Acts 7: What Are We in God
When the Lord directs Ananias to see Saul, lay hands on him, and pray for him, Ananias raises an objection: Lord, I have heard much about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jeursalem. See Acts 7:10-14. As you know, Ananias did go as the Lord bade him—and Saul’s walk of faith began. But I will leave Saul for another day. Today, I want to draw your attention to the term Ananias employs, saints.
The underlying Greek is not a word that readily translates into saints, as we typically understand that term to mean. Hagios—the word in Greek—properly translates into holy ones. Whereas saints connotes the character of a long and separated life unto God—the result of many refinements and hardships through sanctification—holy ones suggests something altogether different. Not process and result as in the word, saints, but rather place and identification. Saints invokes a stamp of approval of a man’s character, well-developed and instructed. Holy ones points not to the man and his character, but to God Himself and His very nature— as it oft repeated in Scripture by God: I am holy; and His Spirit is quite clearly declared Holy.
I am content for the time being to leave considerations of what the glorious trait may mean. What I want to focus on instead is the meaning of that designation for us, as His holy ones. This is the first use of the term when describing believers in Christ Jesus (and it is always prudent to reflect on the significance of a word when it used for the first time in Scripture; it is the root from which all other uses grow).
Ananias employs it only a couple of years after Christ ascended to His throne. That brief period seems hardly long enough for God to have sanctified the people of the Way in Jerusalem, spirit, soul, and body. No, we are at the beginning, the very foundation of the Church. Fire has recently fallen, and had not run its course in the hearts and lives of these new believers. So, the term must reflect something else about them. What could it be?
I would submit to you it reflects sacred space—that is, the place where God dwells.
At the burning bush, God commanded Moses to take off his sandals for the place where he was standing was holy ground. What made it holy? It was but sand and dirt and soil—the basic building material of created things, including Adam.
God was there: present, manifested, glorious, and relational. He made the place holy because He is holy. When He departed, the soil would no longer be holy. Only God present creates sacred space. We see this when the glory of the Lord fills the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle: Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. Moses was unable to enter the Tent of Meeting because the cloud had settled on it, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. See Exodus 40:34.
Even though the construction of the tent was mandated by God, and by all accounts Moses made the tabernacle according the pattern, without God present, it was a tent made of skins, and the people were merely a rabble. What made Israel holy was nothing in them intrinsically, as Exodus makes clear. He Himself made them a peculiar people by His manifested presence.
Do not miss this, however. God desires to be present beyond a tent. Isaiah prophesied that He would be with us in the person of Immanuel; God would manifest himself in a person. See Isaiah 7:14. And then we see Jesus, witnessed to by angels, heralded by signs, wonders, and miracles, lifted up from the earth, and carried into glory. God became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. So says John in his gospel at 1:14.
In this way, Christ was the sacred space, the place where God dwelt and manifested His glory to men, and the realization of His hope for communion with man. Wherever Christ was, on the shore, in the boat, at table, or in the Temple, wherever he placed his foot or laid his head, was holy. And that was evident, as the blind could see, the lame walk, and the dead lived. God was present, with us, in Christ Jesus, in a much more solicitous and compelling manner than the fire in the bush calling out to Moses. Christ had become the temple of the living God: if you have seen me, Philip, you have seen the Father. John 14:9.
Let me digress for a moment. His holiness is absolutely stunning when you consider the bleeding woman reached for the hem of his garment, the woman at the well challenged his Jewishness, and the children thronged him. This closeness, in drawing near to us, does not alter the import God’s presence through Jesus Christ. He is a wonderful gift to man.
I hope you have leapt out in front of me to see where I am going with this because it is remarkable, wonderful, and slightly terrifying. When we are identified as holy ones, what that means is that we have become sacred space in Christ Jesus—the place where God dwells, the created thing through which God burns and yet we are not consumed. It is no accident that flaming fire settled on their heads in Acts 2, and yet they were not consumed. On the contrary, they were by His very presence made holy, the dwelling places of God—a myriad of gardens in which God could walk in the cool of the evening with man.
Do you remember when Paul rebuked the undisciplined Corinthians with this: Know ye not that ye are the temple of the Living God—as if that identification alone should bar the very conduct they had fallen into? It should govern our hearts.
Being a holy one of God brings a different set of obligations and constraints than if we were saints after a lengthy process of sanctification. Holy ones imposes a present, in this moment, burden if we are in truth the place where God dwells. It’s more than removing sandals. It’s more than standing before God once a year. It is nevertheless fall-on-your-face-before-God way of living.
“Be ye holy as I am holy” is not some lofty aspirational and unattainable goal. It is no goal at all. It is not a terminus or an end point of the Christian life. Rather, it is an open acknowledgment of our place in Him and Him in us if we will heed his exhortation: abide in me, and I will abide in you.
Jesus captured our present state as the holy ones of God in this way: Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me. The one who loves me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and reveal Myself to him. See John 14:19-21.
That is a salvation to be worked out with fear and trembling for it is God Himself who works in us to will and to act according to His purposes. Philippians 2:12-13.
