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Wisdom-Trek / Creating a LegacyWelcome to Day 1296 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomMastering the Bible – Holiness and Theology– Worldview Wednesday

Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1296 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is required that you also have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.

Mastering The Bible – Holiness And Theology Insight Twenty-Seven: The Biblical Concept of Holiness Includes, but Is Not Limited To, Moral BehaviorHoliness is one of the more frequent characterizations of God in the Bible.

Unfortunately, what the concept actually means is frequently misunderstood. In our modern context, holiness is typically associated with moral behavior, particularly in a negative sense—avoiding certain behaviors produces or demonstrates holiness. The behaviors to be avoided are either the moral prohibitions in the Bible or the activities a Christian subculture does not associate with God’s own character.

 

Holiness in the Bible relates to personal conduct, but the concept is much broader. The description "holy” is applied to an amazingly diverse list of things, including: God (Leviticus 11:44—45); people (Leviticus 21:7), days (Genesis 2:3), ground (Exodus 3:5), offerings (Leviticus 2:3); garments (Exodus 28:2), oil (Exodus 30:25), events (Exodus 12:16; Leviticus 23:27), structures (Exodus 26:33; Psalm 5:7) water (Numbers 5:17), divine beings (Deuteronomy 33:2), utensils (1 Kings 8:4), and bread (Exodus 29:34). Since many of these items are inanimate objects, moral purity is not in the picture.

In simplest terms, one thing unites the items on this list: they are all associated with God. Holiness is therefore linked to the person and presence of God. For that reason, scholars have concluded that the best way to understand holiness is God’s utter uniqueness—his “otherness” in relation to all things. When a person, place, or thing is called holy, the point is that the person, place, or thing is set aside exclusively for God’s use, service, or remembrance. Whatever is holy is by definition not to be used by, attributed to, or associated with any other person, place, or thing. Holiness speaks of uniqueness because God is unique.

For this reason, the antonym of holiness is not a word like “evil” or “wickedness.” Rather, terms like “common” or “ordinary” better describe the polar opposite of holiness. If something was for everyday use in Israel, it was not holy. That which was holy was exclusively devoted to God and his service and worship. There was no middle ground.

Behavior becomes part of a discussion of holiness in its relationship to other concepts, such as clean and unclean or purity and impurity, terms that spoke of one’s ritual fitness for being in God’s presence (which was considered “sacred space”) or participating in religious rituals and practices.

The list above demonstrates...