How Can We Image God? with Jackie Hill Perry
Today we’re chatting with Jackie Hill Perry about God’s holiness and his communicable attributes, specifically focusing on how we can reflect God’s character. Since being saved from a lifestyle of homosexual sin and the like, Jackie has been compelled to share the light of gospel truth through speaking, writing, podcasting, and music. She is the author of Gay Girl, Good God and the Bible study Jude: Contending for the Faith in Today’s Culture. At home, she is known as wife to Preston and mommy to Eden, Jade, and Sage. You can find her at jackiehillperry.com and on Instagram.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
What is the distinction between bearing God’s image and becoming God?
What are some of the attributes of God that we should seek to take on?
How has God instructed us to do that? What enables us to do that?
I’ve heard that holiness is the most frequently mentioned trait of God. Is that true?
What is holiness?
How are we positionally holy (Hebrews 10:10) and yet at the same time growing in holiness?
How is God’s justice a comfort to us? How are we justified in Christ? What would it look like for us to do justice as the prophet Micah said?
How do we receive mercy? How are we recipients of mercy? How do mercy and justice have a place in the narrative of our salvation? How does mercy triumph over judgment? What would it look like for us to live with mercy in view?
What does grace teach us?
What does it look like to strive to embody these characteristics while also walking in humility and realizing we are not God?
NOTEWORTHY QUOTES
“The holiness of God is a really good incentive for faith.”
“There’s an element that God’s holiness deals with his righteousness, but it also means that God is trustworthy in that he is unable to sin against us, and he’s incredibly unique, so there’s no reason we should ever project onto him the traits and behaviors of other people that we might’ve met.”
“Adam and Eve were made in his image and in his likeness, and when you think about God, God doesn't necessarily have an image, he’s a spirit. So it’s not that they looked like God, like they had his nose or his eyes or his eyebrows, it’s that they were able to image him righteously, ethically, morally.” (Genesis)
“What happened with sin, it’s not that we lost the image of God. We still have the dignity afforded to us because we were made by God, but we did mar that image, where now people look at us and they don't see God anymore, they see the devil, to be quite frank, apart from our union with Jesus Christ.”
“The aim as Christians is ‘When I walk after Jesus, when I behold Jesus, when I live like Jesus - now I am imaging Jesus. Not being Jesus, because only Jesus is Jesus, but I’m able to be like Jesus in the world.”
“There are some attributes that are not ours to have, because they’re God’s. We cannot be omnipotent, we can’t have all power. We can’t be omniscient, we can’t know all things. We are not transcendent in the way God is… Those types of attributes are his and his alone, and glory be to God for being that.”
“Love, joy, peace, self-control, gentleness, kindness…those attributes as seen in God are attributes that we ourselves can walk in. As long as we have the Spirit we can walk in the things of God.”
“God can’t be separated into portions, he is simply God.”
“God’s love actually wouldn’t even be a thing if God wasn’t holy. He would be a self-centered God, therefore an unholy God, therefore a prideful God. But because he is holy, this is why we experience his love.”
“There’s a fuller way to incentivize or motivate people towards holiness by saying, ‘Behold the Lord.’ How do you behold the Lord? You read the Scriptures. What do you see in the Scriptures? You see Jesus. You see God. And you look throughout history and you get to see who God is, and in seeing who he is you trust it, you believe it. You believe the words as communicated to us by the prophets and the apostles and the psalmist. And in our beholding and in our believing, we become like God.”
“Part of the problem of our holiness is that we don’t behold enough. We’re not looking at God, we’re just trying to be good people and that’s not good enough.”
“If God reveals himself where he says ‘Cast your cares on me because I care for you,’ a part of beholding is believing that God has compassion towards me, so then out of obedience I then cast my cares, and thus become more holy.” (1 Peter 5:7)
“There’s an interplay between beholding, believing, and then doing.”
“Holiness means two things: (kid definition) that God is good and that God is special or (adult definition) that God is morally pure and that God is transcendent.”
“Morally pure: God does not sin and does not like sin. He is without blemish, he is spotless, he cannot look upon sin and ever delight in it. Transcendent: God exists in a way that is completely different than everything that exists, which makes him special, which makes him unique, which makes him set apart.“
“God’s moral purity and God’s transcendence sets him apart as being a uniquely pure being.”
“God is both transcendent (set apart) and imminent (near us).”
“For some of us, God’s transcendence makes him so distant that we don’t feel the freedom to be intimate, ‘Does he hear me, does he see me, can I speak with him, can I tell him how I feel?’ But he’s fully involved in our world, even though he does not exist or is not contingent upon our world to be who he is.
“In God sanctifying me, or in being sanctified, God has set me apart for ministry to be used for him for his glory. In Christ Jesus now we have been given a righteousness that is not our own, so positionally when God looks at me he sees the righteousness of his Son even though I’m very much aware of all the flaws that I have. So that is really really good news, that even though I am imperfect, God sees me as righteous, yet God also uses me even in my imperfections. That’s beautiful.”
“Looking throughout the Old Testament and seeing how forbearing God has been and still is, is beyond me.”
“God’s righteousness compels him, by virtue of his nature, to have to judge the guilty. But then he offers forgiveness and says ‘I will not judge you according to your works.’ So, if that’s the case, then God has to do something, because he can't forgive you and not punish you for your guilt, if he did that would make him unrighteous. So what he does then is he sends his Son, so he then is able to place your sins on the Son and judge your sins in Christ, so that now when he calls you his own, when he forgives you of sin, he has not compromised his righteousness in doing so. So that's where you see mercy and judgement, you see it in Jesus.”
“Because we have received mercy, we need to be people who give it out liberally, especially to those that we don’t think deserve it. Because that’s the epitome of what God did for us, he was merciful to the undeserving.”
“To receive his grace is to want to be like him.”
“To receive God’s grace is to receive God himself, which is grace.”
“Sometimes, our ability to give grace is us entrusting ourselves to God who will handle the situation so that we don’t have to. That’s not to say you don’t confront or have the conversation, but it's to say that God is the only true and just judge, I’m not that person.”
“Look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of your faith. In looking to him, for him to be the perfecter of my faith it must mean that it's not perfect yet; it’s being perfected. But in the meantime, keep looking.”
“The temptation is that you become so aware of your own sin that you start looking inward instead of looking upward. But no, the more aware of my sin that I become, I should not walk in self-loathing or self-pity, it’s just more reason to look up. Just keep looking up, knowing that God when he looks at me in awareness of my faults, he’s not looking at me in condescension or negatively. He’s looking at me as a Father looks at his child. I am his child. So just keep looking up, and the more you do the better you become.”
“What helps when we look to Jesus is a community - is always being near or around or learning from people who are looking as well, that just helps me to keep looking.”
“Go to the Scriptures and just read it. Just read, and let the Spirit of God speak to you through the text that he inspired, and I promise you, if you walk away believing what you read, you will be changed.”
“It was transformative for me to realize that there is joy and pleasure in Jesus, and that in my obedience I am actually pursuing joy.”
HYMN
Come Ye Souls By Sin Afflicted (Look to Jesus)
RESOURCES
Holier than Thou: How God’s Holiness Helps Us Trust Him, by Jackie Hill Perry (forthcoming August 2021)
Gay Girl, Good God, by Jackie Hill Perry
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What enables you to image, or reflect, God?
What are some of the attributes of God that you should seek to take on?
How can you pursue holiness, while also recognizing that you have already been made holy before God and that it is Christ who is growing your holiness?
What would it look like, specifically, for you to live with mercy in view? What about patience? Grace? Humility?
What are you going to do or implement as a result of what you’ve learned this week?
IMPORTANT NOTE
Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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