Posted on: 15th January 2026

Sometimes, I feel like I’m the queen of repetition “Put your shoes on”, “We don’t use our hands for hitting”, “I love you”. Maybe that's the nature of having three small children. But there’s also the more serious stuff I get them to repeat. Before bed they say “I am strong, brave, clever and kind”, every night, on repeat. We repeat what we want people to remember, and we learn what we hear repeated. 

If we want to know what God is like, and I think this is natural human curiosity, we can look at what the Bible repeats to learn what is important. In her excellent book In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character, Jen Wilkin talks about this; 

Following the rule of repetition, the Bible wants our first thought about God to be that he is holy. The word holy appears almost seven hundred times in the Bible. [...] No attribute is joined to the name of God with greater frequency than holiness. Twenty-nine times the Bible mentions his “holy name”. He is called the “Holy One of Israel” twenty-five times in the book of Isaiah alone. 

In the book of revelation, the angelic beings repeat “Holy, Holy. Holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Revelation 4:8). This is really clear repetition and is the only time in the bible that an attribute of God is mentioned three times in a row. It isn’t “Loving, loving loving is the Lord” or “just, just, just is the Lord”. While God is both those things, his lovingness and justness are important because of his holiness, his absolute moral purity and perfection. We can trust his lovingness and justness because of his holiness. 

As we come to understand this, our understanding of ourselves also changes. This week, as I’ve been doing my usual repetition, I’ve been trying to remember that God is Holy and that changes everything.