God's holiness is His greatest attribute

The Bible says that God is "holy, holy, holy." It does not say this about any other characteristic of God. It does not say that He is "love, love, love" or "mercy, mercy, mercy" even though He is love and He is mercy. But holiness defines God. If He was not holy, He would not be God.

Fundamentally, this means that God is not like you and me. In the world there is God and everything else. He is the only being in the world who has always existed and everything outside of God has been created by God. He is not dependent on anything else or anyone else for His existence. God is perfectly righteous. He does not have any sin and is so holy that He cannot even look on sin.

God's holiness is His greatest attribute. The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy. It doesn't say that about any other characteristic of God. It doesn't say He's love, love, love, or mercy, mercy, mercy, though He is both love and mercy. But holiness defines God.

If God were not holy, He would not be God. And what that means fundamentally is that God is not like you and me. Because in the world, there's God and everything else. Everything outside of God has been created by God and God is the only being in the world who has always existed and he's not dependent upon anything or anyone else for his existence. That's hard for us to comprehend but that is what sets him apart and that's what makes him holy in that sense.

And then God is perfectly righteous as well. He doesn't have any sin. In fact the Bible says he's so holy he can't even look at sin. He can't even accept any part of sin. Sometimes when the scripture wants to impress upon us the holiness of God, it compares Him to a fire, a consuming fire.

And if you've ever watched a campfire and you throw a log on that fire, Well that fire consumes the log. The log burns up and the fire keeps going because the fire is greater than the log. Well that's true for God too. He is so pure. He is so righteous that He can't have any approval of sin.

And as that holy, set apart being, God, who is holy, He's the one who sent His Son, the Lord Jesus, into the world to save sinners who are unholy so that we can, like Him, become holy. And that's what happens whenever the Holy Spirit changes our hearts and turns us from sin, enables us to trust Jesus. We are in the process from that moment on of becoming holy. And when Jesus returns, we'll see Him just like He is. And God will finish that work He started in us, and we will be made completely holy forever.