The Dyer's Vat

In the wool-dyeing trade of John Calvin's Geneva, cloth did not simply become colored — it was transformed. Artisans would submerge raw wool into boiling vats of indigo or madder root for hours, until the pigment bonded not merely to the surface but to the very fiber of each strand. Wash it a hundred times; the color remained. The wool had become what it was dyed to be.

Peter's command in 1 Peter 1:15-16 — "Be holy, for I am holy" — carries this same logic. The Apostle does not address strangers scrambling to earn their way into God's presence. He addresses the elect exiles, those already scattered by Providence, already called through the effectual work of the Spirit. His imperative is grounded in an identity already conferred.

R.C. Sproul, in The Holiness of God, wrote that God's holiness is not merely one attribute among many but the consuming fire that defines everything else He is — His justice, His love, His grace. To be holy is not to polish our behavior from the outside. It is to be submerged, day after day, in the character of God through His Word, until the color goes all the way through.

The pastoral call of this passage, then, is not to try harder. It is to linger longer — in Scripture, in prayer, in the company of God — trusting that the One who called you is faithfully accomplishing what the dye does to the wool: permanent, total, beautiful transformation.