Holiness | VibbleSpace

27Jul/100

Week 30 Day 5 – The Way of Holiness

Isaiah 35

In this message Isaiah proclaims a vision of hope for the future. He describes what the Kingdom will be like when the Messiah comes and God vindicates Israel. It is a beautiful picture that will, hopefully, spark hope in your heart.

It is interesting to note that one of the themes throughout the Bible has to do with the treatment of the lame, sick, orphans, and poor. The value of a leader is measured, not on his ability to erect grand structures or conquer other nations. Rather, in God’s eyes, a leader is measured by his attitude toward and ability to aid the poor and underprivileged. Reading through Isaiah it is easy to observe that the elite of Judah had become calloused to the poor and sick and had horded the wealth for themselves. In Isaiah’s vision of God’s Kingdom those members of society become exalted and their pain is vindicated.

We can walk on that street today. God’s Kingdom is open to us through the King of all Kings, Jesus. He has made the Way of Holiness accessable to us through the Holy Spirit. Let’s open our hearts to God’s holiness so that it will overflow with grace and mercy to those in our society who are hurting and in need.

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9Feb/100

Week 6 Day 2 – Be Holy

Leviticus 19:1-37

In Leviticus 19 we come to the heart of the matter. What does God really want from His people? Does He want them to become enslaved to the tedium of ritual law, frozen in petrified ineptness? No. What God wants is holiness.

This statement begs the question, "What is holiness?" When we think of holiness we tend to think of it as synonymous with perfection. The Hebrew word translated "holy" is the word Kadosh. In the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) and in the New Testament the word translated "holy" is hagios. In both languages the word means "to be set apart for a specific purpose."

That is what God wants from His people. He doesn’t want them to be perfect by following external rituals. Everyone knows that you can go through the motions on the outside and not be authentically present on the inside. God is not after the externals, He is after the heart. A holy heart is a heart that has been called out from the kingdom and the ways of the world and has committed itself to focus on the Kingdom of God. A heart that is holy will automatically modify the external behaviors. The term "sanctification" is hagiazo, which is the verbal form of hagia. In other words, to be sanctified is the process of being set apart and transformed into the image of God.

When Jesus came He said in Matthew 5 that He did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. He did abolish the tedious external laws, because those had become the idol of the Pharisees. They thought they would be made holy by observing a list of "do’s" and "don’ts". Jesus did not abolish the Law, He intensified it.

He said in Matthew 22:37-40, "‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Do you see how the entire book of Leviticus is summarized in these three verses? Leviticus 1-10 is all about loving God through sacrifices. Leviticus 11-27 is all about loving your neighbor.

How can we be holy? We can understand that God has called us out of the world for the purpose of knowing Him, being filled by Him, and overflowing with His presence in love for the world around us.

With that understanding of holiness in mind, read the following New Testament verses and see if they have new meaning for you.

1 Corinthians 1:2

To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified

[being made holy] in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours:

Ephesians 1:4

For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.

Hebrews 12:14

Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.

1 Peter 1:15

But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy."

1 Peter 2:5

you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

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4Feb/100

Week 5 Day 4 – Bad Boys!

Leviticus 10:1-3

There are three thoughts for today.

1. God takes disobedience seriously. In our age of cheap-grace we often forget that the God who incinerated Aaron’s boys is the same God that we worship today. He has not become less holy or more tolerant of sin and disobedience. Fortunately, as Paul says in Romans 5:9, "God has poured out this all-consuming wrath onto His son Jesus in our place." Never lose sight of the enormity of God’s Grace and the severity of God’s holiness.

2. It’s God’s way or the Highway. What did the boys do wrong anyway? So they used the wrong fire, what’s the big deal? The New Bible Commentary has a good slant on this issue.

Unauthorised fire (1) is unexplained. The Hebrew (zara) means ‘strange’, ‘from outside’. Perhaps they took fire from outside the sanctuary instead of from the altar (cf. 16:12), as if to say, ‘Any fire will do’. Such fire would be unholy, unclean, ‘illicit’ (neb), and therefore, in the context of all that had gone on so meticulously up to this point, wantonly offensive. Their action with it was also usurping the role of the high priest, and therefore included presumption, or perhaps jealous impatience. Their behaviour was not just an accidental slip in a minor detail of ritual, but a cavalier disregard for the most serious meaning of the events they were part of. It is as if a Christian minister in the middle of celebrating the Holy Communion were to inject rites or objects associated with the occult.¹

We must remember that we don’t get to make up the rules. In our culture we have a sort of "Spirituality Smorgasbord" idea about approaching God. We walk up to the kaleidoscope of religions that sprinkle our cultural scene and choose a little of this and a little of that. "Oh, I really like the loving and kind God, I’ll take two of those. Ooh, I need to stay away from the wrath bar, I’m allergic. Ah, over here is tolerance, I’ll take three, please." Zap! Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. We don’t get to make God up, rather, our job is to figure out what God has revealed to us through scripture, what He expects from us, and then line up our lives with that. It’s HIS highway, not ours.

3. The leader’s job is to honor God. There is a profound and startling leadership lesson in this story. The priest’s job was to represent God to the people. He was the go-between. Notice what God’s indictment against the boys was all about. They did not honor God. The word translated "honor" is a rich Hebrew word, kabod, which means "to be heavy, be weighty, be grievous, be hard, be rich, be honourable, be glorious, be burdensome, be honoured."² When you are the representative of someone you carry an important responsibility to present an accurate picture of that person to others. When you represent the heavy weight of the glory of the Almighty God, you had better have your ducks in a row. God will not be mocked by flippancy or sloppy work on the part of the leaders of His church who feel that it is "no big deal" and want to just "let it slide". Being a minister of the gospel is a job that requires a sober mind. This doesn’t mean it has to be boring and like a funeral dirge. It does mean that the minister should think seriously before teaching people about God before he has done his homework. The minister needs to be sure that his cup is being filled with the authentic flame of God’s Spirit before he tries to light fires in other’s hearts.

Therein lays the real sin. The boys brought another fire. The original fire on the altar was started by God Himself, not by some guy in the back of the tabernacle with a bic lighter. Aaron’s boys thought they could fake it, and it would be OK. Not so. We, as ministers of the good news (all of us are ministers at some level, so you’re not off the hook) need to make sure that we are lighting our fires from the true flame of God’s Spirit, not from some humanly constructed spirituality that looks good, but has a faulty foundation.

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28Jan/102

Week 4 Day 4 – Broad Shoulders Required

Exodus 28: 36-43

The role of the priest was intense. These men were chosen by God to represent the people of Israel. They were God’s go-betweens to the people because the people were not holy enough to approach the holiness of God. The priests spent their entire life making sure that they were clean enough to go into the Holy Place. If they were not clean, they would taint the whole place, disrupting the worship of God, and possibly even getting themselves struck dead by God’s wrath. The run-of -the-mill priest had to stay squeaky clean just so he could keep the lamp burning and refresh the show bread. Even with that level of holiness, they were still not clean enough to enter the Most Holy Place. As we learned yesterday, only the High Priest could go into that awesome chamber, and then only once a year.

Why did God make it so difficult to enter His presence? Why did He demand so much from His people? For crying out loud, the people weren’t even allowed to come to God; they had to go through a priest. Why is that? There are a couple of reasons: 1) the people had rejected God’s presence on the mountain and were so spiritually immature that they needed this physical system to be able to conceive of God, 2) God was demonstrating to the people (and to us) how seriously He takes holiness.

God is a holy God. He is absolute perfection and cannot tolerate anything less than perfection. It’s not that He doesn’t want it around, its that imperfection can’t withstand the presence of the absolute; it gets blown away! In a sense, God was, out of compassion, protecting His people because He knew they weren’t ready to handle absolute truth.

So what does this have to do with us? There are two important points for Christians to understand when it comes to the role of the priest.

We have a perfect High Priest. Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the perfect High Priest who entered into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled His own blood in that awesome chamber. Since he is the Son of God, the perfect Lamb, and the perfect priest, His sacrifice was a once for all sacrifice that atoned for the sins of the world, once and for all. He tore down the curtain of separation between God and man, and being the bread of Presence and the giver of the Spirit, He is our mediator between man and God.
We are all priests. 1 Peter 2:9 says, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” No longer are we the common man standing outside in the courtyard, hoping that the priest is clean enough to get our sins forgiven. We are the priests. We can enter into the Holy Place and interact with the Spirit and the Word, and, in the ultimate act of grace, the High Priest throws back the curtain for us, revealing the Presence of the Almighty.

Now that you know that you are a priest, what does that mean? Does that mean that God no longer cares about holiness, or has somehow become sin-tolerant? Not at all. God still expects absolute holiness from His priests (from you).

There are two kinds of holiness at work here:

Positional Holiness: Because of the blood of Jesus, your sins are paid for and you are considered clean and worthy to stand in the presence of God. That is grace, it was a gift, you didn’t do anything to get to that place, nor could you have had you tried.

Relational Holiness: For you to be able to stand in the presence of God and look Him in the face and receive His full glory, you need to be clean on the inside. Imperfection still cannot withstand absolute perfection. It is like a small child who has just lied to his parents or secretly disobeyed. That child cannot look her parent in the eye. Why? Because she knows she has violated the relationship. Not until the sin is confessed and the relationship restored can there be real communication between parent and child. The same is true with our relationship with God. If we are cherishing sin in our heart, we will not be able to stand before our Holy God. Not because He is pointing the finger and condemning, but because we want to hide our sin from His holiness.

What is keeping you from standing fully in the presence of God, naked and unashamed? Remember that God invites you to come to Him. The blood of Jesus is eternally sprinkled all over the Most Holy Place while the Spirit and the Son stand, holding open the curtain inviting you to come. Dump the sin and the shame that is holding you back and come bask in the presence of holiness.

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