Holier Than Thou - Jackie Hill Perry

Feature Friday

Happy Feature Friday!

Today’s excerpt comes from none other than Jackie Hill Perry. i came across Jackie in the early days of my faith, and such radical thoughts about holiness and righteousness were scary to me. She spoke with conviction than I had never heard before, but one that I yearned for. An authour, poet, hip hop artist, teacher, mother, wife, to name a few, Jackie Hill Perry is one of the most clear examples of deathtoself. for me. Her book Holier Than Thou, expands on the holiness of God and the unholiness of man, and why the two are perfectly needed! I hope you enjoy :)

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I don’t remember the day I thought about it and if my coffee was iced or warm. What I know is that what I thought, and what I thought of, I wanted an answer for: “If God is holy, then He can’t sin. If God can’t sin, then He can’t sin against me. If He can’t sin against me, shouldn’t that make Him the most trustworthy being there is?”

It’s possible that I thought about people before this and the reasons why I don’t trust them. People are incredibly problematic, to say the least. They’re born into this place with bad blood and inconsistent intentions, and of course, this isn’t what any of them (me included) was created to be. God made us to image Himself. To exist in the world in such a way that when observed, whoever looked at us could accurately imagine God. But when you add in an inquisitive demon, a woman deceived, a man’s forbidden bite, and God’s law broken because of it, what you don’t have left is native goodness. You have the generational inheritance of everything unholy which makes everyone with it unlike God. The same impulse that lifted Cain’s hand and necessitated the crying voice of his own brother’s blood is within every person alive. This, I believe, is the root of every reason we don’t trust people. We know that if a person is a sinner,then bad behavior is always a possibility and God forbid we get too close and they make an Abel out of us. We distrust as protection (wisely at times) from the lift of their hand and the cry of our own blood. Whether the killing is verbal, emotional, or physical, we keep ourselves from the potential of all three because we’ve seen our own sinful nature and have experienced enough sins against us to know that sinners aren’t trustworthy.

What about God, though? Is He as negligent as everyone else? Is He a being with the potential to be as bad as us? As Cain and his father, the first sinner? If not, why do we treat Him like we do all the others? Is it that we’ve mistaken the Second Adam for the first and have thought of Him as a “better” version of ourselves? Is it that we think His goodness, though great, isn’t consistent? Or that His commands are true only when they don’t hurt? As if when His instruction costs you an arm, leg, or life, then He must be lying? What I am trying to get at is that somewhere lurking at the bottom of our unbelief is the thought that God isn’t holy. One goal of this work you’re holding is to prove that “if” doesn’t belong in front of “God is holy.” Since He is, as the following chapters will show, He can and should be trusted.

According to the writer of Hebrews, without faith, it’s impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6). So then, faith must HOLIER THAN THOU 4 always be a part of the discussion of how we’re to interact with Him. Without it, we are damnable. With it, we move mountains. Without it, we are an unstable sea, having two minds in one body. With it, we are a home, built on a rock. When the winds come to throw its weight against the frame, it—or should I say we—will not break. It makes sense why of all the things the serpent could come for, it is our faith he attacks most. By walking through the Scriptures, we will see the Holy God as He is so that we can place our faith in who He has revealed Himself to be. Faith isn’t optional in this case. We must trust God like our life depends on it because it does.