Holy Means Whole: According to Andrew Murray, Part I

I learned some of the most important things I know about holiness from Andrew Murray in his book titled Holy in Christ. To find anything about holy that is quoted from it on the internet seems to be mostly fruitless. To find even the same title for the same book makes it even worse. So I will quote a great deal from it here, so that you can read for yourself what he had to say.

In addition, I am going to edit this posting considerably over time. I just couldn't wait to get these two parts out there on the internet. Here it is in part:


Note B (p. 207)
On the Word for Holiness

The proper meaning of the Hebrew word for holy, kadosh, is a matter of uncertainty. It may come from a root signifying to shine. (So Gesenius, Oehler, Furst, and formerly Delitzsch, on Hebrews 2:11). Or from another denoting new and bright (Diestel), or an Arabic form meaning to cut, to separate (So Delitzsch now, on Psalm 22:4). Whatever the root be, the chief idea appears not to be only separate or set apart, for which the Hebrew has entirely different words, but that by which a thing is separated from others for its worth is distinguished above them. It indicates not only separation as an act or fact, but the superiority or excellence in virtue of which, either as already possessed or sought after, the separation takes place.

In his Lexicon of New Testament Greek, Cremer has an exhaustive article on the Greek hagios, pointing out how holiness is an entirely Biblical idea, and `how the scriptural conceptions of God’s Holiness, notwithstanding the original affinity, is diametrically opposite all Greek notions; and how, whereas these very views of the gods exclude from the gods all possibility of love the scriptural conception of holiness unfolds itself only in the closest connection with divine love.’ It is a most suggestive thought that we owe both the word and the thought distinctly to revelation. Every other attribute of God has some notion to correspond with it in the human mind: the thought of holiness is distinctly divine. Is it not this reason that, though God has so distinctly in the New Testament called his people holy ones, the word holy has so little entered into our daily language and life of the Christian church?

I hope you can see that he views holiness as clearly more than separation.

In Christ,

Pastor Jon