The distinction between judicial holiness and positional holiness is an important one. Judicial holiness means we have never broken any part of God’s law and that we have the same holiness as God himself. Since “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23) our holiness, if we have any at all, is at the very least tarnished. We are guilty of breaking God’s law and, therefore, can never be judicially holy.

Positional holiness, on the other hand, means that even though we may have sinned we are placed among the holy items and seen to be holy. It may seem that this is like your GPS sending you to the wrong coordinates, but that’s not quite right. It’s more like your GPS knowing the future and sending you to coordinates that will one day be the right location. Understand, God sees you as you will be one day and treats you accordingly, instead of as you are at the moment. Which begs the question, if God already see’s us as holy, what role do we play in becoming holy?

To answer that question we first have to understand something about the afterlife. Unlike Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife, whereby a person’s spirit descends to the underworld for judgement and is either welcomed into the eternal rest or is annihilated, the Bible teaches all humanity will be raised and given an eternal body to live in forever. Some will be raised to judgement and sentenced to eternal death in the lake of fire, some will be raised to life eternal in the presence of God, and some will be raised to their reward which is not only life but also other rewards. In this view, all who are raised to life and\or reward will be washed clean of their sin and given a new and holy nature.

The transformation from unclean to holy might be minimal or drastic depending on how we have trained in holiness in this life. Think of humanity as a bunch of criminals. Some are freed from prison (those who have put their trust in Jesus) and make their way through life as best they can. Others have been freed and attempt to rehabilitate, becoming a better person than the one they were in prison. A couple decades later if there were a reunion of these criminals, some would appear to have changed not at all while others you would hardly recognize as the same person. I believe that is what heaven will be like, only in reverse. I say “in reverse” because those who have practiced holy living will be the least transformed and most like the person they were at death, while those who did not will receive the greatest transformation.

This explains the differences between judicial and positional holiness, important concepts in their own right but there is still more to learn. If God’s will is for us to become holy, an end result that will come about one day, how do we follow the command to “be holy as God is holy” (Leviticus 19.2 and 1 Peter 1.16). This hints at a third category of holiness, practical holiness, which we’ll explore in more detail next time.