The Holy — A People Set Apart

The most important thing about the Holy is that they start all over again from scratch. They were born just normal human beings. They grew up and made choices that put themselves on a path to one of the first two eternal destinies (see bottom of page). In fact, most of them were on the road to the first eternal destiny, the Lake of Fire. There was no way they could come off of those paths and onto the third path by themselves. Even if they were righteous, there was still no way that they could undo all of the wrong things that they had done in their lives and become holy.

God's concept of holy is different from all the funny ideas that men come up with. When He thinks of holy, He thinks of men and women who are being totally restored back to His image, the image that He created them in. He thinks of people who are learning to be full of love and to express it all the time.

Even if a person struggles all his life not to do evil, and tries really hard to do good, he still can't bring himself back to that place of purity. He can't restore himself to the way God created him to be. All he has the power to do is avoid the Second Death. So that's why our Master Yahshua said that people had to be born again. He meant that they had to start all over, forget everything that they ever learned and ever were, and become like little babies. They needed to grow up all over again and learn what it means to be really human.

This is the reason the Son of God, Yahshua of Nazareth, came to the earth. He gathered together a band of disciples who spent all their time, day and night, with one another and with Him. They needed to be with Him because they were full of problems. And He was the One who had the solution. So He created an environment in which they could share everything — not just their possessions, but their joys, their hurts, and their problems, too. This is what fellowship is (1 John 3:14-17;23; John 13:34,35; 1 John 1:6,7; 2:4).

It's just about as hard for us to understand today what fellowship means as it is to understand what holy means. We might think that being holy is walking around in some kind of a robe and fellowship is having coffee and donuts in a big room together. But to Yahshua and His disciples, fellowship meant sharing everything, having everything in common.

A Common Life

Yahshua got His twelve hand-picked disciples together and kept them with Him all the time. They shared a common life with Him, the Son of God. They learned the way their Master thought. They learned how He related to His Father in heaven. They were right by His side as He lived the life of a disciple. They saw Him face impossible difficulties and overcome. They knew deeply what it meant when He said that He couldn't do anything apart from His Father. They knew where His power came from. He proved to them that He had no advantage over them or any other disciple. He didn't use any special divine privileges (Philippians 2:7). He did everything as a man who had fellowship with His Father in heaven.

He came to them as the Light of the world. He showed them the way to be real human beings. But it wasn't enough for Him just to show them the way to live. He also had to prepare them to live it. He had to deal with all of the false things they had learned. These weren't just false ideas of what God was like, or what it meant to be holy, or things like that. He had to deal with their false ways of living. So He kept them with Him and with one another until all the false ways in them came to the light.

During the years that they lived with Him they got totally exposed. Their hidden motives came out. Their shallowness, their worldly ambitions, their selfish refusal to suffer — it all came to the light. All their false concepts about being the hand-picked messengers of the Messiah, the future rulers of Israel, got totally torn down. It was a time of intense training. They fought with one another, got their feelings hurt, pouted, sulked, argued, resented one another, gossiped about each other — until every false way came out of them and was exposed. Then they finally got down to being who they were meant to be (John 3:27). They lost their false faces. They arrived at a proper understanding of themselves (Romans 12:3). They left behind all their thoughts of being superior and special and learned to accept themselves and each other for who they really were. They saw that by themselves, apart from depending upon their Father in heaven, they were a hopeless mess. They understood in their experience that without Him they couldn't do anything (John 15:5).

"The Way"

This was what our Master was talking about when He said we had to be born again and become like little children. He spent much time preparing them to receive the Holy Spirit. Receiving His Spirit was their only hope of being holy — or even of being fully human. He completed His mission by dying as a payment for their sins. And after rising from the dead, He went up into the heavens and sent His Spirit to live inside of them. These chosen messengers who had been through the fire, and learned how to be humble and how to be real, got filled up to overflowing with the Spirit of the Creator of all things. They were full of joy, full of love, incredibly patient, gentle as doves, kind to everyone, even those who weren't kind to them. And they had a peace about them that ordinary people could not understand. This was the result of the excruciating training they had gone through while they were with Yahshua. They had learned the Way of the Lord (Genesis 18:19). It was a new way of life, a new way of relating to other people.

They now became the teachers. When the Holy Spirit was poured out upon them they gathered other disciples and established the same full-time, practical life of fellowship that they had known with Yahshua (Acts 2:42). They taught the new disciples the same lessons that they had learned. They helped them to give up their false concepts and false identities. They taught them to depend on Yahshua. But now there was an amazing difference. Yahshua had now come to them in the person of His Spirit (John 14:23). Fellowship with Him meant fellowship with one another. They learned to recognize and respect Him in one another. They fell in love with Him. They fell in love with one another. They were ready to do anything for each other. They gladly gave up lands, houses, possessions, friendships and family ties, even their own lives and independence (Acts 4:32). All they cared about was being true to their Master Yahshua and their fellow disciples.

This was what fellowship meant. This was true "Church Life." They didn't just go to meetings and eat chicken dinners together. They were totally devoted to their God. They were consumed with His name being made great on the earth, His rule coming to the earth, and His purpose being done on the earth, just like it was in heaven. They were dedicated to loving Him and loving each other, seeing to it that no one in their Community was in need (Acts 4:34).

The Commonwealth of Israel

The zeal of these early believers startled the world. No demand was too great for them. They eagerly took the whole message of this Life (Acts 5:20) to any place and anyone that would receive it. They didn't become a new religion; they became a new nation. They were the Commonwealth of Israel (Ephesians 2:12,13). Anyone and everyone who was willing to do God's will could be part of this holy nation. They called themselves the house of Jacob (Luke 1:33), the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16), the Twelve Tribes (Acts 26:7; James 1:1; Revelation 21:12). The life of self-sacrificing care that they had for each other spread across national boundaries. All of the Communities in all of the Tribes were united together. Communities in one region would give, even beyond their means, to help those in another region (2 Corinthians 8:1-14). The life of heaven was coming to earth.

So this is what it means to be holy. This is what it means to pass out of death and into life. It doesn't just mean that your sins are washed away and your destiny is changed. It means that the life of separation and alienation that makes people so miserable in the world is replaced by a different life.

This is how the Holy are different from the Righteous of the Nations. They don't just do the best they can to obey their conscience. The Holy are consumed with the purpose of God, filled with the Spirit of God. They are restored back to what it means to be a human being. They live to prove to the world what it means to be created in the image of God. Salvation doesn't just mean escaping from the Lake of Fire. It means being set free from all of the false things inside of you that cut you off from others and hold you back from being real. Being holy means being set free from worry over your own food and clothing. Eternal Life means loving each other the way Yahshua loved us. It means having the assurance that we are doing what is pleasing to our Creator and not even being afraid of death.

The Restoration of All Things

The process of salvation, of being made whole, that Yahshua started on the earth sounds a little like a fantasy. If it hadn't been recorded in the Bible no one would believe it was even possible. Strange as it may seem, most people who read the Bible still don't believe that it's possible. They look at all the confusion of the last 1900 years and they can hardly believe that there is anything more than just going to heaven after they die. But there is more. There's a lot more. Our Master promised in Mark 9:12 that the time would come when all things would be restored. We know that He is true, and that He always told the truth. And we believe that the life He lived on the earth — the life that He shared with His disciples, the life that rocked the foundations of society in the first century — is being restored now.

If life is worth living and the Bible is worth believing, then every person alive ought to get himself to a place where this Way of Life is being lived. He ought to search and not give up searching until he finds this life of love and fellowship. What could be worth more than Eternal Life?

See Introduction to the Three Eternal Destinies of Man, which explains these categories of people and their three distinct eternal destinies.