As we move forward in the story of Scripture, we come to the book of Leviticus. Leviticus is always a hard book for the church today to grapple with because so much of it involves laws of sacrifices, festivals, and purity laws that we believe do not apply to Christians today (see Acts 15). So what do we do with this book? Is it even worth reading and studying? Absolutely!
However, before diving in to the book itself, I thought it was important to spend a week talking about the idea of “holiness.” So much of Leviticus centers around the fact that God is a perfectly holy God whose presence sinful and impure people cannot enter. Leviticus tells us how people who are sinful and impure can become holy and pure like God and worship him rightly.
“Holiness” and “holy” are words that are used a lot in the church, but it can be hard to fully grasp what they mean. In the most basic sense, holy means “set apart,” or “totally unique.” For our lesson this week, we watched the Bible Project’s video discussing holiness in the Bible. In this, they talk about God’s holiness as his being totally unique, and both life-giving and completely good, yet also dangerous. To illustrate this, they use the sun. The sun is good and powerful and the source of all life, yet if you approach it too closely, or look at it or enter its presence in the wrong conditions, it can be destructive and lethal. So it is with God. He is dangerous because he is perfectly good and holy. In school, I have also heard God’s holiness described as his perfect unity of all of his characteristics at the same time. This is a hard idea to wrap our minds around, but God is perfectly loving, perfectly forgiving, and perfectly merciful, all at the same time that he is perfectly just, perfectly wrathful, and perfectly jealous. He is infinitely good and powerful beyond our ability to understand, and this all plays into his holiness.
The amazing thing is that God understands that he is holy and we are not, but he makes a way for us to be able to be holy like he is. The book of Leviticus will spell out how the people of Israel could be holy and worship him rightly. For us today, we trust that Christ was holy on our behalf, perfectly fulfilling God’s demands for us and giving his holiness to those who admit they cannot please God apart from Jesus’ sacrifice. It can be confusing, and may even feel strange for us to think about, but God makes us holy because of what Jesus did for us on the Cross. He even gives his Holy Spirit to his people to work in our hearts each day to help us be more like Jesus.
We ended our lesson with a project. The Bible project used the image of the sun to demonstrate what God’s holiness means—that it is good and life-giving, yet also dangerous. So we each thought of another image that we felt demonstrates this idea, and had to draw it. Some drew fire, as it helps us cook and stay warm, yet also must be treated with caution and respect. Others drew dangerous animals, while some others drew water. Water is also the substance of life, yet can be powerful enough to wipe out whole cities. There is no earthly image that can capture God’s holiness and goodness, but it can be helpful for us to try thinking of metaphors. When we see just how far our metaphors fall short of God’s goodness, power, and holiness, it should increase our awe and worship of him, and our gratitude that he still loves us and wants to make us his own children!
