Leviticus: The Holiness Of God

This is really one of the most difficult books to study and to get something from for the heart. But it is the inspired Word of God, and God has something for us in it. Leviticus is a book that speaks of the holiness of God. It's a book that has holiness as its main theme throughout.

Holiness is a word a lot of Christians are afraid of. But we must boldly proclaim Holiness as the standards of God's Word-for they are all realistic and attainable.

Holiness is the very nature of God. The Spirit God gave us is a Holy Spirit. When Isaiah got a vision of God, he saw Him in His holiness and saw himself as an unclean man,

Holiness is like health. How many of you are afraid to hear messages on being perfectly healthy? Are we afraid of good health? No. Then why should we be afraid of perfect health in our spirit-which is more important than health for our body? Sin is like sickness. We see that in Leviticus. The Lord gives rules concerning holiness and concerning health. The two are similar-one is for the spirit and one is for the body. Holiness for the body is what we call health. Health for the spirit and soul is what we call holiness. So we need to get rid of this fear of holiness. And we must come to the place where we desire total holiness more than we desire total health. Just like we want to be totally free of all sickness in our bodies, we must want to be totally free of all sin that defiles us.

We must not tolerate sin any more than we tolerate sickness. To tolerate dirty thoughts is like tolerating tuberculosis or leprosy. To tolerate anger by justifying ourselves saying, "That's my weakness or that's my temperament" and thus to permit it in our lives, is like making allowance for AIDS or syphilis in our body. Sin and sickness are very similar.

For example, in Leviticus, God tells the Israelites how to deal with a person having leprosy and similar skin diseases. That is a type of sin in this book and the laws given here relate to how to deal with sin.

The words 'holiness' and 'holy' appear in this book nearly 100 times, emphasizing that that is the main theme of this book. A book of 27 chapters where holiness is mentioned 100 times must certainly be an important book. But this book has no stories like many of the other books of Bible. There are not many interesting verses or promises either. But there is a lot of description of offerings, feast and things like that. I want to bring out some of the important parts of this book and explain them to you. I also want to explain some of the offerings and feasts described in this book and see how they apply to us in this new covenant age. We know from Hebrews that God has finished with all offerings and sacrifices. But those sacrifices pointed to Christ and to us, and therefore, it is good for us to see how they apply to us and what they symbolize- just as we saw with the tabernacle in the book of Exodus.