holiness – The Christian Exile

Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonians was:

…that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.
1 Thessalonians 3:13

Notice carefully: Paul did not simply pray that they might be established blameless, but that their hearts might be established blameless. The distinction matters.

The heart is where holiness begins – or where sin festers. As Jesus taught:

Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.
Matthew 15:19

Outward morality without an inward holy heart is hollow. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for this very problem:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence… You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within and full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” – Matthew 23:25-28

It is possible to appear righteous while the heart is rotten. True holiness must go deeper.

How Are Hearts Established in Holiness?

Paul gives the answer just one verse earlier:

May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you, so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father.
1 Thessalonians 3:12-13

The hope of a blameless heart at Christ’s coming (v. 13) is directly tied to growth in love (v. 12). Love is not optional – it is the very means by which the heart is made holy.

For Paul, love was the defining mark of Christianity. Love toward one another and toward all is how our hearts are strengthened in holiness. Growth in love is growth in holiness. Without love, we cannot expect to stand before God with a blameless heart at Christ’s return.

Christian love is thus inseparable from hope. When love increases, hope and certainty for the future increases. Without love, the certainty of our hope dries up.

What Kind of Love?

Here we must be clear: when Paul speaks of “love” he does not mean mere affection. In our day the word “love” is used flippantly to justify almost anything. “If two people love each other, how could it be wrong?” That reasoning is then used to defend fornication, adultery, and homosexuality. Yet in Paul’s prayer, love is inseparably tied to holiness.

True love does not lead into sin; it leads out of it. To drag someone deeper into sexual immorality is not to love them but to despise them. Real love seeks another’s eternal good, not their temporary pleasure. Affection that destroys the soul is not love at all, but a worthless counterfeit.

And this principle extends beyond sexual sin. If our desire to be friendly excuses sinful social activities, that is not true friendship. If our desire to be kind silences our call to righteousness, our “kindness” becomes cruelty. Love that is severed from holiness is not the kind of love Paul prayed for.

Paul’s Example of Holy Love

When Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to “increase and abound in love for one another and for all,” he adds, “as we do for you.” The kind of love Paul expected was the love he had modeled:

Renouncing his right to make authoritative demands (1 Thess. 2:6)
Laboring night and day for their sake (2:9)
Sharing not only the gospel but his very life (2:8)
Caring for them tenderly like a nursing mother cares for her children (2:7)

This is not the hollow “love” the world celebrates. It is a cross-shaped, self-denying love – love that gives itself wholly for another’s eternal good. That is the kind of love that establishes a heart in holiness.

Examining the Heart

So take some time and inspect your heart. It is good to examine your external duties – your doctrine, morality, speech, church attendance, and conduct at home. But don’t neglect the heart.

Does your external life genuinely flow from a blameless heart, or is it an act?
Are there hidden heart problems that need addressing?
Can it truly be said that you love God, love the church, and love all those you interact with?
If you’re really seeking the eternal good of others, do your actions reflect it?

If you recognize the need for your hearts to be further established in holiness, how is it strengthened? By increasing in love – the kind of love Christ displayed on the cross. A love that bears burdens, sacrifices self, and seeks not temporary happiness but eternal joy for others.

At Christ’s coming, it will not be the appearance of righteousness that matters, but whether our hearts have been established blameless in holiness.

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.
Proverbs 4:23

Now that we’ve established a clearer biblical understanding of holiness – that to be holy means being set apart by God’s presence and for God’s purposes – and clarified that Israel is not merely an ethnic group but a covenant people set apart by faith, let’s now turn our attention to the land God promised to Israel. What made that particular plot of land – the land of Canaan – holy in the first place?

A Land Promised by God

The idea of a “promised land” is rooted in God’s covenant with Abraham. In Genesis 12:7, God says, “To your offspring I will give this land,” referring to the land then occupied by the Canaanites.

Later, in Genesis 13:15-16, God broadens the scope of this promise:

For all the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted.

Already, there’s a hint that Abraham’s descendants would extend beyond his physical lineage – anticipating the broader definition of Israel as a people who share Abraham’s faith (cf. Romans 4:16-17). While God’s promise to Abraham centered geographically on the land of Canaan (Genesis 12:1-7; 15:18-21), the full scope of the promise would ultimately extend to a people as numerous as the dust of the earth itself.

God’s Land, God’s Sanctuary

As the Israelites prepared to enter the land, God spoke through Moses in Exodus 15:17:

You will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain,
the place, O LORD, which you have made for your abode,
the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established.

Here, the land God was giving to Israel is described as God’s own dwelling place – His sanctuary. Leviticus 25:23 reinforces this point clearly:

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me.

This is key: what made the land holy was not that it belonged to Israel, but that it belonged to God. Israel’s role was that of a guest. They were sojourners, even in the promised land. The land was holy – not because of who lived there, but because of the One who claimed it for His purposes.

Spiritual Geography

This concept of a geographical plot of land belonging to God himself can be traced back to Moses’s song in Deuteronomy 32, which we looked at briefly in the previous part of this study.

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
But the LORD’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.
Deuteronomy 32:8-9

Here we see that God assigned each nation its own allotted land, and with it, its own spiritual association. That is, the land was allotted according to the number of the “sons of God,” a phrase used in the Old Testament to refer to lesser spiritual beings (Job 1:6; 38:7; cf. Psalm 29:1; 89:6).

This divine allotment is the Bible’s explanation for why the surrounding nations came to serve other “gods” – it was part of God’s sovereign division of the land. From that vantage point, each geographical location had its own spiritual identity. Land is either holy, meaning the territory has been claimed by the one true God, where His presence dwelt and His covenant people loved, or the land was unholy, meaning the region was under the dominion of other spiritual powers.

This isn’t a denial of God’s omnipresence, but it underscores that geography itself has spiritual significance. The promised land was set apart by God’s claim on it. To live in the promised land was to dwell in the domain of the LORD; to leave it was to cross into the dominion of another spiritual power. (For a deeper dive, read “The Principalities and Powers” here.)

The Significance of Spiritual Geography

Clearly, David understood this. Have you ever noticed his lament when he fled from Saul into a foreign territory?

They have driven me out this day that I should have no share in the heritage of the LORD, saying, “Go serve other gods.”
1 Samuel 26:19

David wasn’t switching religions. He knew God was present everywhere (cf. Psalm 139:7-12). But he also knew that leaving God’s land meant stepping into regions associated with the domain of other “gods.” David understood that there was something special about the promised land. It was the place where the LORD had chosen to dwell. Meanwhile the land where he was driven was under the influence of other rebellious spiritual powers.

A similar awareness appears in the story of Naaman, the Syrian military commander healed of leprosy. After his healing, he offered a gift to Elisha. When Elisha refused payment, Naaman made what may at first sound like a very strange request:

Then Naaman said, “If not, please let there be given to your servant two mule loads of earth, for from now on your servant will not offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god but the LORD.”
2 Kings 5:17

Two loads of earth? Dirt? Why would Naaman want to carry loads of dirt?

It wasn’t because Israel’s physical dirt was somehow superior to dirt in the surrounding region. It was because Naaman recognized the holiness of the land. He wanted to take a part of that sacred ground back with him, because he recognized that the land of Israel had spiritual significance. It was the land that belonged to the true God as opposed to all the other gods who were served among the nations.

The Conditional Nature of the Land Promise

Although God did give the land of Canaan to Israel, it was never theirs unconditionally. We read in Joshua 21:43 that God gave Israel the land, just as he had promised:

Thus the LORD gave to Israel all the land that he swore to give to their fathers. And they took possession of it and settled there.

But the land remained God’s possession. Israel’s right to dwell there was based solely on their faithfulness to the LORD. In Exodus 19:5-6, God makes this crystal clear:

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

Their inheritance was never automatic. In Leviticus 20:22, God warns,

You shall therefore keep all my statutes and all my rules and do them, that the land where I am bringing you to live may not vomit you out.

The prophets repeatedly echoed this truth. If Israel ceased to be faithful to God’s covenant, they would be expelled (cf. Amos 7:7; Hosea 9:2-3; Jeremiah 3:19-20). Perhaps the most sobering warning comes in Jeremiah 17:3-4:

Your wealth and all your treasures I will give for spoil as the price of your high places for sin throughout all your territory. You shall loosen your hand from your heritage that I give you, and I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you do not know, for in my anger a fire is kindled that shall burn forever.

To live in the land was to fully embrace loyalty to God’s covenant. Security in the land was never about national strength – it was about faithfulness to the LORD.

The land was a gift, but a conditional one. It was never given to Israel as a piece of real estate to own apart from submission to God’s rule. It was Holy Land because it was God’s land – and He alone determined who could dwell there.

With this, we’ve now explored what it means for something to be holy (Part 1), the true identity of Israel as God’s covenant people (Part 2), and why the promised land was holy (Part 3). This groundwork prepares us to examine how the land promise finds its fulfillment in light of the gospel.

But before we do, we must address a common concern: the charge of “replacement theology” – the claim that the church has replaced Israel in a way that nullifies God’s promises to Israel. To be clear, I do not believe in replacement theology, as it lacks critically important nuance regarding the significance of Israel in the Bible. In the next part of this study, we’ll take that objection seriously with careful biblical reflection.