7. “Belonging to a Holy God” (Leviticus 10 and 11)

                                                            Belonging to a Holy God

                                                              Leviticus 10:8-11 and 11

Okay, what’s going on with this passage?

If you are coming to church for the very first time this morning, this Scripture reading might have confirmed all your worst fears. You’ve been thinking about checking out Christianity. Friends tell you that really, contrary to its reputation, Christianity is not dry and dusty or irrelevant: it’s relevant and important, and so finally you’re giving it a try today, and what do you hear? Ancient laws about whether or not to eat the rock badger? What even is a rock badger?

And to be honest, this is just a portion of a much larger section—4 chapters all about what we might call ritual purity, discussing not just food but about childbirth and skin diseases and many other things. Even if you’re a Trinity veteran, my guess is you’re scratching your head a bit right now. You know that all of the Bible is from God and is supposed to be useful. But here, honestly, you’re not sure how that could be.

Believe it or not, when we understand these verses rightly, they tell us something really important about what it means to be a Christian.  

To begin to understand how that might be, I want to return to a point I made about Leviticus at the beginning of our series. Leviticus was given to help God’s people to connect us to what we might call the spiritual realities of the universe. By spiritual realities I’m talking about those deeper and more mysterious realities that we can’t see or touch or measure: things like the soul, love, sin, God. Leviticus takes things that we can touch, such as animals, blood, tents, clothing, and uses those things to connect people in a physical way to spiritual realities. It creates a system of symbols and practices that were meant to be lived out, and when they were, they helped Israel connect to these spiritual truths.

Which perhaps might sound a little weird to us, until we realize that we do the same thing in our day. 

Think for a moment about love. Love is something we probably all believe is a real and very important thing. But love is not something we can touch. There’s not some love liquid that we can store in a bottle and measure. So what do we do? We find physical ways to represent love. We use images of hearts—why the heart and not the kidneys? I don’t know—it’s just the symbol our culture has chosen. We give roses—again, why roses instead of dandelions? Just because. Physically we offer hugs: an alien might look and wonder why we seize each other like that—is it a sign of aggression? But for us it’s a symbolic physical expression of love. 

The way that we connect to spiritual realities, those important things that can’t be seen or touched, is through symbols, symbols that can often seem arbitrary to outsiders. A colorful piece of cloth hanging on a pole somehow represents a country; pieces of paper that we can stick in our pocket represent wealth; a ring is a sign of a lifelong vow. Those are all weird when you think about it, but we just take it for granted. We relate to immaterial realities through material symbols. 

God understands that because we are physical, embodied creatures, that’s how we operate. And it’s important that we understand that this is what drives all of these instructions for ritual purity in chapters 11-15. Because if we don’t recognize that we’re talking about a symbolic set of practices, we can get really confused. When things are identified here as unclean, God is not saying they’re sinful. Bacon, thank God, is not sinful. Giving birth is not sinful, obviously! These instructions are all about creating a system of symbols to help God’s people grasp something deep and important. 

Really, the heart of all of this, what it’s all about, is found in verse 45: “I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.” In the end, all of these instructions are given to help God’s people connect with the idea that God’s people are, and are called to be holy. And it makes sense that all of these symbols were needed, because holiness is perhaps the greatest example of a reality that we can’t get our minds around. 

Holiness is the word to speak of how God is different from everything and everyone else. Revelation says, “You alone, O Lord, are holy.” “Holy” is the word for God’s unique God-ness. “Holy” is that which is true of him and nobody else. While there are other spiritual beings—angels and demons, some of whom other peoples might even worship as gods, God is of an entirely different category than them. He’s holy! Only he is the one who has always been and always will be; only he is the one who made all other things—everything else is created by God and depends on God. And his glory, his greatness is entirely beyond all else. “To whom will you compare me?” God asks. People try to understand God by thinking of him as being like us—just a really strong and great human being—but he is so different from us, so much greater in every way. He is holy. He alone is the source of life and all that is good. God is love, God is light, God is the fullness of beauty in a way that nothing else is. There is no one like him. This greater-ness of God beyond all else—that is what it means when we say that he is holy. 

Which of course the statement we just quoted is a bit confusing: “You shall be holy, God says, “for I am holy.” How can this be, if God alone is holy? Well, there’s another important piece to this. Yes, God alone is holy in and of himself. But God also delights to share. When he created humanity, he made us to connect with him, to commune with him so that we could know him and experience him and enjoy him. And in that connection, that sharing that God does with us, we become like him. He alone is light, but in his light those who belong to him become people of truth who reflect that light. He alone is love, but those who experience his love become people who love. He is the wellspring of joy, and those who know him taste of that joy. God alone is fully alive, the source of all life, and those who commune with him, who share with him, experience his life. All of that is to say, God shares his holiness and makes his people holy.

In this verse God is saying to Israel, “When I brought you out of Egypt, I did that so that I could be your God, so that I could share with you. I will live among you. I will provide for you. I will show you how to live. In this way, I am sharing my life, my love, my truth with you: As I am holy, now you, my people are to be holy. You are to be like me.”

These words were for Israel both an invitation and an instruction: holiness is a gift, something that only happens as God shares of himself. But it’s also something that must be received and taken hold of.

If this is all seeming really abstract and hard to get a hold of, well, now you understand why God did what he did with Leviticus—to help people with their practices begin to internalize what it meant to be a holy people belonging to a holy God.

Now before I tease out this symbolic system teaches this, I think it’s important for us to understand that even though we no longer are commanded to observe the Levitical laws, the truths that they point to remain true for us. If you are a Christian, God continues to call you and me to share in his holiness. Peter in the New Testament says to Christians, “Just as he who called you is holy,” obviously talking about God “you also be holy in your conduct, since it is written, (and now he’s quoting Leviticus), “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” 

You hear that? What was true then for God’s people is true now: if you belong to God, God seeks to share his life with you in such a way that you become like him. Just as God is holy, so also are you called to be. The difference between us and Israel is not the call to be holy. It’s that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, God has shared his life with you and me now in an even deeper and greater way. When someone trusts in Jesus, we’re not just given new instructions and a new community that God lives among: in our very souls we are given the life of God by the power of his Spirit. Even if you don’t feel it, if you are a Christian, at the very core of your being you now have the love of God, the truth of God, the joy of God dwelling within you. When we hear God say in these verses, “Be holy as I am holy,” we are being called to receive this gift, to allow this new way, this new life to make us increasingly like God.  

So how do all of these ritual purity instructions help us with this? To understand their significance, we need to back up to last week’s passage. Right after the death of Nadab and Abihu, God tells Aaron, “You are to make a distinction between the holy and common, and between the unclean and clean, and you need to teach the people these things.” God wants his people to learn to make two kinds of distinctions. Some things are holy, and some things are common—we’ve already been talking about this first distinction. When people or even things, like the tabernacle, belong to God in a special way, they share in his holiness. They become holy; everything else is common. Okay, that’s the first distinction—holy and common. And the second distinction God wants his people to make is to divide up what is common into two categories. There are common things that are clean, and there are common things that are unclean. And that distinction—again, is what the symbolic system of ritual purity is all about. There are clean animals to eat and unclean animals not to eat. There are things that can happen to you that make you unclean, such as childbirth or leprosy.

What makes something unclean is that it has associations with the consequences of sin. It has associations—because that’s what symbols do, right, they carry associations—it has associations with the consequences of sin. The ending of life in this world, that is, death, happens because of sin: sin brought human death into this world. Likewise the beginning of life now comes with pain, the pain of childbirth, because of sin, as Genesis 3 tells us. Death and the pain of childbirth are things in this world that bear the mark of our failure, the mark of sin. If something carries associations with these outworkings of sin, they were identified as unclean. This is why childbirth is connected with uncleanness—because in the pain of childbirth we are reminded of the effects of sin. Leprosy causes uncleanness: because broken skin has associations of decay and corruption of death. 

And this is also how we make sense of the distinction among the different animals. There are two basic reasons for uncleanness in animals, and both have to do with death. First, if an animal has ongoing direct contact with the ground or with the water, it was unclean. This is because dust of the ground carried associations with death—from dust you are, and to dust you will return—and so also did the watery chaos of the sea. 

So to be clean, animals needed “protection” from exposure to these things. When land animals had hoofs, which symbolically was like a kind of shoe, they were not in regular contact with the ground; but those animals that, as verse 27 says, “walk on their paws” and those animals that swarm on the ground were connected to the ground, so they were unclean. Fish in the sea with scales had a kind of armor, protection against the watery chaos, but others, like eels, did not, so they were unclean. It’s about contact with death. 

Second, if an animal eats meat, if it eats dead things, it’s unclean. 

This is why chewing the cud was important: it meant they were herbivores—that makes them clean, unlike omnivores or carnivores. You might also notice that the birds identified as unclean are birds of prey.  

You might be thinking, “Well, this doesn’t feel very scientific.” And it’s not supposed to. Because this is not about whether they are bad or good, healthy or unhealthy: it’s about feelings, about the symbolic associations they would carry for people. Things that especially carried associations connected to the effects of sin, were classified as unclean. 

And as day after day, people sought to maintain this distinction and live out all of these instructions, they would experience some important truths about being God’s holy people, truths that continue to matter today.  

First, this symbolic system reveals something fundamental about holiness: holiness and sin cannot mix. In making these divisions between the holy and the common, between the clean and the unclean, there is one primary rule that drives everything else. What is holy and what is unclean must NEVER be brought together. You might remember last week after Nadab and Abihu were killed, Aaron, their dad, was not allowed to show signs of grief. Why was that?  Because as the ordained high priest who was intimately connected to the holy God, he was holy. And therefore he could not visibly connect himself to death. The uncleanness of sin cannot come near the holiness of God. 

Because God is utterly opposed to sin. This is part of why he is so worthy of our worship. God is so good, so loving that he is utterly opposed to every cruelty, every injustice, every corruption or stain upon this beautiful world. God’s God-ness, his holiness and the stain of sin are completely incompatible. 

And that is how we are supposed to be. This is why you see in verse 13 the instruction for Israel to “detest” unclean animals like the eagle. The point is not that eagles are somehow bad creatures; eagles are awesome. It’s a symbolic practice meant to help teach God’s people something about holiness: we are to detest all that is opposed to God. The holy people of God are those who detest what God detests. We are those who utterly hate sin. 

Sometimes someone will ask me, “Why are you so concerned about sin? Hasn’t God forgiven you? Aren’t you supposed to forgive others?” And yes, because of Jesus, we are forgiven. Whatever our sin, through Christ, it is dealt with. And as people who have been forgiven, we are to be a community that shows patience and compassion and forgiveness to others of their failings as well. 

None of that changes a simple truth. Sin is awful. It just is. Just think of what it looks like when someone you love has become trapped in a pattern of sin, how self-destructive it is. Think of how cruel people can be to others, how much pain sin can bring. All of those “small” sins that we treat lightly this kind of awfulness, only in seed form. We live in a day that talks about trying to avoid what is toxic: sin, all of sin, is toxic. We can and should be patient with each other’s failings and humbly realize that even in ourselves God’s work of changing us will take time. But as those who belong to God we also must hate sin and recognize it to be utterly incompatible with who God is and with who we now are.

Second, these ritual purity laws show us that being holy involves making a break with the world’s status quo. One of the primary intended effects of these food laws was that they separated Israel from all the other nations so that they couldn’t even eat meals together. This was intentional. In Levit 20 God says, “I am the LORD your God, who has separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore separate the clean beast from the unclean…You shall be holy to me, for I the LORD am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.” Do you hear the connection—in the way you choose to eat, making a distinction, you will be reflecting something about who you are, that you are distinct. Because you belong to me, you are different from all the other peoples.

Jesus brought an end to these food laws so that there is no longer a division between Jews and Gentiles. But the deeper truth still holds. In a world in which sin is so pervasive, when a person is claimed by God, when a person comes to Jesus, that requires a real break with the previous status quo. When Peter gives us that instruction to seek holiness, he says that as those who are now children of God, born again, we must not be conformed to the passions of our former ignorance. There is an old way, a way that came naturally to us before we came to Jesus, and that is no longer our way. 

I have a friend who became a Christian as an adult, and fairly quickly thereafter his wife also came to Christ. In her explanation as to why, she said that she saw her husband become a different man when he trusted in Christ. He was now more patient, less angry, humbler. She had no explanation for it except that something happened to him. That’s what this is talking about: when we become part of God’s people, a break happens from our former way—we’re called to a way that is different, that is better.  

Third, these ritual purity laws are meant to show us that holiness permeates the practicalities of life. Could there be anything more basic, more mundane than eating? It’s what we do multiple times a day, every day, or else we stop living. And so it’s no accident that it is in something so common, so pedestrian that Israel was told to pay attention to the call to be holy. It’s common to think of worship of God as something that happens in spiritual times and places, like church on Sundays. But just as sin is very much in the details of life so also the life of God is found in the details of life: in our habits—in how we eat, how we stay busy, how we relax. Pursuing holiness involves seeking change in the pedestrian moments and not just in the “sacred” moments.  

Finally, these ritual purity laws help us see how much we need to cling to Jesus. I think it’s hard for us to imagine what it would be like to be an Israelite at that time. So many things caused uncleanness. And many of those things were contagious. Just as one example, if a dead lizard has come into contact with a dish—that dish becomes unclean. Say you didn’t realize it and ate from that dish; now you’re unclean; and if you then come into contact with another person, now they’re unclean.

When you add up all the different things that cause uncleanness, it would feel impossible—as much as you’d try to avoid it, you couldn’t help but find yourself unclean again and again. If you lived with that, one thing would be clear. I can’t do this. I can’t make myself clean.

And that’s right. We can’t, not on our own. But Jesus can. Jesus who loves us, is entirely committed to making us holy. In a famous passage in Ephesians, when Paul is speaking of how husbands are to love their wives, he speaks of the love of Jesus for his bride, the church. Christ loved the church and died for her to make her holy; he cleanses her with the word, and what he is working to do is to make her holy and spotless, without fault on the final day. Think of what that means. Even as God calls us to take hold of his gift, in Jesus he works every day, every moment, helping us to grow. Right now he’s speaking to us, in Leviticus of all place, because he is committed to you. Jesus will not rest until you are wholly perfect, beautiful, without blemish.

With someone committed to us like this, how can we not turn to him and seek to let him change us in this way, making us more like him. Let us now cling to him as we turn to him in prayer.