel.

          Like tap-dancing, the doctrine of Holiness has become a dying art.

          Let me read you a quote from a book called A New Call to Holiness by author J. Sidlow Baxter: “One of the saddest features of the present time is the lost emphasis on this inward and outward sanctification which purifies the soul in its deepest depths, and then transfigures the character… As we have lamented, the flood-tide of holiness enthusiasm has given place to a disappointing ebb.”

          Perhaps even more accuracture of a summary of our modern experience is in a section which Baxter titled A Shift from Superficiality. Listen, and ask yourself whether this describes your Christian experience:

          “Another consideration which stresses the need for  a new epidemic of sound, Scriptural, holiness teaching is the superficiality of our average present-day Christian profession. There is an exuberant eagerness in modern Christian youth movements, but, in general, does the depth equal the noise? They are versatile, but are they also volatile? Oh, to see our Christian youth gripped by the deeper teachings of the Word concerning sanctification and the fullness of the Holy Spirit! Does someone object that the very words, ‘sanctification’ and ‘holiness’ are strange to the youth of our churches today? That only confirms what we here say.  The terms have dropped out of use…

          “Of course, the whole pressure of our mechanized, urbanized, industrialised, congested, present-day world, with its wheels and propellers, its specialization and restless goads to go-getting, tends to beget spiritual superficiality; and in that we moderns all need sympathy. A thousand pities that our modern hurry-mania has been allowed to invade the churches! Instead of making the sanctuary and its services a haven of quiet retreat from the outside din and scramble, too many among us seem to deem it a necessary strategy to copy the outside world. So, instead of a relieving contrast there is an unrestful imitation, with ‘streamlined’ services, three-minute hymns, four-minute prayers, and fifteen-minute sermonettes. We know there are many exceptions, and we thank God for all those churches which have remained evangelical; but in the many, how skimpy the hymns, and what thin fare from the pulpit! Breeziness and singiness are no compensations for lack of depth and dignity! I believe that nothing could so restore quality to evangelism, and depth to our youth movements, and reverential dignity to our evangelical churches, as a revival of sound, sane, holiness teaching and holiness experience.”

            And do you know that Baxter first printed those words in 1967?! If this was all true of the generation before us, how much more so now as we move toward an increasingly amoral society, as in the days of Noah? What an accurate view on the current lack of holiness as a central teaching of the modern Christian faith. We have traded holiness for being liked, for being contemporary and fashionable and clever and witty and relatable. We have sacrificed holiness for lives complicated by temptations and fleshly desires. We have lost holiness for the quick and easy route. We have left holiness behind for simply building character. We have forsaken holiness for the sake of happiness.

          Author Oswald Chambers said: “Holiness, not happiness, is the chief end of man.”

          So then, we come to a subject tonight which has grown faint and distant from our hearts and minds. But does that not mean it is a subject which all the more demands to be studied?

          Tonight’s study is entitled: “God’s Holiness: a Voice from the Past”. We’re going to examine Holiness as an attribute of God and then Holiness as a part of the Christian life.

          But first, turn to Isaiah 6:1-7.

          This provides the perfect structure for our entire study tonight. Notice several things:

          Notice a) that the prophet had a revelation of the holiness of God. There the angelic beings, these seraphim, chant the tersanctus, Thrice Holy. They cry Holy, Holy, Holy, three times, indicating the exceeding nature of God’s holiness.

          Notice b) that the prophet, recognizing God’s holiness instantly recognizes his own unholiness. Isaiah says “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips.”

          Notice c) the dilemma this creates: a totally Holy God combined with a very unholy human being.

          Notice d), finally, the solution to the problem, the purification of the unholy man so he can coexist and have relationship with the perfectly Holy God.

          Four things become apparent, that God is totally holy, that human beings are unholy, that there is then a problem of relating the holy and the unholy, but that the problem is solved not by the Holy One becoming less holy but by making the unholy pure. In the prophet Isaiah’s experience, we find the structure of God’s plan for history.

          The universe began with a totally Holy God, but when His creatures became unholy, a problem occurred. How could Holy relate with unholy? The solution is to make the unholy now holy, and that solution for the problem of human history came in the form of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The Cross made provision for the cleansing of the sinner, rectifying the age-old original problem between the Holy God and sinful man.

          So tonight we’re going to hit FIVE points:

1.   The Biblical Basis for Holiness

          The revelation that God is holy is perhaps one of the clearest of Biblical teachings. References to God being holy are interspersed throughout Scripture.

          I punched the word holy into a bible word search engine, and found that the New King James version contains 576 verses which use the English word holy. The word holy appears more times than the words Christian, Church, Grace and Truth. The word holy occurs even more times than the word Love, according to this search engine.

          So then, we can safely assume that holiness is a central theme of the Bible and a foundational attribute of God.

            Let’s have our Project Scripture verses and witness what Scripture says about God’s holiness.

 

          Note how central holiness is to the Being of God. The Spirit of God is known as the Holy Spirit. God’s own Name is holy. God’s dwelling place in heaven is holy. God’s throne is holy. God’s ways are holy. God chose a holy people, He gave commands to build a holy tabernacle with holy instruments in it. He gave His people a holy land. He ordained holy priests. And He expects us to live a holy life.

          So lots of things about God and related to God are holy.

2.   The Definition of Holiness

          With all this talk about needing holiness in our modern Christianity, and about God being holy, we must ask the question: well what is holiness anyways? We’ve now seen how the Bible makes use of the word holy, let’s get a better understanding of what this word means.

          There’s a chapter on the Holiness of God in A.W. Tozer’s book the Knowledge of the Holy, and there he writes: “Neither the writer nor the reader of these words is qualified to appreciate the holiness of God. Quite literally a new channel must be cut through the desert of our minds to allow the sweet waters of truth that will heal our great sickness to flow in. We cannot grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of. God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible, and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God’s power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine. Only the Spirit of the Holy One can impart to the human spirit the knowledge of the holy.”

          That’s a great introduction to God’s Holiness. We approach God’s holiness not as an attribute which God possesses merely in a higher degree than human goodness. No, God’s holiness is a unique trait.

          Now let’s look at three origin words to get an idea of what our English word holy is all about. We’re going to look at three origin words, in Hebrew, Greek and Anglo-Saxon.

          In Hebrew, the word qodesh is the word translated as holy. This gives us our first impression of what holiness is, for qodesh basically means separateness. Qodesh means apartness, sacredness, holiness, it was used to refer to places, things and people who were then set-apart.

          For a practical example, consider the robes of the ancient Hebrew high priest. In Exodus 28:2, God said to Moses “You shall make HOLY garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty.” The word holy there is our word qodesh. This tells us that these holy garments for Aaron, the first high priest of Israel, were garments that were set apart, distinct, unique from other garments. They were meant specifically and solely for the role of high priest. They could not be worn by anyone who did not occupy that office. The high priest garments were holy, set apart, different than any other garments because they were meant for a specific purpose and that made them unique.

          What does Qodesh tell us about the Lord? Consider that God, being holy, is also set apart. “There is none like You, O LORD; You are great, and great is Your name in might” Jeremiah 10:6. Moses in Exodus 15:11 says “Who is like You, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like You, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?”

          The word qodesh reminds us that the Holy God is wholly unique, totally different and therefore set apart and separate from any other living thing in existence.

          In his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer writes: “The child, the philosopher, and the religionist have all one question: ‘What is God like?’ This book is an attempt to answer that question. Yet at the outset I must acknowledge that it cannot be answered except to say that God is not like anything; that is, He is not exactly like anything or anybody.”

          God is by nature totally above and different than any other Being. In this sense, in the sense of the Hebrew concept of qodesh, God is essentially apart from all else, therefore: holy.

          Another way to rephrase this attribute is in terms of God’s transcendence, another metaphysical attribute we once covered which describes God as being above and outside of the universe, beyond it, apart from it, in a sense: qodesh, holy.

          So then, God occupies a class of one, a rank of only one. There is nobody like Him. There is only one God, one infinite and perfect Being.

          The next origin word is Greek. In the Greek language, and in the New Testament, the word translated as holy is the word hagios. This word literally means “most holy thing” but it can refer to saints as well. When translated, hagios can also mean righteous or pious. Hagios shows us that since God is holy then He loves and does things that are holy.

          The mistake of American Christendom today is to water-down God into a lovey-dovey Deity such as only loves but never hates, since anger and hatred and wrath are politically incorrect. And after all, if we want people to come to God readily, then we must make God out to be politically correct. But whatever God modern American Christianity has invented, it is not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is holy, and is therefore totally opposed to sin, that which is unholy. God hates lies. God hates cheating. God hates divorce. This is clear from Scripture.

          So hagios shows us God’s holiness as His moral character.

          Obviously, whereas the Hebrew qodesh appears to refer to a kind of physical separateness (or metaphysical in the case of God), the Greek hagios appears to refer to moral purity and holiness. And the Bible uses the word holy then in two different ways.

          Between qodesh and hagios, the Bible tells us that the Holy God is both metaphysically holy and morally holy. His holiness has two distinctions, metaphysical and moral, thus His attribute of Holiness is a quality which, like His love, seems to bridge upon both His metaphysical and His moral traits.

          Apologist Norman Geisler writes: “…God’s holiness is both a metaphysical and a moral attribute. It refers to His absolute moral uniqueness as well as His total separateness from all creatures. In one sense, holiness is an overall attribute of God that distinguishes Him from everything else that exists.”

          Remember that metaphysical refers to what God actually is, what He is “made up of” in a sense. Metaphysical attributes of God describe what God’s nature and being is comprised of, things like immaterial spirit and immortal life and unchangeable essence. On the flip side, moral attributes describe who God is, what His character and personality is like. Holiness, then, touches upon both sides of God. He is Holy in essence, by nature, being set apart and unique and He is also morally pure, His character and personality is holy.

          The third origin word I’d like to share with you will take back in time not so far as Hebrew or Greek. The third word comes from the Anglo-Saxon language, which is also sometimes known as Old English. We’ve mentioned before that Old English has very little similarity to our modern English, however, some of our modern words have interesting origins in our language’s ancient counterpart.

          Scholars of language have identified the Old English word hal as being connected to what eventually turned into the word holy. However, the word hal meant health. We get the words hale and whole, also meaning health, from the word hal.

          Now health is not actually something we think of when we consider the word holy, but it brings out an interesting facet of God’s own holiness. Actually, we already know what we’re about to learn. We often speak of sin as a cancer or a sickness without considering that the word holy came from an old word meaning health.

          A.W. Tozer again illustrates this: “The moral shock suffered by us through our mighty break with the high will of heaven has left us all with a permanent trauma affecting every part of our nature. There is a disease both in ourselves and in our environment… God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Sin’s temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal, meaning ‘well, whole’.”

          So then we learn from the Hebrew that God is totally unique and apart from all other lives. We learn from Greek that God is perfectly moral in character and person. And we learn from Old English that God is perfect health, holy, and that anything unholy, being other than God, is sick, decomposing, falling apart and dying. And that accommodates for the current functions and moral landscape of our universe.

          We learn from qodesh that God is metaphysically holy and from hagios that God is morally holy, but we learn from hal that God is in perfect health and that anything apart from God is without health and slowly dying.

          This leads us to our next point

3.   The Need for Holiness

          If Holiness is health and life, and we being unholy are dying whereas God is the source and holder of holiness, then we immediately see that we need this holiness to survive. That is much more of an urgent statement than simply saying “we need to be good people”, rather we need God to make us holy or we will perish.

          “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling; naked, come to Thee for dress; helpless, look to Thee for grace; foul, I to the fountain fly; wash me, Savior, or I die.” Incredibly appropriate words from the hymn Rock of Ages. We must be washed, we must be holy or we shall die.

          We often think of oxygen, food, water as some of the basic elements necessary for life. But in a very real sense, we need holiness in order to live, for without it, without being made holy by God, we shall not only die in this world because the wages of ours sins is death, but we shall also die for an eternity in the next world at the second death, being cast into the lake of fire.

          Another example of this in Scripture, this necessity of holiness for survival, comes from our original example of Isaiah seeing the LORD. Remember that Isaiah cried “Woe is me!” Why? Because he knew that he couldn’t hope to witness the pure, holiness of God without being destroyed.

          Tozer, again, says: “Every wrathful judgment in the history of the world has been a holy act of preservation. The holiness of God, the wrath of God, and the health of the creation are inseparably united. God’s wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the [disease] that takes the life of her child.”

          The Holiness of God was an actual danger to Isaiah’s unholy existence. Isaiah’s sinfulness risked arousing the wrath of God and the subsequent punitive justice of God. So then, it was necessary that Isaiah be purified, made holy, there specifically by the coal administered to his lips.

          Did you ever stop to wonder just why Adam and Eve were removed from the Garden, a place in which they’d known the tangible Presence of God, after they sinned? Because they being sinful could no longer experience God’s Holy Presence in the same way. They could no longer walk with Him in the cool of the garden.

          God’s holiness must be preserved by distancing Himself from sin. God’s holiness was protected by remaining set apart, even from Adam and Eve. And for themselves, Adam and Eve were in actual danger of the Presence of God. They could no longer survive in His holy light. And that light and warmth of His Presence which they had once enjoyed, they, after they had sinned, hid themselves from God’s Holy Presence. What was once a comfort to them now became terrifying.

          You see this response throughout Scripture, when unholy men and women saw who they really were in the light of God’s perfect Holiness, often it resulted in pure horror. Adam and Eve hid themselves from God’s holiness. The children of Israel shook in fear when God descended upon Mount Sinai. Abraham experienced deep terror when God’s Presence came to establish a covenant with him. And of course, Isaiah was deeply troubled when he witnessed the pure holiness of God. Even the apostle John, in the New Testament, Revelation 1, fell over paralyzed with fear when He saw the vision of the risen Christ, so that Jesus had to tell him “Do not be afraid.”

          This picture of the high priest hiding his face before the glory above the Ark of the Covenant perfectly encompasses the human reaction to God’s terrifying and awe-inspiring purity, a purity which cannot tolerate any impurity. Remember Isaiah 6? The seraphim that cry “holy, holy, holy” even veil their faces with their own wings. Even the holy angels hide their faces from the Holiest of All.

          No doubt this is precisely why we shall have and need incorruptible, heavenly bodies when we die and enter God’s Presence in heaven. I Corinthians chapter 15 discusses the fact of spiritual bodies, saying that the dead shall be raised up and our corruptible bodies will put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. Why? Why would we need to put on a new body, immortal and incorruptible? Perhaps because our flesh, tainted by sin, could never withstand God’s holy presence, and we need suitable bodies of holiness that can.

          You can think of it in terms of an astronaut’s space-suit. If you were to go out into the vacuum of space without proper protection, you’d die. Your lungs would blow up and your moisture would vaporize. Make no mistake, you’d be dead. But not if you had protection! Not if you had a space suit.

          In the same way, God makes us holy in order to have a compatible relationship with you, and He will eventually clothe you in an incorruptible body such as can withstand His holiness once we die.

4.   The Call to Holiness

          I Thess 4:7, “For God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness.”

          Now since we need to be holy, in this life and in the next, God has issued a call. A voice from the past calls us to be holy.

          This is a command for His people to be holy. Put in terms of life or death, we realize that this is no mere suggestion. The Divine call upon the life of a Christian to be holy is not there merely as wishful thinking, nor as simple guidelines on how you ought to live your life. No, the command is there as just that: a command, something to be taken as seriously as the command of a military captain to equip yourself for battle lest you be destroyed.

          Christians may disagree on many subjects, the majority of which are non-essential, but this is essential, this is something which every Christian must agree upon: that there is a call upon the life of the believer to be holy. To avoid the pitfalls that await our generation: the allure of wrong relationships, the temptations of substance abuse, alcoholism, materialism.

          But we must approach the call to holiness with care. We’ve seen that God’s holiness is actually dangerous to our sinful selves. In much the same way, if we approach the subject of His holiness incorrectly, we may endanger ourselves with heresy, establishing a goal of Christian perfection for the now, for the present day, and only living lives of constant disappointment and guilt in trying to pay God back for our faults, rather than a life of freedom and rejoicing in Jesus having taken away our guilt and shame.

          Perhaps nowhere does this careful balance hinge more so than in the famous words of Scripture “Be holy as I am holy”.

          How ought we to understand these words? What are we to do in recognizing the problem that exists between Holy God and sinful Self, as Isaiah saw the problem so clearly?

          Looking at Leviticus 11:44-45, we read: “For I am the LORD your God. You shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and you shall be holy; for I am holy. Neither shall you defile yourselves with any creeping thing that creeps on the earth. For I am the LORD who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.”

          More familiar to us is the reference in Matthew 5:48. Christ says “Be perfect, therefore, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

          How ought we to understand these verses? Well, remember how God’s holiness touches both His metaphysical side and His moral side?

          Considering that, we cannot be holy as God is holy metaphysically. We cannot transcend the universe and be above and beyond all other life as He is, since our being is nothing like His Godhood. Sure we can be a people who are set apart, who are devoted to God and not the world, but we cannot be transcendent.

          However, as far as being holy as far as morally holy, that is a goal we can strive for. God is calling you and I to be moral people, to be set apart from the world in that we shall stand out from an amoral society.

          Scripture is not saying “Be holy in the same way that God is holy”. It is saying “Be holy because God is holy” or “Be holy since God is holy”. We cannot be transcendently holy like God, nor even perfectly morally holy like God. But we can be holy in our own human sense of the word as it pertains to reality and our limitations.

          We have then the solution to the problem. What was the problem? How to bring the Holy God and the sinner together. The solution is purify the sinner. And we know that Jesus Christ died to take away our sins, but we also know that practically we live with dual natures: the new man and the old man, the spirit and the flesh warring against each other within us.

          What do we do then? How do we aim for holiness in this life, fully understanding we shall have it in the next, but struggling with it in our present time?

5.   The Pursuit of Holiness

          How shall we pursue holiness? How you answer this question will define how you live your Christian life. It could be no more important than that.

          J. Sidlow Baxter, again, writes: “…No subject which ever engages the thought of Christian believers can be more sacredly commanding than that of our personal holiness, by which I mean an inwrought holiness of heart and life. Beyond contradiction, this is our ‘priority-number-one’ concern. Admittedly, one would not infer so from the general appearance of things just now, but it is so, if the New Testament is true.

          “Although this deeper work of the Holy Spirit in the consecrated believer seems little expounded in the average church today, with the unhappy consequence that comparatively few Christians seem to know much about it in experience, it still remains true that this call to holiness is the first call of the New Testament to all Christians. For the moment, let just one text of Scripture represent the many to us: Ephesians 1:4, staggering in its mystery and immensity: ‘He [God] hath chosen us in Him [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love’.”

          If then this is our first call, how ought we to fulfill it.

          I think it is illuminating to consider just what we often tell new believers. What do they write on gospel tracks? What do we often tell people who are new Christians? We tell them: read your Bible and pray every day and find a church to fellowship in. Three basic staples: the Word, Prayer and Church.

          And yet, if you think about it, if that is it, if that is everything they need as a new believer, then you’ve given them only enough to become a good Pharisee. What? How? Consider, my friends, that the Pharisees read the Bible, poured over it, studied it without ceasing. They had it memorized. They wore its verses in their clothing. The Scriptures adorned their homes.

          And prayer? Well could the Pharisees pray! Day and night, in the temple and ought of the temple. The Pharisees could pray articulately, loudly, boldly, eloquently (things we often mistakenly listen for to gauge how well someone prays).

          And as far as attending church, you couldn’t beat the Pharisees. They lived church. They lived at church. They ate, slept, and breathed church. And yet you know that Jesus did not have kind words for the Pharisees. The Lord called them foolish and hypocritical. He said in Matthew 23:15, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make one convert, and when he is made, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.”

          Why? Why were they so bad? What single ingredient did the Pharisees lack that Christ had such harsh language for them? After all, they read their Bibles, they prayed every day and they went to church. By all human standards, the Pharisees (whose very name meant separated) were some of the most holy men who ever lived. They did it all, all of the requirements of religion and all that human energy could accomplish. But their holiness was incomplete.

          Why? Because they lacked reliance upon God to sanctify, trusting rather in their own efforts for holiness. They were proud, not humble enough to come to God for mercy, healing and purification.

          Leviticus 21:8 says “…For I the LORD, who sanctify you, am holy.” Another translation of the same verse says: “I the LORD am holy—I who make you holy”. That is what the Pharisees missed and what we cannot miss unless we want to become hypocrites ourselves. The Lord makes us holy, more so than any effort we put in to holify ourselves.

          Augustine once said: “Nothing whatever pertaining to godliness and real holiness can be accomplished without grace.”

          What the Pharisees failed to see in their pursuit of holiness was that they needed to rely upon God to sanctify them by His Spirit, by His grace. They were doing all kinds of work on themselves without coming to God and allowing Him to make them holy, to sanctify them. In clearer terms, we might understand how ludicrous this is to think that we can fix ourselves. That would be like you doing open heart surgery on yourself, rather than going to a trained, professional surgeon to fix your heart problem.

          Make no mistake, the pursuit of holiness can only be accomplished in submitting to the working hand of the skillful Great Physician. Do your part. Yes, read your Bible and pray every day and attend Church, but do so in addition to submission to the Spirit of God working in you to sanctify you. Let Him sanctify you through the truth of His Word. Let Him sanctify you through compliance in prayer. Let Him sanctify you through the sharpening of other believers in Church. Rely upon  God’s strength and turn from the immoral, from the wicked, from the unholy.

          This is a work of His Spirit.

          I Thessalonians 5:23, in closing: “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”