People sometimes ask to describe God in one word.  Love tends to fall at the top of the list, but many go with two words – Love and Holy.  Some will say that one leads to the other and that is true in general of complimentary things.

When we look at God’s interactions with the world, we see both love and holiness.  The Old Covenant (Testament) was showing God’s Holiness which is based on love.  The New Covenant (Testament) is showing God’s love which has holiness as one of its key foundation elements.

• Love (primary “visible” expression in the New Covenant):  When Jesus walked the Earth, He didn’t go around commanding people to obey Him even though He had the right to do so.  Mostly, He spent His time showing love.  He healed people, He gave wise counsel, He died for us.  He did show holiness a few times such as when He cleansed the Temple of market activities and a few times when the Jews were arguing in a very condemning manner against the love, truth and wisdom He was teaching.  But, by far, He spent His time ministering to the people. We also see the love based life principles expanded on in the New Testament. The biggest expression of that is God the Father making sure we understand His unconditional love for us by making it visible that all our sins are redeemed through what Jesus did on the cross. We are also given a glimpse of our primary hope – an eternity in Heaven full of wholesome relationships with God and the others there.  That will happen because the only people there will be those that decided God’s “Truths” really are far more loving and wise than ours and God will be there to help us with them.  Love has a foundation of loving others as much as “self” because “self” focused activities and attitudes corrupt relationships.
• Holy (primary “visible” expression in the Old Covenant):  The Old Testament is full of “narrative” which means what people actually did which was often different that what God guided them to do.  The Old Testament showed what happens when we want to be justified by “being a basically good person”.  God gives us the real rules for “being a good person” and we have completely mixed results.  Look at the strife we have created in this world – truthfully, we have bad results.  We usually satisfy our own definition of being good, but not the definition of others and definitely not the definition of God’s.  God’s definition of holy includes loving our neighbor as ourselves because that is a key difference between the mess of this world and what God is setting up for eternity in Heaven.  God describes His definition of loving others in the two greatest commandments (loving first Him and also others in this world — including those with which we disagree on important things).  Those two commandments are a summary of the 10 Commandments which are a summary of the 613 commands in the Old Covenant.  But God takes holiness even further away from “religion” and towards “love”.  In Matthew 5:21-48, God makes statements like “If you lust after someone, you have committed adultery with them” and “If you angrily condemn someone, you have murdered them” and “Love your enemies and help meet their needs without expectation for return”.

A loving and wise parent tries to remove bad behaviors from the life of their child even if the child doesn’t understand or agree because love knows holiness (to some human level) makes a person’s life better.  In 2 Corinthians 7, Paul let’s them know that he did not regret previously confronting them because it brought good change to them.

Holiness is not conforming to religious actions or attitudes.  It is believing and acting on what our loving and wise God teaches because we believe it really is better for us even if we don’t understand it.

God is using this blink-of-an-eye time on Earth to let us see what happens when we do things our way instead of His.  We focus on this brief time on Earth.  God is focused on our full eternal lives and is willing to do what it takes to make eternity in Heaven completely different than the mess we have created here!