Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What is Holiness? | Torah | Leviticus 20-22

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

What does it mean to be holy? Can sinful people be holy? Does holiness have to do with morality? In today's episode, Patrick looks at Leviticus 20-22 to discuss the meaning of holiness. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Leviticus 20-22

Welcome to 10-minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. In Leviticus, chapters 20 through 22, Yahweh is speaking to Moses. And throughout this speech, a single refrain is repeated again and again and again. You shall be holy to me, for I, Yahweh, am holy. Yahweh speaks about holiness and the need to be holy 18 different times in these things. three chapters. And this shouldn't surprise us. In many ways, Leviticus is a book about holiness.

Despite only being 27 chapters long, Yahweh speaks about holiness 78 times. And more often than not, the command to be holy is rooted in the reality that God himself is holy. Which should make us ask a question. What is holiness? Maybe that seems obvious to you. Holiness is being a good person or a moral person. And there's some truth to this. Often holiness is connected to morality. It's connected to how we treat our neighbors, foreigners, and even our enemies. It's connected to our sex lives, to how we treat our parents, and to how we worship God alone. But in many cases, holiness is connected to things that really aren't quite related to morality. It's connected to the kind of clothing that we wear or the food that we eat. It's connected to how we interact with the bodies of the dead, with the menstruation cycles,

of women with how priests and ordinary people treated food inside of the tabernacle. Holiness is connected to the special role of priests inside of the tabernacle. We know that these aren't morality issues because Jesus was perfectly righteous. And yet he did many of the things that Leviticus calls unholy. He touched dead bodies, menstruating women, and he declared all food clean. So while holiness entails morality, it's so much more than that. Which brings me back to the question, What exactly is holiness?

And the answer comes through most clearly in these three chapters. Yahweh says in Leviticus chapter 20, verse 26, You shall be holy to me, for I, Yahweh, am holy, and have separated you, he's talking to Israel from the peoples, the rest of the nations out there, that you should be mine. The key word here is separation, which means set apart or consecrated. He's saying that Israel is, holy because God set Israel apart from all other peoples to be different in a special, unique way.

That's the deepest meaning of holiness, to be set apart, to be different. And that begs another question. Why? Why does being set apart? Why does being different matter? And I want to suggest a few reasons by using a short parable. There once was a woodworker who had the most decked-out workshop imaginable, saws of every kind, manual and electric. a variety of hammers and mallets, a whole collection of measuring squares, chisels of every possible variety, grinders, sharpeners, clamps, sanders, hand drills, and screwdrivers. But, but, but, but his most treasured possession of all was a lathe. He used the lay to make his most intricate pieces, bowls, platters, pens, salt shakers, and complex parts for his furniture, legs, spindles,

faceplates. For him, there is nothing so satisfying as watching wood spinning on a leg. He's He loved to feel it under his hands as he used other tools to shape the wood into something unique and something beautiful, to sand it down, to polish it. This tool, this lathe, was set apart from all of his other tools. He knew it inside and out and he loved to use it. And so naturally, he spent a great deal of time cleaning this thing, removing the sawdust, cleaning off the metal chips, wiping down the spindle tapers, lubricating its mechanical parts, and of course protecting it from rust. No tool was as special as a special as. this tool. No tool was important as this tool. And in a strange way, the lathe felt like an extension of the carpenter himself. His beloved tool used to craft his most beloved creations. One day a friend

came along who was just getting into carpentry. And he watched this season woodworker work. He worked the lathe. And he said that he wanted to try. And so the older woodworker in a spirit of generosity loaned his treasured lathe to his friend. A few weeks passed. And, He asked to have the lathe back, but the friend ghosted him. So he asked again and again and again, and he missed using it. He desperately needed it for a few projects. And finally, the friend responded and dropped the lathe off. What the woodworker saw was dismaying.

The lathe was rusted. It couldn't spin because its parts were jammed up with metal chips and marble sediment. Worse yet, pieces of the lathe have been bent out of shape. So he asked his friend, what in the world happened? And his friend explained. that he'd got it into marble and granite carving, and so he'd made some alterations to the lathe for stone carving. And of course, to do that, he had to use some water, which may have caused a little bit of the rust. Of course, he apologized, but he really wasn't quite sure how to get the

lathe back into working order or how to clean out the chips of stone. The woodworker was understandably more than a bit angry. This was a woodworking lathe, not a stone lathe. It's meant to carve wood, not marble. And worse yet, it was his most beloved tool. that he knew inside and out, and now it would never be possible for it to serve its original purpose. And even if he got a new one, it wouldn't be the one that he loved, the one that he knew. This is exactly how God viewed Israel, not so much as an object or a tool, but as his beloved set apart people, which served a profound purpose in his acts of creation. Through Israel, God would rescue and renew the whole world. He knew that there were other peoples, other nations out there.

And yes, God loved those other peoples and nations, but Israel was set apart. And so God and love wanted to help keep Israel clean and properly functioning for his purposes, as an extension of his own self, as the special object of his love and purposes in the world. This is why holiness has a moral dimension. When we break God's moral law, it james up our motors. We cease to be able to function the way that God designed us. us. When we break his law, we reshape ourselves into something we were never meant to be. But this story also helps us to press one step further and say that holiness is about being set

apart for a purpose. For a purpose. Yahweh wanted Israel to eat and dress and worship differently than everybody else because they were special to him and because they served a special purpose in his plan for the whole world. The devil wants nothing more than to take God's beloved lathe, his people and to wreck it by using it for the wrong thing. And it took nothing less than a purifying love of Jesus to make that lathe right again. You are holy. The whole church is holy. You've been set apart, not just morally, but in your whole life, because God has a purpose for you. The way you eat, the way you dress, the way you speak, the way you think, and the way you live matter because you are a beloved child of God set apart for his purposes in his world. Do you see your life as holy?

Do you see that you've been set apart for a purpose that God wants to work through you to draw people to himself, that he wants to work through you to renew and restore a world corrupted and shattered by sin? To be holy is to know that you are the special set apart object of God's love for a purpose. And because of that, to know that just like him, you must not only walk in righteousness, but you must also walk in purposefulness. You are not your own. You are his, and this is gloriously good news. So live like you're set apart. Be holy, therefore, because Jesus, your Lord and King is holy. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.