What does it mean that Christ is holy? What is the holiness of Christ?

Holiness has been described as "a nature that delights in purity, and which repels evil." Adam and Eve were 'innocent,' not holy; for though they might have delighted in purity, they did not repel the evil of Satan. God is ever holy... and the Lord Jesus when in this sinful world was holy, harmless, and undefiled. God is called 'the Holy One of Israel,' Isa. 30:15, etc., and the Lord Jesus 'the Holy One.' Mark 1:24; Acts 3:14.

Was Adam unfallen either righteous or holy? Scripture never says so, and it cannot be broken. But I go farther: what scripture does say is inconsistent with such a standing. Absence of evil, creature good, is not holiness. There was this positive intrinsic superiority to evil in the Lord Jesus even from His very birth and before it. We are conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity; the Lord's flesh was neither conceived nor made thus, but holy by the power of the Spirit.

From this magnificent passage, we learn that the human body into which the eternal Son entered, was formed by "the power of the Highest." "A body hast thou prepared me."... The humanity of the Lord Jesus was, emphatically, "that holy thing." And, inasmuch as it was wholly without taint, it was wholly without a seed of mortality. We cannot think of mortality, save in connection with sin; and Christ's humanity had nought to do with sin, either personally or relatively.

The Lord Jesus Christ, God's eternal Son, a distinct Person in the glorious Trinity, God manifest in the flesh, God over all, blessed for ever, assumed a body which was inherently and divinely pure, holy, and without the possibility of taint — absolutely free from every seed or principle of sin and mortality.

It is wretchedly low and even dangerous ground to say, with divines of repute, that Jesus was born holy because born of a virgin. He was indeed so born of the virgin; but the holiness of His humanity, though of the very substance of His mother, turned upon the miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost.

As there was in Christ the total absence of self-will inwardly, as He in every respect hated and rejected evil, there was nothing but thorough suffering. The effect of temptation on fallen humanity is not suffering, but rather pleasure, if we can call that pleasure which is the gratification of our evil nature. Christ knew nothing of this in either His person or His experience. Of motions in the flesh, inward solicitations to sin, He had none: He "knew no sin."

Within there was nothing but what gave the sweet savour in life and in death. I know of nothing more horrible than thus sacrificing the holiness of Christ to excuse and allow "suggestions," suggestions of sin in us. Instead of taking Him as the living standard of holiness, holiness is lowered in us, so as to allow of evil suggestions, and Christ is brought down to this level, that sin in us may be passed over.

Was He ever anything but perfectly holy? That is the question. If there were evil suggestions in His heart which He had to resist, He was not... He was a holy man, not an innocent man, and ever maintained His holiness — met Satan by obedience and dependence on God by the word. The wicked one did not touch Him.

If I seek for the truth, the sum total, the divine character, of holiness, I find it only in Christ: this holiness is presented to me by God in Christ. In Christ only is redemption, final redemption to enter glory.

Christ Himself, as has been said already, is the perfect expression of the character, of the perfection, of holiness in man; and although the life which is in us is a holy life, the outcome in our thoughts, in our acts, in our words, in our relation to everything is not produced in its perfection; but our desire is not to lower the standard of it, but to reach it. It is ours in Christ, not yet in practice, not yet subjectively.

The new man desires that in everything his whole being should answer to the model he knows in Christ. In this life the result is not attained to, but the Christian has no other model, no other substance of sanctification for the soul but Christ Himself. Christ is for him, from God, the substance of that which he longs for; because Christ, who is his model, is his life already.

It is in resurrection that Jesus has been declared Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness. This resurrection is a public proof of the power of the life of God, and of the holiness of Christ. (Rom. 1:4; Heb. 7:26.) Christ is now openly separated from sinners. When He returns, He will appear "without sin" for His own, and will drive out sin from His presence; whereas on earth He was the Friend of publicans and sinners.

He was God, and having become Man, proved Himself even as Man to be holy, harmless, undefiled, One upon whom death had no claim. And then He of the unforfeited life, He who both as God and as Man had every title to live, being Himself the very Fount and Origin of life, laid down that life for us of the forfeited lives. Here is the miracle of miracles indeed!

In the Lord Jesus Christ there was God manifested in flesh giving Himself... that He might test and show out the character of the world, and the essential contrast between the state of Himself (holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners) and sinful man.

Adored forever be His peerless name, He was the pure, holy, spotless One of God. He was unique. He stood alone — the only pure untainted grain of human seed that earth had ever seen. He came into this world of sin and death, Himself sinless and lifegiving. In Him was life and nowhere else.