When We Forgot to Tremble: Understanding God’s Holiness

A reflection on why modern Christians have lost the fear of God, and how Christ restores awe.

Last night, my connect group said something that silenced the room: “Maybe we don’t fear God because we don’t understand His holiness.”

The statement struck me like thunder. It was not accusation but revelation. Perhaps our generation’s great poverty is not rebellion but amnesia, we have forgotten what holy means.

We Have No Concept of Holiness as Lived Experience

We speak often of God’s love and grace, but rarely of His holiness. That absence shows. Holiness is not one divine quality among others; it is God’s very being, His perfection, His purity, His “otherness.” The Hebrew word qōdesh means set apart, distinct, beyond.¹ It does not describe moral goodness alone but the infinite difference between Creator and creature.

When Isaiah beheld the Lord, he cried, “Woe is me, I am undone!” (Isa. 6:5). Holiness revealed itself not as serenity but as fire; an uncreated light in which every falsehood disintegrates.² Holiness is not something we understand naturally; it is something we survive supernaturally.

That is why Moses was told, “No one can see My face and live.” (Exod. 33:20). Holiness is not studied at a distance, it is approached by invitation. We have no frame of reference for it because nothing in this fallen world is holy in itself. Holiness is God’s language, and we are foreign speakers.

We Are Not God, Therefore We Cannot Know Holiness Fully

This is true, and yet, this is also where divine mercy speaks. The unknowable made Himself known. “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is Himself God and is in the Father’s bosom, has made Him known.” (John 1:18).

In Jesus Christ, holiness takes on human flesh, not diluted, but embodied. He is holiness translated into humanity.³ Every act of healing, every word of truth, every moment of forgiveness was holiness incarnate; purity that did not recoil from sinners, but redeemed them.

Through the Holy Spirit, holiness becomes not just visible, but habitable. Peter’s impossible command, “Be holy as He is holy” (1 Pet. 1:16), is fulfilled not by human striving but by divine indwelling. The Spirit sanctifies by making us living temples, so that holiness no longer resides in a temple made by hands, but in the redeemed heart.

Holiness is not a command to achieve; it is a presence to receive.

How Then Should a Christian Understand God’s Holiness?

Holiness is the essence of God, not His restraint. Every attribute, love, justice, mercy, truth, is holy love, holy justice, holy mercy. Holiness is not the wall around God’s character; it is the fire within it.

Karl Barth once wrote, “Holiness is the burning centre of divine love.”⁴ Holiness is not the opposite of love, it is love in its purest, undiluted form. To fear God, then, is not to dread punishment but to tremble at perfection; to stand before that blazing goodness which both exposes and heals.

When the Church forgets holiness, it becomes tame. Worship becomes entertainment, preaching becomes psychology, and reverence becomes sentiment. We stop trembling. And when we stop trembling, we stop transforming.

The Holy One Among Us

Holiness is not God’s distance from us, it is the quality that makes His nearness possible without annihilation. Christ makes holiness bearable. Grace does not cancel holiness; it invites us into it.

We are not called to understand holiness fully, for that would require divinity. We are called to stand in awe of it, like Isaiah, like Moses, like Peter who fell to his knees and said, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” (Luke 5:8).

Holiness is not an abstract doctrine; it is a Person. To know Christ is to encounter the Holy. To worship Him is to tremble and be healed in the same breath.