Doing God a Favor
Thus you are to be holy to Me, for I the Lord am holy; and I have set you apart from the peoples to be Mine. Leviticus 20:26 NASB
Holy to Me – We’re familiar with the citation of this Levitical command in the gospel of Matthew (5:48) where the Greek text translation changes the meaning from “holy” to “perfect.” That, of course, is a mistake; a tragic mistake that has caused considerable psychic trauma for generations. God does not expect perfection. He doesn’t command it either. What He expects is holiness. Ah, and there’s the rub because we have been taught to think of holiness as perfection. So even when we know this commandment isn’t about perfection, we still feel it that way. We believe that holiness equals perfection. Maybe that confusion has been ingrained in theology since Aquinas who listed holiness and perfection as attributes of God. Fortunately, Matthew Wilson’s book, The Simplicity of Holiness, has forever dispelled that nonsense. At least cognitively. But if you’re like me, there’s still that connection floating in the back of your cultural mind and it still condemns you.
It’s time to take another poke at the problem. First, let’s make sure we pay attention to the prepositional phrase here. God commands His people to be holy to Him. Now, if holiness is a state of spiritual being, then it isn’t exclusively to God, is it? It’s an ontological category. If, for example, God said, “I want you to be kind,” we wouldn’t expect Him to say, “I want you to be kind to Me.” If we are to be kind, then we are kind to everyone, not just to God. But in this verse, God says He wants His people to be holy to Him. Does that mean we can be unholy to everyone else? If we read this as a state of being, it wouldn’t make sense. But if we read it as Wilson suggests, reading qedôšim as “devoted” rather than “holy,” then the exclusivity (“to Me”) makes perfect sense. God wants His people to be exclusively devoted to Him, and not to anyone else. Perfection has nothing to do with it. God is not interested in making sure you never make a mistake. Holiness has little to do with it. God doesn’t need you to remove yourself from life. What He wants is total commitment—devotion, and as Wilson points out, He has made the same total commitment to us. God is fully devoted to His creation, especially to His people.
Heschel also addresses this issue. “Prophecy . . . consists in the proclamation of the divine pathos, expressed in the language of the prophets as love, mercy or anger. Behind the various manifestations of His pathos is one motive, one need: The divine need for human righteousness.”[1] This is the critical addition to understanding qādaš (“to be holy, hallowed, sanctified”). God can’t do it on His own. He needs you! Heschel’s insight is that God’s pathos is directed toward Man’s responsibility to be devoted. When men are devoted to God, righteousness prevails. In fact, devotion to God is faith because faith is really faithfulness. It is not what you believe that matters. It’s where you heart is. “Faith is a relation to God, belief a relation to an idea or a dogma.”[2] Go ahead, believe in holiness if you wish. Who cares? But that the end of the day, God will ask, “Were you devoted to Me?”
Topical Index: holy, devotion, Matthew Wilson, qādaš, Leviticus 20:26
[1] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, pp. 244-245.
[2] Ibid., p. 166.
