This week we have a double parasha, Acharei Mot, which means “After The Death”, and Kedoshim, which translates to “Holy Ones”. Between these two parashas we will be covering Leviticus 16-20. These two parashas cover the Yom Kippur service, sexual sins, punishment for child sacrifice, and the repeated teaching to observe the Lord’s commandments. However, all the themes of these parashas can be summarized in one word, Holiness. This morning, Lord willing, I would like to explore what these parashas teach us about Adonai’s holiness and how it relates to us all.
In Leviticus 19:2 we have repeated for us again the command that we should “…Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy”. The Hebrew word at the root for Holy is “Kadosh”, understood simply and very literally it refers to the idea of separation, between everything that is holy from everything that is not holy. Something that is holy is set apart, the Land of Israel is holy because it is set apart from all the other land in God’s creation, the Sabbath is holy because it is set apart from all the other days of the week.
But simply describing holiness as separation does not address what makes something holy? What exactly is holiness? God’s Word, and specifically this verse, makes it clear the Lord Himself is the definition of Holiness. I really like the way A.W. Tozer in The Knowledge Of The Holy, defines this truth:
“Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is.”
So Holiness is more than just God’s goodness or His perfection, it is the overwhelming and incomprehensible essence of His nature that makes Him different from every other created thing, including us. Everything about the Lord is holy, He lives in a holy heaven and is served by holy angels, everything that is in heaven is holy and nothing unholy can live in that place. In fact if we were brought right now before the infinite holiness of our creator on our own we would be terrified just like Isaiah was.
The prophet Isaiah was one of the most righteous men to ever live and in Isaiah 6 had a vision of standing before Adonai in heaven. In this vision the holy angels of the Lord called out to one another the words on the banner behind me, “Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The threefold repetition of Holy is to make the clear point that the Lord is infinitely separate from everything else, there is nothing that even begins to approach what He is like.
We use words like glory, holy, powerful, to describe His presence but it is in these moments that the limits of language are known. What Isaiah saw in His vision was very real, but He does not have the words to truly capture the sight He is seeing. Even though Adonai in this vision was veiled to Isaiah it was still enough for him to cry out that he was a man of unclean lips, a man from a people of unclean lips. He cries out that he is a sinner and that He will surely be destroyed. In that moment before the light of God’s holiness all of Isaiah’s sins are made clear to him.
Every rationalization and excuse is stripped away, and all his good deeds are shown to be nothing but filthy ragged clothing covering his body. From our perspective Isaiah seems to be quite righteous, but before the holiness of God all his sin is made known and causes him to tremble and cry out in healthy fear.
This is not just the experience of Isaiah, but the experience throughout Scripture of anyone who encounters up close the holiness of the Lord. We read in our first parasha this week the commandments concerning Yom Kippur. It was one day out of the entire year that the High Priest of Israel could step into the Most Holy Place, the place where the holy presence of the Lord dwelled. Without the proper preparations extensively listed out in this chapter he would immediately be killed for his sins.
Each of us in born in the same condition as Aaron or Isaiah. Alienated from our Holy Creator and unable to live or even stand before His holy presence. We rationalize and justify our lives but even a moment before Adonai is enough to pierce through all our lies and for us to understand whatever “goodness” or “holiness” we think we have is grossly overestimated.
The reality is that to approach God we need His help to do so, we cannot save ourselves. Therefore, we read of the sacrificial system in the Mosaic Covenant. In Leviticus 17:11, we read that the shedding of blood is required for the forgiveness of sins. The Yom Kippur ceremony required several different animal sacrifices, first for the High Priest who presided over the ceremony, as well as for all the people of Israel so that their sins could be forgiven.
Through the animal sacrifices that were required of our people, we could see repeatedly the true consequences of our sins, death. Because sacrifices like the ones for Yom Kippur were done every year, it showed that this system did not perfectly make right our standing before our Creator because we continued to sin and so more sacrifices were required.
Throughout these parashas we have numerous commandments concerning not engaging in sinful sexual activities, most of the Ten Commandments repeated, and the charge to love our neighbors as ourselves. The Lord charges the Jewish people to not imitate the sinful practices of those who surround us or that we were called out of. But our people failed in this charge and so do we today. If we are honest with ourselves, we can admit that we fail to live up to the standard of our Holy God every single day. In fact, many times we do not appear to be separate at all from the sinful culture that surrounds us. As we read the commandments of the Lord in His Torah we quickly see how we fail to measure up to the clear standard we have been given. But the Law is not bad or evil, it is of God, and it reveals to us the reality of our fallen nature and lack of holiness.
So with reality of our sin set before us, the clear command of the Lord that we must be holy as he is holy what are we to do? We need the Lord to enter our lives and save us from our sins.
When Isaiah called out that he was a man of unclean lips, the Lord saw him in his distress and sin and made him clean. The Yom Kippur sacrifice and the entire Mosaic Covenant was a gift given by the Lord, to our people, so that we could begin to approach the standard necessary for dwelling with Adonai. However, the Lord knew that we would break this covenant, and so sent His Son, Messiah Yeshua, to be the final and perfect sacrifice for us. He became the ultimate Yom Kippur sacrifice, not just providing temporary forgiveness to Israel, but permanent and lasting forgiveness to all people throughout all time. A forgiveness that is everlasting and that can never be taken away.
When we accept the atonement, the forgiveness that has been provided for us through Messiah Yeshua, the Spirit of God enters our hearts. We are sanctified, set apart, made holy, not because of who we are or what we have done, but what Adonai has done for us. This process of being made holy starts the moment we welcome Messiah Yeshua into our lives and is a lifelong process in a fallen world.
When I was a kid I understood holiness and the process of becoming holy as rule keeping. If I followed the lists God gave me in His Word for being good then I would be holy. But holiness is more than rule-keeping, it is more than keeping an account of your successes and failures in following His commandments. Holiness is also more than some model of spirituality, of being “Spiritual, but not religious”. It is not just a subjective standard of our own creation.
Holiness is looking at Messiah Yeshua, looking at God, and through His Spirit becoming more and more like Him each day. It is being renewed into the image of God that we first were in the Garden of Eden and striving with His Help to keep His commandments and to live a life that is marked by right behavior and thinking. It is avoiding the sins mentioned in these parashas, sins of improper sexual contact, sins of idolatry and the sin of not loving our neighbor as ourselves. Holiness is having a genuine desire, deep within, to keep God’s commands. It is not compromising or rationalizing in the face of hard choices when the world expects us to act one way and we know we must act differently. If we are to be holy, to be set apart, then we should look in some way different then the world around us, and desiring to live forever with our holy Creator.
This is the essential message of all of God’s Word. As Kevin DeYoung put it in The Hole in Our Holiness (which inspired this commentary), “You can’t make sense of the Bible without understanding that God is holy and that this holy God is intent on making a holy people to live with him forever in a holy heaven.” The reality is that we will never be perfect in this life, but we have the promise that if we confess our sins the Lord will forgive us through Messiah Yeshua. So when we consider the holiness of our God let it encourage us to break with the sins and shame of our past. If you have not yet experienced the transformation that comes from knowing God through His Son, then I encourage you today to ask Him to reveal Himself to you.
May these parashas help us to understand the standard we are to strive to reach. May each of us look forward to our eternal home with Adonai where we can look upon the Lord with joy washed clean of our sins. May the Lord through His Spirit transform us daily to be less like ourselves and more like Him.