Dear Veritas,

Holiness is a crucial component to the Christian life. But why? Why is holiness such a big deal? There’s a wide variety of answers to this question, but I want to explore one reason that I’ve been considering a lot recently. I’ve been doing a Bible-in-a-Year plan with my wife since January and just got through Leviticus. If you haven’t read through Leviticus in awhile, I’d encourage you to take some time to revisit it. Leviticus is full of laws, offerings, sacrifices, feasts, and rituals. And it’s easy, as you read through it, to start to get overwhelmed and start thinking, Why do I need to know or care about all of these things? What’s so important about clean animals and unclean animals? Why are there so many specific commands concerning the blood of sacrifices? What’s so important about all of these purification rituals? And then we get to chapter 20 and see a verse that helps put all of this into context:

Leviticus 20:26
²⁶You shall be holy to me, for I the LORD am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.

There are a couple of things I want us to see from this verse that help us understand why all of these statutes—this call to be holy, or set apart—were so important for the people of God.

First, notice that God gives a reason for them to be holy; it’s because he is holy and he had separated the Israelites from the rest of the world to be his people. The holiness of God’s people—the way they conducted themselves differently from the other peoples of the world—was to show the set-apartness of their God. Their holiness was to represent God’s holiness to the nations around them. By being different from the world around them, people would see the God they serve as different.

And, while Christ has fulfilled the Old Testament law and we are now under the New Covenant, the same is still true: God is holy, and as people redeemed to God by Jesus, we are called to be set apart from the world. Our holiness—being set apart or different from the rest of the world—is to show the world the holiness of our God.

However, the problem is that so many within the church look so much like those in the world. Too many people who claim the name of Jesus with their mouth don’t honor the name of Jesus with their lives. We choose to look like the world instead of being set apart from the world. We fear being different more than we fear dishonoring and misrepresenting the God who has set us apart. And when we choose to simply blend in with the rest of the world while slapping the label of “Christian” on ourselves, we are obscuring the holiness of God instead of revealing it. Here are a couple of questions I have been wrestling with that I’d encourage you to wrestle with:

What in your life is different because you follow Jesus?
How is your life representing God to the world?

We see another great motivator for our holiness at the beginning of that verse in Leviticus: “You shall be holy to me”. Other translations say, “You shall be holy unto me”. Our holiness isn’t just meant to represent our holy God to the world around us, but our holiness is also an act of worship to our holy God. It reminds me of Romans 12:1, which says, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

Church, God has set us apart. He has made us a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession. So, may we live that way. May we live differently than the world because we are different from the world. May we live holy lives, representing the holiness of our God to the world as an act of worship to our holy God.

- Ian Crosby