Holier Than Thou

Author Jackie Hill Perry opens with a question that drives her entire argument: If God is holy and therefore cannot sin, and if He cannot sin against people, then He should be the most trustworthy being in existence. Yet believers often fail to treat Him that way. Perry frames the book as one she wanted to read but could not find, acknowledging the influence of theologians such as R. C. Sproul, A. W. Tozer, and Stephen Charnock on her thinking about holiness. She contends that people distrust God because they project the sinfulness of other humans onto Him, treating Him as a better version of themselves rather than recognizing Him as categorically different. The root of all sin, she argues, is unbelief: a failure to believe what God has said about Himself. She illustrates this through the story of the Rich Young Ruler, a wealthy man who approached Jesus asking how to inherit eternal life. The ruler called Jesus "good teacher" but did not recognize Him as God, which made the command to sell everything feel optional rather than urgent. Perry's stated goal is to show readers a God who is incomprehensibly holy and therefore completely beautiful, so that seeing Him as He is will inspire trust and transformation.

Perry establishes what holiness means by placing readers imaginatively in the position of an ancient Israelite approaching Mount Sinai to meet God. She recounts the plagues in Egypt and the blood on the doorposts, building toward the theophany, a visible manifestation of God, at Sinai: thunder, lightning, fire, and a supernatural trumpet. She argues that holiness is not a selective attribute but is essential to God's entire nature. Drawing on the theological concept of divine simplicity, the idea that God's attributes are not separate components but are identical with His being, she explains that when God loves, it is a holy love, and when God judges, He has not ceased to be loving. She traces God's holiness through creation, the fall, and redemption, where the sinless Son was judged on behalf of sinful people so that God could justify the guilty without compromising His righteousness.

Perry turns to the vision in Isaiah 6, where angelic beings called seraphim sang "Holy, holy, holy" over God. She explains that this threefold repetition, used for an attribute of God only in Isaiah and Revelation 4:8, emphasizes His absolute holiness. She unpacks the Hebrew root of "holy," meaning "to cut" or "to separate": When applied to things outside of God, holiness means being set apart for Him. Isaiah's response to seeing God was not praise but confession. He declared himself "lost" and "a man of unclean lips" (27). Perry argues that God's holiness creates moral self-awareness in those who encounter Him and introduces the term "transcendence" to describe how God exists in a way no creature can, encompassing both His utter uniqueness and His moral purity.

Exploring God's moral perfection, Perry opens with the account of Jesus stepping into Peter's boat in Luke 5, where a miraculous catch of fish led Peter to the same response Isaiah had: confession rather than praise. She uses God's moral law as evidence of His perfection and turns to Jesus as the definitive revelation of God's moral character. In the wilderness temptation, Jesus refused to turn stones into bread, refused to worship Satan, and refused to test God, demonstrating perfect trust in and obedience to the Father. Perry connects God's moral perfection to the question of trust, acknowledging that many people carry deep wounds from abandonment, neglect, and abuse. She suggests that underneath doubt about God is often a suspicion that He is just like those who have caused harm.

Perry devotes a full chapter to God's transcendence as a distinct dimension of holiness. Returning to the burning bush in Exodus 3, she argues that the bush burned without being consumed because the fire was independent of the bush, just as God is independent of creation. She explains God's aseity, a theological term for His self-existence, meaning He is uncreated and sustained by no one but Himself. She warns against making human experience the primary lens for understanding God, noting that love, the most relatable divine attribute, is often elevated above holiness. Yet human love, shaped by sin, is an inadequate mirror for God's love. She also discusses God's immutability, His changelessness, arguing that His perfections neither grow nor diminish.

Perry contrasts God's holiness with idolatry, using the golden calf narrative in Exodus 32 as her central illustration. The Israelites asked Aaron, Moses's brother, to fashion gods while Moses was on the mountain with God. Perry systematically contrasts the calf's limitations with God's attributes: The calf was local and lifeless, while the living God saw Israel's affliction, heard their cry, and came down to deliver them. She transitions to modern idolatry, listing contemporary equivalents: sexual identity, autonomy, relationships, money, politics, and social media. Using Jeremiah's metaphor of broken cisterns versus a fountain of living waters, she argues that idols provide only a semblance of life, and their supply always runs out.

Perry argues that God's holiness necessitates justice. Without holiness as context, she contends, sin and judgment have no framework. She explains God's righteousness as His faithful adherence to His own perfections and surveys biblical instances of divine wrath, including the flood, fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, and the death of Uzzah for touching the ark of the covenant. She poses what she calls the great dilemma of heaven: God's mercy toward sinners before Christ appeared to compromise His righteousness. She resolves this dilemma at the cross, expounding Romans 3:22–26. God put Christ forward as a propitiation, a sacrifice that absorbs divine wrath, so that God could be both just and the justifier of those who have faith in Jesus. The sinless Son, who had known only His Father's delight, cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (123). The cross displays both justice and mercy: God would not clear the guilty, but His love compelled Him to provide a substitute.

In the book's final movement, Perry turns to how believers become holy. She argues that holiness begins not with moral effort but with the Holy Spirit's work of regeneration, the supernatural act of granting spiritual life to the spiritually dead. She explains the new birth through Ezekiel 36:26–27, where God promised to remove the heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, and stresses that this work precedes any human effort at obedience. With regeneration comes what Perry calls "holy vision": The veil over the heart is removed, and Christ is finally seen. Drawing on 2 Corinthians 3:16–18, she argues that believers with unveiled faces behold the glory of the Lord and are transformed into His image. She identifies specific glories to behold in Christ, including His love, His peace, and His kindness, and notes that these correspond to the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23.

Perry concludes by explaining the sequence of beholding, believing, and becoming. She clarifies that this process requires active participation with the Spirit, not passive reception, and warns that merely reading Scripture is not sufficient for transformation. She points to demons who correctly identified Jesus yet rebel against Him and to the Pharisees who mastered the law yet missed the Savior. She cites Thomas Chalmers's concept of "the expulsive power of a new affection," the idea that old loves can only be displaced by a superior new love for God. Becoming holy, she explains, means putting to death earthly behaviors and putting on compassion, kindness, humility, and patience. She closes by pointing to a future hope: Believers will one day see Christ as He truly is, and in that final seeing, their transformation will be complete. The book ends with a concise declaration: "Beholding, we become; holy."