John Wycliffe on Holiness

Manmade religion thrives because we are ignorant of God’s word.

Religion tells us that repentance means “turn from sin,” so we get busy turning from sin.

Religion tells us that confession means “review your sins,” so we get busy reviewing our sins.

Religion tells us that holiness means “avoid sin and sinners,” so we do that too.

And the result is an irrelevant and disengaged church that is riddled with unbelief and devoid of the supernatural.

How much better if we listened to God and spoke his language. How much better if we viewed the Bible as useful for training in righteousness instead of looking to manmade tradition.

Take the word “holy”, for example. Do you know what this word means?

Look up the word holy in a dictionary and you will see that it means sacred, consecrated, or religious. But these are poor definitions that do not describe a holy God. God is not religious.

Holiness means wholeness

To say that God is holy is to refer to the wholeness, fullness, beauty, and abundant life that overflows within the Godhead. God lacks nothing. He is unbroken, undamaged, unfallen, completely complete and entire within himself. He is the indivisible One, wholly self-sufficient, and the picture of perfection.

Holy means whole or complete. At least, that’s what the word originally meant, but we changed it to something else.

Under the old covenant, the Israelites were commanded to avoid unclean things and to distinguish between the holy and the profane (Lev. 10:10, Eze. 20:7, 22:26). This fueled the notion that holiness means being separate from sinners and the world in general.

(Sidebar: Jesus, the Holy One, was the friend of sinners. He touched them, laid hands on them, and ate with them. Jesus didn’t pray that we would be taken out of the world, but that we would be sanctified in it (John 17:15-18). True holiness runs from nothing.)

A famous 19th century evangelist once said, “Holiness is moral perfection, and nothing short of moral perfection, or moral rectitude, is holiness.” Many eastern gurus would agree with him. In many of the world’s religions, holiness is the result of rule-keeping and good behavior.

The problem with these definitions is they promote dead works and self-trust. If fourteen centuries of the law-keeping covenant taught us anything, it’s that people cannot make themselves holy. We might as well try and climb to the moon.

John Wycliffe on Holiness

The English word holy comes from the Old English word halig which means whole and hale. When John Wycliffe and his associates began writing the first English Bible in the fourteenth century, this is what the word holy meant to them. It meant wholeness, completion, or perfection. When the earliest English translators wrote about a God who is holy, they understood that they were writing about a God who is whole and perfect in every way.

Wycliffe was a brave man who was martyred for his convictions. In defining holy as whole, he was departing from the Latin tradition of defining holy as set apart.

Latin meaning of holy: set apart
Middle English meaning: whole

Sadly, Wycliffe’s interpretation didn’t stick. Ask any English-speaking churchgoer today what holy means and they’ll likely give you the Latin interpretation rather than Wycliffe’s.

A Biblical definition of holiness

John Wycliffe was all well and good, but what does the Bible actually say? We get some insight into the true meaning of holiness by looking at the Old Testament. The passage below is the first time in the Bible that God is described as holy:

For I am the Lord who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God; thus you shall be holy, for I am holy. (Lev. 11:45)

The Hebrew word for holy is the adjective qadowsh which is related to the verb qadash and the noun qodesh. The first time any of these words appears in the Bible is in Genesis:

Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. (Genesis 2:3)

If we want to know the true meaning of holiness, it will help if we consider why God made the seventh creation day holy.

When God made the stars, planets, trees and animals, it was good but not holy. It was not until Day Seven that God looked at creation and said, “This is particularly good day. I’m going to sanctify it and make it holy.”

What made the seventh day more special than the rest? Look at how the seventh day is described in Genesis:

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. By the seventh day God completed his work which he had done… (Gen 2:1-2)

The seventh day was a holy day or a holiday because the work of creation had been completed. The world was whole and perfect and good in every way. To be holy is to be wholly whole, completely complete, and perfectly perfect.

Life as one long holiday

Adam and Eve began their new lives on a holiday, and so did you. The day you began your new life in Christ you were made whole and holy. The new you is complete in him (Col. 2:10).

Which means you do not need to waste your life examining your navel for sin. Nor should you run from sinners. (Can you imagine Jesus doing that?)

Your heavenly Father is holy and you carry his holy DNA. What does that mean? That’s for him to reveal and you to find out.

The life God intends for you is one of joyful discovery. It is learning to live loved (because you are loved) and being holy (because you are holy). It is growing into who you already are in Christ.

The Christian life is not striving to perfect what he started; it is resting in his finished work and holidaying in his holiness.

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