Without Holiness

[Amisk]

"We should be holy because we are most solemnly assured that without holiness ‘no man shall see the Lord’."
Commissioner Samuel Logan Brengle D.D. O.F

[sinner/SAVED]

I wonder whether the author of Hebrews was talking about imputed righteousness or imparted righteousness when he/she wrote "Strive for ...the holiness without which no one will see the Lord".

We are assured over and over that through Christ we will see the Lord.

1Co 1:30 ESV And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption,

2Co 5:21 ESV For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Rom 3:20-24 ESV For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. (21) But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it-- (22) the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: (23) for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, (24) and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,

[eklectic]

I don't think the best paraphrase of this verse/concept is: "If you can just get sinless enough, then someday you will go to see God."

God is all around us for us to see -- we see him in nature, in morality, in the scriptures, and in each other. Sometimes we can even see him in ourselves. And Jesus promised to never leave us, didn't he?

I think the concept brought forward between holiness and seeing God is not an achievement/reward paradigm but, rather, learning to see things a different way. In other words, especially in Jesus' own words, we need "eyes to see and ears to hear." The problem isn't that God isn't here and that he is mute, the problem is that we look at things "fleshly", through our own natural resources. If we could look at things "spiritually", through God's perceptions, then a whole new world opens up for us. A world that is "holy", not because it is sinless, but because God's prescence is there in a real and transforming way.

If Jesus was God, as Christians claim he was/is, he never required someone to be sinless before they could see or fellowship with him. It was, in fact, being in his prescence that changed them, that transformed them, that made them "holy". If we think that we need to be sinless because we can see God, we go against the very notion that God has revealed himself through Christ to, of all things, sinners. But as we grow to have "eyes to see and ears to hear", we can indeed see and hear God more clearly, don't you think?

[Concetta]

Raises some interesting questions there, for sure