Holiness increases our assurance and joy and usefulness to God...

...so J. I. Packer argues in Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Revised & Updated ed., Regal Books, 2009).

Publisher: Regal Publishing
ISBN-10: 0830751068 | ISBN-13: 9780830751068
Binding: Paperback
288 Pages
Published September 2009

This morning I stumbled across this title while looking through the Westminster Bookstore website. I immediately went to Amazon.com in order to read whatever preview was available (click here). This looks to be an excellent book. If you haven't seen this title yet, I'd encourage you to consider it. I'm thinking that this would make for an excellent personal study for 2010, and Packer is an able guide for such a study.

A few years back I led a small group of teenagers through a study of Joel Beeke's little pamphlet Holiness (published by Banner of Truth). I enjoyed that study because of Beeke's knowledge of the Puritans and his ability to present the subject of Holiness with clarity, humility and conviction.

Other excellent resources on the topic of Holiness are J. C. Ryle's classic work Holiness and Jerry Bridges' works, The Pursuit of Holiness, and The Discipline of Grace.

What other works on Holiness would you recommend? Or, what are your thoughts on the titles recommended above?

Holiness increases our assurance and joy and usefulness to God...

New Jerry Bridges Book

NavPress announces a new book by Jerry Bridges, Holiness Day by Day: Transformational Thoughts for Your Spiritual Journey. The book is a 328-page hardback and consists of selections from Bridges' previous books arranged as a daily devotional.

Publisher's Description: "We can begin each day with the deeply encouraging realization, I'm accepted by God, not on the basis of my personal performance, but on the basis of the infinitely perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ."

Read sample pages.

New Jerry Bridges Book

The Holiness of God

I'm still reading feverishly along the lines of OT Theology, but today I have been profitably distracted by Phil Brown's musings upon holiness:

• Survey of Holiness in the OT
• Holiness through the OT looking glass
• Defining Holiness: Where to start?
• Rufolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy: Worthless

By way of formulating a response to the last post, I came upon a few comments upon the holiness of God by A. W. Tozer in his classic book, The Knowledge of the Holy. He writes as follows:

The feeling for mystery, even for the Great Mystery, is basic in human nature and indispensable to religious faith, but it is not enough. Because of it men may whisper, "That awful Thing," but they do not cry, "Mine Holy One!" In the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures God carries forward His self-revelation and gives it personality and moral content. This awful Presence is shown to be not a Thing but a moral Being with all the warm qualities of genuine personality. More than this, He is the absolute quintessence of moral excellence, infinitely perfect in righteousness, purity, rectitude, and incomprehensible holiness. And in all this He is uncreated, self-sufficient and beyond the power of human thought to conceive or human speech to utter.

Through the self-revelation of God in the Scriptures and the illumination of the Holy Spirit the Christian gains everything and loses nothing. To his idea of God there are added the twin concepts of personality and moral character, but there remains the original sense of wonder and fear in the presence of the world-filling Mystery. Today his heart may leap up with the happy cry, “Abba Father, my Lord and my God!” Tomorrow he may kneel with the delighted trembling to admire and adore the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.

Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because He is holy, His attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.

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.”

(A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, Harper & Row, 1975. p. 112-13, emphasis mine.)

This book has been reissued by HarperOne [Amazon $10.36 pb, 1998 | Amazon $13.57 hc, Large Print/Gift Edition, 1992] and reprinted by Authentic [Amazon $9.99 pb, 2008].

The Holiness of God