God's name is holy, reflecting His inherent holiness. We bear His name as sons of God, baptized into it, and the Third Commandment measures our spiritual cleanliness by the quality of our witness to all that His name implies. We must not take His name in vain, for the Lord will not hold us innocent if we do. In the Lord's Prayer, the first request is "Hallowed be Your name," a plea for God to take action to hallow His name, as only He can enable us to do so through His work in us. Where His name is truly hallowed, there is peace, harmony, unity, prosperity, joy, creativity, and endless life. God's holiness, described as "holy, holy, holy" in Isaiah, reveals His transcendent purity, setting Him infinitely apart from us in every quality. This holiness is not just an attribute but enhances all others, making His love, mercy, and justice uniquely holy. We are called to holiness, to be set apart and reflect purity in our relationship with Him, treating each other with deference as those separated by God, regardless of our current state of heart or conduct. Only God can sanctify and make something holy, lifting it from the commonplace to the special, as He has done with us by calling us out from the crowd. True holiness in us must be experiential, developed through obedience and a relationship with Him, enabled by His Spirit, to transform us into His likeness.

To hallow is to separate, consecrate, and regard as holy. Only God can make something truly holy, as He did the Sabbath, so humans hallow what He has sanctified by treating it as holy and obeying His instructions about it. In Jesus' Model Prayer, "Hallowed be Your name" stands alone among ancient salutations, echoing David's praise in Psalm 8:1 but adding holiness and a longing for increased true worship. In biblical thought a name represents a person's essence, and God's names (Eternal, Creator, Healer, Sanctifier, Shepherd, and others) reveal His character. The third commandment and this petition therefore require more than careful pronunciation. They call for reverence toward what His names stand for, and for taking the pursuit of God and His way of life seriously as a profound aspiration. To hallow His name is to put Him in His own exalted category, without rivals: "I am God, and there is none like Me" (Isaiah 46:9). The whole family in heaven and earth is named from the Father, and Christ has been given the name above every name. His people hallow His name by coming to understand Him, learning His teachings, keeping Him at the center of life, and praising and obeying Him in every word and deed. The petition expresses the desire to please the Father in all of life and to see His glory witnessed by the world.

God's name is holy because He Himself is holy, a truth that undergirds the third commandment's prohibition against taking the name of the Lord in vain. This holiness demands that His name be kept clean, held in awe, reverence, and regard for all that it implies, rather than being trampled through profanity, carelessness, or ignorance. The psalmist declares that the Lord is great in Zion and high above the peoples, calling for praise of His great and awesome name because He is holy, a refrain repeated in connection with His justice, forgiveness, and vengeance. No one is holy like the Lord, for He stands in a class apart, incomparable, unique, and transcendentally separate from all others. The first request in the model prayer is that God's name be hallowed, placed ahead of the petition for His kingdom, indicating that the kingdom will come to those who first regard Him and His name as holy. Where His name is so regarded, peace and beauty prevail, as in heaven; where it is not, violence, evil, and every form of imperfection fill the earth. This holiness touches every facet of life because God's lordship extends to all creation, leaving nothing outside its reach. As witnesses chosen to know and believe Him, believers must proclaim before the world that He alone is God, declaring His majestic works so that others may understand His uniqueness and trust Him. Redemption itself serves this purpose, granting deliverance so that His people may serve Him without fear in holiness and righteousness all the days of their lives. The command to be holy as He is holy requires that holiness become an issue in every aspect of conduct, not as an optional feeling or outward appearance but as the essential character of genuine service and worship. Even when confronted by the overwhelming power of God's holiness, as Isaiah and others were, the response is recognition of personal uncleanness and a call to reflect the divine likeness through choices that produce purity and separation unto God. Holiness thus measures the quality of witness for God and shapes the conception of Him that directs all of life.

God's holiness lies at the core of His being. Scripture calls Him holy more often than anything else, so His holy name is the label most often affixed to Him, far more than His loving, mighty, or eternal name. Holiness is the attribute invariably mentioned in any vision men have of Him. In Isaiah's vision of the Lord high and lifted up, the holiness of God was stressed above every other attribute, and Isaiah's immediate reaction was to bemoan his own sinful condition: "Woe is me, for I am undone!" Holiness involves majesty and will, and God's will is set on His majesty. Because sin tries to diminish or flaunt that majesty, God's holiness cannot be indifferent to it. God must hate sin if He is to be as He declares Himself in Scripture, and His wrath toward sin is a necessary aspect of His nature. The Old Testament has nearly six hundred important passages on His wrath, and the New Testament speaks of it as well (Romans 1:18; 2:5). Because God is holy, sinful people who came into His presence would be consumed. This is why only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies, and only once a year on the Day of Atonement, with blood. God's holiness is also the reason Christ's death was an absolute necessity. Having chosen to save sinners, God could do so without violating His own nature only by having His Son suffer the judgment in their place.