Holiness is relational (Leviticus 19-20, Hebrews 7)

What does it mean to be holy? Grow a big beard? Live in a monastery? Become a nun?! Leviticus 19 tells us that holiness is very down to earth and practical, it’s all about how we relate to God and others. It has to do with caring for the poor and obeying parents, keeping the Sabbath, not cheating people, keeping God’s good gift of sex within marriage of husband and wife.

Someone will say, times have changed! But Leviticus tells us that even if somethings in the world have changed, God’s people are still to be different from the world (20:23). Holiness involves being different to the world. Just as Israel was to shine as a light among the nations, to show God’s ways and not to do what the surrounding nations were doing, so the church is to be distinct from the world, to be salt and light. The church is not to change her ways to become more like the nation surrounding her, instead she is to show a better way. A way that includes caring for the poor and marginalised, and that protects families through holding to the sanctity of marriage. Increasingly that will make us look different from the world as the world moves more and more away from God’s ways and gets itself into deeper and deeper mess.

We will not get this right all of the time, but wonderfully our reading from Hebrews 7 tells us about someone who is “holy, blameless, pure” and He sacrificed himself for our sins once for all.

We can be totally forgiven for wrong we have done, but that doesn’t mean that we should lower God’s standards for He is still the same God who says “Be holy for I am holy.”