What Is Holiness? (Leviticus 19-20) Series

Today, we are going to rabbit trail for just a week, and talk about holiness.

One of the hardest things to explain in the entire Bible, in my opinion, is the idea of holiness. The Bible often tells us that God is holy, and when the Bible tells us this, it tends to be in very serious, weighty situations. Every time you hear that God is holy in the Bible, it's in situations where God is treated with total respect, and reverence, and awe. Language about God being holy also tends to lead God's people into feeling every bit of their sinfulness, when aren't walking rightly with God. When you are close to God's holiness, you feel not holy.

And so, what I've found, at least for me, is that the language of holiness hits hard. Language about holiness makes me reflect on how I've been compromising, and sinning, and perhaps outright rebelling against God in different areas of my life. But at the same time, I've never quite been satisfied with the way people have described what "holiness" means. Most of what I've heard has been sourced from systematic theologians, and it's always seemed to me that it's at least a couple steps removed from what the Bible actually has to say. When I've heard people talk about God's holiness, I've usually heard it described in terms of Otherness, and Transcendence. God is Other. He is Not Like us. He is Different. And there is a huge gap between God and us. But when I hear people talk this way, they sound like famous theologians like Karl Barth. They don't seem really connected to the Bible, or to biblical scholarship, and so I've just always kept this mental reservation about all language of God's holiness. That's been on my to-do-list of things to try to figure out, at some point. [And the resource that helped me most is Andrew Case's journal article, "Toward a Better Understanding of God's Holiness: Challenging the Status Quo." If you google it, you can get free access through academia.edu, if you give them your email].

Now, I think we'd all agree that if we want to find an answer to the question of what holiness is, that the best place to look is in the OT. It's not that the NT says nothing about it-- holiness is important to Paul (Romans 6:22; 12:1; 2 Corinthians 7:1; 2 Timothy 1:9), and Peter (1 Peter 1:15-16), and Hebrews (Hebrews 12:14). But there are lots of places in the OT that talk a lot about holiness-- Isaiah 6 has a famous throne room scene where spiritual beings proclaim God as holy, holy, holy. Ezekiel, less famously, describes God as The Holy One (Ezekiel 36:23; 38:23). But no matter where in the OT we find a launch point, we will always end up eventually in Leviticus 19 and 20.

And what I think we'll find, when we turn there, is that holiness is actually a really straightforward, easy-to-explain thing. My immodest goal this morning is to give you total clarity about what holiness is.

So let's start in Leviticus 19:1.

(1) And Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying,

"Speak to all the congregation of the sons of Israel,

and say to them,

"Holy, be ["holy" is focused], [the Hebrew word is "qedosh"]

because holy, I Yahweh your God/Elohim [am]. ["holy" is focused]

I'm not going to read the rest of chapter 19-- I'll let you do that later-- but I'll give you 15 seconds to skim it...

Even just a quick skim of Leviticus 19 shows that it has lots of commands about how God expects his people to live. Yahweh wants his people to worship and serve only Him. He wants his people to treat each other rightly, with respect. And Leviticus 19:18 has the famous sentence about loving your neighbor like yourself.

The chapter then closes, verse 37, with God commanding his people to keep all of his rules/customs and laws.

So the question is, how do verses 2-37 relate to the opening command to be holy, because Yahweh your God is holy?

What I think, is that these verses tell you "how" to be holy. You are holy, when you obey God, and keep all his rules. And we can see that holiness is both vertical, having to do with God, and horizontal, having to do with each other. It's been said (Walter Brueggemann, I think) that we love God by loving one another. That's probably a deliberate overstatement that's designed to provoke, and push. But certainly, you are holy when you love God and people.

But I'm not convinced that tells us what holiness is. If we read Leviticus 19, we will know how to be holy. If we obey Leviticus 19, we will be holy. But what is holiness?