11: Holy God, Holy People

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 2, episode 11. We are continuing our lessons from the wilderness series with a look at Leviticus. Don’t run away.

[00:09] Marcus: Leviticus. Yay.

[00:10] Stephanie: Hello, Father.

[00:11] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. It’s one of your favorite books.

[00:14] Stephanie: I do, I actually really love Leviticus. I was really blessed to take a good class on inductive Bible study of the Pentateuch while I was at Asbury Seminary. And Leviticus was one of my favorite parts of that class. So, anyway, before we jump into Leviticus, let’s do…

[00:36] Marcus: You’re the one. Okay. No, I’m just kidding. Go ahead.

[00:40] Stephanie: I loved it. Yeah. So, on that note, today’s icebreaker. Would you rather read through all the laws in the Old Testament or all of the genealogies?

[00:54] Marcus: So, for me, I would rather read all the genealogies. Most people, I don’t know what they would choose on that, but I actually find the genealogies fascinating and have actually written papers on them and spent a lot of time on those.

[01:10] Stephanie: What do you love about them?

[01:12] Marcus: I really like seeing the connections. All right, here’s a classic genealogy example. When David committed his sin with Bathsheba, a lot of people know that Bathsheba was married to one of his mighty men. What they may not realize was that her father was also one of his mighty men, and that her grandfather was his chief advisor. But you’re only going to know that if you read the genealogies and you put two and two together. And so I like putting two and two together and seeing the little hidden gems there that connect some of the dots.

[01:44] Stephanie: Mm hmm. I love it. I could go either way depending on what the study is. But I’m going to lean toward laws right now. I love unpacking the why. A lot of times with laws, you can focus on what did they say yes to? What did they say no to? What was going on? But I love unpacking the why. Why would this have been the case? What is the heart behind it? So, yeah, there we go.

[02:09] Marcus: Here we go. And today, we’re focusing on laws.

[02:12] Stephanie: Okay, so I made a joke about not running away, but Leviticus gets a bad rap. A lot of times, people think it’s boring or confusing or triggering, and I can see all of that. But we love Leviticus. Father, would you set the stage for us? What’s happening in Leviticus? Why should we care?

[02:36] Marcus: Let me just start by what’s happening with the law in general and that is that one of the things that’s happening with God giving the law to Israel, is that he has, in a sense, a blank slate for creating a culture. So if his goal is, “I don’t want you to be like the cultures of the other nations,” then that says, okay, so what kind of culture do you want?

Throughout the Torah, throughout the law of Moses, in his commands, he is creating a culture. And that part I do find fascinating, and that is, what kind of a culture did God want to create, and why? When we get to Leviticus specifically, we’re focusing on that part of culture that is related to worship and related to the rituals of worship, which are now fascinating because these tell us something about the character of God.

That’s also going to be our point of connection to the emotional healing journey – the character of God. What kind of God are we interacting with here? Because a lot of us have a fear of God or an anger toward God, or we have something like the issues with God we have to work through. And so seeing God through the eyes of the law that he gave, and seeing God through the eyes of the ceremonies that he established can really help us get God into clearer focus.

[03:57] Stephanie: Yes, thanks. On that note, will you tie it back into the journey thus far that we’ve been on? How does Leviticus tie into where we left the people of Israel?

[04:07] Marcus: Sure. So, on the journey side of it, one of the things we’ve pointed out is that God had a two year boot camp for the people, to prepare them for invading the land of Canaan. He took three months to get them out of Egypt and to the mountain. They were at the mountain for about a year. And then he takes nine months to get them into position to invade once again.

So Leviticus is them camped at the mountain. All of these instructions are being given while they’re, they’re, uh, camped out at. At Mount Sinai. And so we can associate it with that part of the journey he’s establishing for them. He just had him build a tabernacle. He’s just filled that tabernacle with the glory, the cloud of glory, and with his presence. And now he is going to commission the priests who will supervise all things going on at the tabernacle, and he’s going to give them instructions like, this is precisely how I want things done.

Now, for those people, this was hugely important. They would have studied this stuff in detail because you’ve got to make sure you get this right. Some of this is life and death stuff. For us, because we don’t have a temple, because there’s not a tabernacle and we’re not actually performing these ceremonies, it can become a little tedious. It would have been anything but tedious to these people, as they would have been wanting to make sure they got every last jot and tittle of this correct.

[05:25] Stephanie: There were high stakes.

[05:26] Marcus: There were high stakes, yes.

[05:27] Stephanie: Yes. Well, and I do think it’s good to reiterate that the tabernacle is at the center of everybody. And I think that’s going to play a key role in why some of these laws and rituals are so important. Why holiness is the central theme of Leviticus. That’s tied into all of this, too. So would you help us understand, what is holiness?

[05:53] Marcus: What is holiness? If you’ve grown up in a holiness tradition church, like I grew up in a holiness tradition church, it’s easy to hear the word holiness and think, “Oh, that means rules and regulations about how you’re supposed to live.” For example, in my holiness tradition, my mom, when she was first converted at age 17, was told, “Well, to be holy, you can’t wear nylons anymore, you can’t wear makeup, you can’t go to movies, and by the way, saxophones are from the devil.”

So a lot of us equate holiness with legalism, which is why I think you said earlier that Leviticus can actually be triggering for some people because all they can see is legalism. And so the first thing we need to do in understanding holiness is separate holiness from legalistic Christianity and this idea that God’s going to smite us with his wrath if we don’t get every last thing correct. There are stories in Leviticus that can lead you to that conclusion, especially if you’ve already got legalism in your mind.

What’s really going on with holiness is that holiness can be thought of as the connection between this created world that we’re in, that we can see and smell and touch and interact with, and the unseen, spiritual realm, where God lives. That there is something about if we, in our common, everyday world, want to touch and interact with that world, anything to do with that interaction, we are now entering into the realm of the holy. So the holy you could think of is anything to do with that world.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that holiness is actually quite a common word in paganism. And they use it in the sense of, I am leaving behind the visible world and I am now entering into the spirit realm and everything in the spirit realm is holy. Well, in paganism, their holy gods were not moral. Right? Their holy gods were vindictive and jealous.

[07:56] Stephanie: The morality that was attributed to them would not be the same morality as we would think of it.

[08:01] Marcus: Yes, that’s another way of looking at it. They had virtues and they had qualities that people might want, and they had power that people certainly wanted to take advantage of, but holiness in the ancient world wasn’t a synonym for morality. I think for us in the evangelical world, we think of holiness as a synonym for morality. What holiness is really about is my encounter with this otherworldly person, this otherworldly realm. It’s just that with God, he’s saying, “My reality of what this other world is like is moral, it is upright, it is just, it is merciful. Therefore, if you are going to interact with me and you’re going to be holy like I am holy.” That means that a moral component immediately enters into that because of the character of God.

[08:53] Stephanie: Yes, you just touched on it, but I want to expand it a little bit more, which is that he said over and over again, “Be holy as I am holy. Be holy as I am holy.” So you can be holy as a false god is holy?

[09:06] Marcus: Right.

[09:06] Stephanie: And it looks very different. Right. So holy. So the importance is, how is God holy? What does it mean to be Yahweh holy?

[09:14] Marcus: Yeah. Well, let’s use a contrast. Like, if one of the norse gods, like Thor said, “Be holy as I am holy,” he might just mean be courageous in battle. And that would be what he would mean by be holy as I am holy. So when our God says, be holy as I am holy, he’s like, “I take care of people, right? I provide. I am a God who provides. I am a God who heals. I am a God who sees. I am a God who cares.”

So to be holy as our God is holy is all about relational and merciful, and just and righteous, and all of those things. So it’s important that the very definition of what that means is defined by the character of God. So “Be holy as I am holy,” means reflect the god’s character in all that you do.

[10:01] Stephanie: And then a lot of these laws and rituals, you see a juxtaposition of what not to do with what to do. Or you say, “This is an abomination. This is not holy as I am holy.” And by learning what it is not, you are learning what it is.

[10:18] Marcus: And so that word abomination is like the black velvet that allows the pearl of holiness to shine more brightly. So by saying, this is an abomination, it paints it black. And then by saying, this is holy, that makes it shine like the bright pearls in front of it. And I think we see both the things going on in Leviticus, God is making his holiness shine out all the brighter by saying, and this is absolutely forbidden.

[10:46] Stephanie: Yes. And then one more point I wanted to draw out was that it’s not only addressing don’t be pagan, be my people. He’s also attacking or addressing syncretism a lot throughout Leviticus. Do you want to touch on that?

[11:06] Marcus: Sure. We talk about syncretism periodically here. It’s probably good to define it again. Syncretism is the unnatural blending of worldviews. So syncretism in their society would have been taking pagan ideas and pagan practices and mixing them with the worship of the one true God. For example, the classic scene of syncretism in the book of Exodus is when they build a golden calf and they name that golden calf Yahweh, and say, “This is the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” That’s syncretism. It’s using idolatry in your worship of God.

Today, it might be a Christian who plays with tarot cards or goes to fortune tellers or is doing something syncretistic. It’s like, this does not fit with this. That is syncretistic. Or it’s actually bringing pagan practices into the worship of our God. We see this all over the world, literally, where people are bringing pagan practices into the church and not seeing the problem with that. So Leviticus is, you’re right, it’s not only opposed to paganism proper, it’s opposed to the syncretism of paganism with the worship of the true God.

[12:17] Stephanie: So let’s dig a little bit more into what does it mean to be holy as I am holy. And I think in your book, A Deeper Walk, you walk us through a picture of identity in Christ, actually from Leviticus. Do you want to walk us through that?

[12:36] Marcus: Certainly. So in Leviticus eight, one of the things that happens is, God is going to take Aaron and his sons through the initial ceremony to make them priests. And there are some really key lessons here that are worth noting. First of all, at this point, Aaron has already made the golden calf. He has already led the people into this horrible syncretistic worship that led to tens of thousands of people dying, all the rest of it.

One of the things that established is that Aaron is not being made holy because he earned it. In other words, no one is under any illusions here that Aaron got this job because he’s better than anybody else. And I think that’s an important foundation for the gospel and understanding the gospel. We don’t get our identity in Christ, we didn’t get called into being holy because we became better than everybody else.

Aaron is about to be made holy in this ritual. And this ritual is going to move him from the common space to sacred space, and from the secular or the mundane to the sacred and to the holy. And suddenly he will be holy because of God’s declaration. So in that sense, to be holy means he belongs to that other realm, and now he is a representative of that other realm here.

Because of that, there are high stakes. And that’s important to understand, because later we’re gonna actually see that fire comes out of the altar and kills his two sons. And we’re like, what just happened here? And it’s because this high calling of being holy, of being the representative of the unseen realm, was not taken seriously and that they did not follow the rules and God had to kind of make it very clear. This is a black and white thing. This is not all kinds of gray area here.

[14:29] Stephanie: It was not a wrathful smite button, but we will get to it.

[14:32] Marcus: We’ll get there. But for right now, in chapter eight, here’s Aaron, who is going from secular to sacred. He’s going to become a priest. And in becoming a priest, he becomes part of the realm of holiness. And so watching how he does this, you can’t help but see the overtones to the New Testament, because the New Testament writers are clearly thinking about this when they write about our identity in Christ.

First, he’s washed with water. Well, what does that make you think of? Baptism. Right? I’m baptized with water. Secondly, he puts on a tunic. He’s clothed. Well, what does Paul say? I am clothed with Christ. I am clothed in the righteousness of Christ. And then in verse ten, it says Moses took the anointing oil, and he anointed the tabernacle. And then he anoints Aaron. And one of the things we see is that the tabernacle itself became holy.

And if you ask yourself, “Wait a second, the tabernacle clearly didn’t earn its way to holiness by its behavior. It’s an inanimate object.” So to be holy means I belong to this sacred realm, this realm of what is otherworldly. And so Aaron then, and his sons are anointed with the oil. Well we talk about anointing in the New Testament. It’s always associated with the Holy Spirit. And so we get the same idea. I’m born of the spirit to walk in the spirit as part of my identity in Christ.

And then it says it’s got him laying his hands on a bull, and this substitutionary thing is happening here where it’s like, “Okay, this bull is now going to take away my sins. An atonement is going to be made for, for my sin.” And then we go further, and now there’s going to be the sprinkling of blood. And as the author of Hebrews says, we have been sprinkled clean with the blood of Jesus.

Finally, there is going to be his commissioning to the office, and his first act as a priest is to offer sacrifice to worship God. And so in the same way, in Ephesians it says, “We were created to be God’s workmanship, created in Christ for good works, which he prepared in advance for us to do.” And so all of this is called an ordination ceremony. When he is done with this ceremony, he has moved from the realm of the secular to the realm of the sacred, and he is now able to represent sacred space, which is a very dangerous place to be.

Because I am now on the line between the eternal and the temporary. And at that line and that intersection between the spiritual and the physical is a dangerous place to be, which is why God gives them all these protections. One of the reasons he gives them all these rules is for their own protection, because bad things can happen here.

In the same way, when we go through this transformation of our identity it’s got nothing to do with our behavior. It is now an identity that is given to us in Christ. We’re sprinkled clean, we’re clothed, we’re anointed, a substitutionary atonement has been made. We are all now in on this transformation. We have entered into another realm, and because of that, we are now holy.

And thus, holiness is the foundation for the way that Aaron wants to live and his sons. In the same way, holiness for us Christians is now the foundation upon which we build our lives. And so, because we belong to a God who is holy and we are holy, therefore we should live holy lives. And so the behavior actually follows the identity rather than the other way around.

[18:02] Stephanie: Yeah, let’s keep pushing into that, since we already mentioned the smite button. What was happening with Nadab and Abihu? You can tell the story in brief there, too.

[18:15] Marcus: So let me just read the beginning of chapter ten of Leviticus:

“Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his own fire pan, put fire in it, placed incense on it, and presented (the word is) unauthorized or strange fire…” And that word, strange, literally means, “a foreigner or stranger”. The point here is that that sentence in itself would have horrified the first readers of this book. It’s like, “Wait, they were just told, here’s the incense. It has to look like this. And that incense could only be used in this act of worship.” Nobody was allowed to say, “You know what? I feel like burning some incense in my tent tonight.” You could not use this blend of fragrances.

[19:01] Stephanie: It was set apart.

[19:02] Marcus: Yes, this was specific to the worship of God and so anybody reading this going, “They decided to do a strange mix of incense? Wait a second. Why would you do that?” There’s something profoundly offensive that everybody would have picked up on immediately. And so to add to it, it says, “…which God had not commanded them to do. And fire came out from the Lord and consumed them,” it says, “and they died before the Lord. And God said, very clearly, ‘I will demonstrate my holiness to those who are near me.’

“In other words, if you’re going to come into this sacred space and you’re going to treat it like a profane place, that’s a dangerous place to be. And so I will reveal my glory before all the people, whereas you can’t treat me like I’m one of these other gods, and you can come in to me with the fire that you would offer to this other pagan god. You have to treat me the way that I said to be treated. I was very clear about this. The rules were set up.”

And so there is this shock factor that he did it. He really did it. He killed these people because of incense. And we look at it like, “Wow, that’s just a ceremonial law. It’s not like they were committing adultery or something like that. This was a breach of the ceremonial law.” And one of the things we see about this is that God says, “This is about my holiness and it’s about my glory. If you, as the priests who are going to be representing me to the people and the people to me, if you don’t get this right, the whole system is going to break down.” There just couldn’t be any mercy on this issue at this point because everybody had to be clear what was at stake.

[20:56] Stephanie: Yes. We don’t have time to unpack it all here, but I remember reading commentaries about this as well and just different speculations based off of other things that happen in the narrative on other rebellious acts by these two men and what might have been going on there, too, that presents another picture. So there’s a lot there.

[21:25] Marcus: Well, it is, the way I look at it, too is like…

[21:29] Stephanie: Oh, training wheels, that was my secondary thought.

[21:31] Marcus: Tell me about your training wheels idea first.

[21:33] Stephanie: Well, just that one of the things that we see as all of this is getting set up is that when you’re first learning something, sometimes you have to learn it in an extremely unnuanced way in order to understand it before you can carry on. And so I think a lot of what we see in this era of the law is also training wheels.

[21:59] Marcus: Well, and clearly he wasn’t trying to train Nadab and Abihu. He was training the priesthood.

[22:03] Stephanie: Right, right.

[22:04] Marcus: He’s saying, all right, priests, all of you who go through this ceremony, and you’ve got the privilege of being able to come into this like, this is serious business.

[22:16] Stephanie: Oh, and third thought, okay, that’s fine. We’ve also talked about the idea of electricity being a good thing, but that it will still, if you don’t treat it responsibly, it will hurt you. And we’ve used that analogy before with some of this as well.

[22:35] Marcus: Yes. There is this analogy that, for instance, in paganism that’s especially true. The pagan idea would be, you mess with the holy and it will kill you so you do have very much this electricity feel to holiness because you’re interacting with another realm that you don’t fully understand, don’t fully comprehend. And thus God gives us laws, and when he gives us laws, therefore our protection.

[22:59] Stephanie: Yes.

[23:00] Marcus: So that these kinds of things don’t happen. When we violate those laws and when we don’t follow them, bad things happen. And so this whole chapter ends with the words good and evil. Now, it doesn’t always come through in English, but in Hebrew, it’s very clear that Aaron and his other children are beginning to discern what is good and what is evil. And it’s becoming very clear to them.

What I find interesting about this is, later on in the book of David. Book of David? The Book of Samuel, when Samuel is interacting with Eli, you remember that Eli and his sons are completely banished and they’ve been cut off from the priesthood. And what they’ve done is, they’re not only breaking rules like Nadab and Abihu did, they are sleeping with the women in the tabernacle. They are corrupting things.

And God just says, enough is enough and he actually takes the priesthood away from that line of the descendants of Aaron and gives it to another line of the descendants of Aaron. He did this, to your point of training wheels, to set a precedent and to make sure it was clear. He later on showed a lot of mercy and a lot of patience with a lot of people who did not take this job seriously, to the detriment of the nation of Israel as well as their own detriment.

[24:25] Stephanie: Well, we’re running up on the end of our episode and there’s so much to talk about. How does all this affect the healing journey? We can keep talking about it next episode, too.

[24:39] Marcus: Certainly, so to me, the healing journey part of this is that we understand that holiness, in this sense when we’re talking about the holiness of God, we’re talking about not just the smite buttonness of God, which is the thing that a lot of us are afraid of. “You mean if I mess up once, he might kill me?” That’s not the message that’s supposed to come through here.

The message that comes through is that this is the God who rescued the people from Egypt. This is the God who led them through the wilderness and provided for them. This is the God who’s trying to protect them even now, and he’s trying to protect them from the dangers of the interaction with the unseen realm. And I think that one of the things we learn is that God’s heart is to take care of us and God’s heart is to provide for us. And we see in this that God is good and in him there is no darkness at all.

In fact, this is one of the first lessons I remember working with somebody years ago and we came to that verse that said, “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all,” and it was like something hit them as they realized, “When I entered into the presence of this holy God, I am entering into the presence of someone who is untainted in any way by anything shadowy, dark, or evil. He is pure, and therefore I can trust him.”

And since the whole healing journey is about a journey of building our trust, this idea that this holy God is light and in him there is no darkness at all, that is the basis and the foundation of the fact that we can trust him implicitly.

[26:19] Stephanie: Beautiful! All right, quick announcement. Reminder: this Saturday, April 13, is our Body, Brain and Breakthrough conference with Dr. Jim Wilder, Dr. Todd Hall, and our own Dr. Marcus Warner. We hope to see you there for this name-your-own-price event. You can find more details in the description.

All right, final thoughts for this episode.

[26:46] Marcus: I’m just happy because I’ve already written my talk for that. So we’re all good.

When we circle back to the idea of Leviticus, and the healing journey, and these laws, it can get cumbersome because there’s a lot of redundancy here. If you read it from the perspective of, if I was a priest and I wanted to make sure I get this right so I don’t end up like Nadab and Abihu, you do read it with a very different set of intensity. I think for us, one of the things we do is we look at this, and I’ve always wanted my whole life to be able to study this more and to understand this more.

Psalm 119 is the longest psalm in the Bible, and in that psalm, David, in every single verse in there talks about the law of God, and the law of the Lord is perfect, the law of the Lord renews my soul. His instructions and all of these things. There is something to actually studying this stuff and understanding the culture that God created, understanding the worship culture that God created.

This is one of those studies that gives for as much as you want to put into it, it is not a surface level study. So if you just want to get through the book of Leviticus and say you read it, that’s one thing. If you want to take the deep dive and take the time to see the characteristics of God that are represented in all of these things, it’s going to be an investment. But it’s one of those investments where you begin to understand what David was so excited about when he wrote Psalm 119.

[28:20] Stephanie: Beautiful. Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to, like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend.  And hey, do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer.

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