07/22/2008
Leviticus 11:44 - 45 (HCSB) 44For I am the LORD your God, so you must consecrate yourselves and be holy because I am holy. You must not defile yourselves by any swarming creature that crawls on the ground. 45For I am the LORD who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God, so you must be holy because I am holy.
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Leviticus chapter 11 talks about the clean and unclean animals, that is, what the Jews may and may not eat. Some of these laws seem logical (for instance, all rodents are unclean), while others seem arbitrary (pigs and camels for instance). Yet the greater issue here is found in the closing verses of chapter 11.
In verses 44 and 45, God makes the statement that He is holy and therefore, His chosen people must be holy.
Israel was chosen by God to be the guardians of the temple, and to be a nation of priests to the rest of the world. Since they occupied the inner circle of God’s chosen, then they were subject to stricter laws. But this begs the question: “Does eating certain things or abstaining from certain things really make one holy?”
The answer is no. What makes us holy is obedience. This is not to say that the laws were completely arbitrary – only a test to make sure the Israelites stayed in line. No, there is good sense in abstaining from eating certain predatory, scavenger, and animals prone to carry disease. Yet just like the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, they also gave the Israelites boundaries. These boundaries not only set the Israelites apart in the eyes of God, but in the eyes of the world. Other people groups could easily see that the Israelites practiced a serious set of religious laws. It was a public demonstration of who they were. If they took the laws lightly, then that reflected poorly on the grandeur of their God.
Like Israel, we are called to be set apart from the world. We are not held to the same laws of what to eat or not to eat, but we are expected to be holy.
God declares that He is holy and therefore, those who wish to be identified with Him must be holy. This means that we must take seriously our obedience to His commands so that when the world looks at us, they will know that our God is a great God not to be taken casually.
Jeff Justus
Cleff Publishing
www.cleffpublishing.com
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