In middle school, I had an endearing, but somewhat-strange Social Studies teacher who liked to shout, “No kadosh!” while rapping our desks with a wooden ruler, whenever he sensed sub-par studenthood. We seemed to hear “No kadosh!” a lot, but in our defense, his was the ninth and last class of a very long school day. (Edit: On second thought, this quirky saying may have belonged to one of my high school math teachers instead…)
I had no idea what “no kadosh” meant until recently, when I discovered (while preparing a Sunday School series on the Book of Numbers) that “kadosh” (qadosh) is the Hebrew word for “holiness.”
“Kadosh” literally means “to be separate” or “to be set apart.”
This certainly jives with Old Testament notions of holiness. If there is one thing I learned from the last three books of the Torah, it would be that God is holy, holy, holy–and quite distinct from His often unholy people.
Many Christians find these “Books of Law” bewildering and frankly, boring. They seem to go on and on about rituals and sacrifices, rules and regulations–many of which sound outdated and outlandish.
But even in my layman’s study of Numbers, I realized that these ethical restrictions and priestly rituals served an important function: they kept Israel “holy” or “set apart” from the other idolatrous nations, and they constantly reminded the Israelites of God’s holiness and of sin’s contagious and deadly power.
Everything about priestly Jewish religion revolved around this holiness of YHWH. The Tent of Meeting (where God dwelled among the Israelites) was the restricted domain of specially dedicated priests. There was an entire tribe–the Levites–set apart to manage the affairs of the wilderness temple and to perform the myriad sacrifices. Not even the Kohathites, a branch of Levites responsible for handling the holiest things of God, could look upon or touch the holiest items without getting struck dead.
The laws applied to every single member of the community, male and female, young and old, Israelite and alien. Many of them had to do with drawing distinctions between life and death, cleanliness and uncleanliness, purity and impurity. For instance, corpses were considered “unclean,” as were menstruating women (since a potential life was lost), because Israel was to stand for life. God had delivered them out of slavery from Egypt, a death-obsessed civilization (Dennis Prager points out that Egypt’s greatest monuments were its tombs, and that its “bible” was the Book of the Dead), and now Israel was to be set apart for life.
“I am the LORD your God; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy. Do not make yourselves unclean by any creature that moves about on the ground. I am the LORD who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44-45).
Of course, these rules were instated not only to preserve the holiness of God, but also to preserve the lives of the people. God had made a covenant with Israel to be their God and to dwell among them. However, an unholy people in the presence of a Holy God is like the meeting of paper and a Consuming Fire. Clearly, this would be very dangerous and perhaps fatal for the flimsy paper. Though God is the deliverer, preserver, provider, and leader of Israel–indeed, Israel’s very Life–God is still to them a Consuming Fire because of His awesome holiness.
“The sinners in Zion are terrified; trembling grips the godless: ‘Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire? Who of us can dwell with everlasting burning?’” (Isaiah 33:14).
Now, I confess that I often don’t appreciate or honor God’s holiness nearly enough. What also troubles me is that sometimes, I’ll meet Christians who tell me that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the Jews, and not the God of Jesus Christ. Sometimes, I’ll meet Christians who don’t see what’s so important about holy living: from drunkenness to sexual impurity, these things might not be good, but they’re not anything dire. God is a loving, merciful, forgiving Deity, and He is not going to smite anyone for downloading blue video clips while downing Bud Lights, right?
Well, perhaps we don’t see very many thunderbolts here these days, but as the Apostle Paul warns, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life” (Galatians 6:7-8).
Like the Old Testament, New Testament is clear in saying that God created Man to be holy as He is holy, and that God intends for His beloved children to grow into holiness after the image of His Son, Jesus Christ.
“For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will–to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves” (Ephesians 1:4-6).
What then? Shall we keep on sinning? By no means!
“Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many” (Hebrews 12:14-15).
Now here’s the thing that I realized. A lot of the Old Testament points to God’s uncompromisable holiness. A lot of the New Testament points to God’s loving grace. But the entire Bible points to Jesus Christ (John 1:45; Luke 24:44; Romans 3:21-26).
If we do not understand God’s holiness, then we cannot fully understood and appreciate the Gospel of grace.
To use a mundane example, think of TV commercials for cleaning fluids. They never show a mom wiping away a little bit of spilled water. No. They show moms trying to scrub away tubs’ worth of congealed spaghetti sauce, gallons of blood-red cranberry juice, mud-tracks that have long fused to the white carpet fibers…basically, the worst of your hygiene nightmares. The purpose, of course, is to prove the cleanser’s power. The more disgusting and stubborn the stain, the more miraculous the cleanser proves when the towel is lifted to reveal nothing but victorious shining purity where there had once been unspeakable grossness.
If we do not see the purity, light, and life of God’s holiness, then how can we see, by contrast, the filth, darkness, and deadliness of our sins? If we do not see the hopeless estate of our sinfulness, then how can we see the full glory of God’s grace in Jesus Christ?
God’s holiness and graciousness are not just two coincidental character traits that complement each other. God’s holiness and God’s grace augment each other–they magnify His glory!
If God were not holy and just, then sin would be no problem. Forget the temple and its layers of mediating priests and purifying rituals and atoning sacrifices. Let the people meet God whenever and wherever and however they want. God could easily dwell among sinful man without sinful man fearing for a second that they would be consumed by divine holiness.
If holiness were not important and if sin were not such a desperate and insurmountable problem–if there were some other way to resolve the irreconcilable difference between God’s holiness and man’s sinfulness–then why would God have sent His only Son to die on the Cross? Why would we need Jesus? If we do not need saving, then we would not need a Savior.
Our Christ would not be our Messiah, he would just be a spiritual teacher (like Buddha), whom we should all just admire and strive to be like. We would not have to fall down on our knees and worship Him–we would not have to believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that He is Lord.
What of all the Old Testament laws and rituals? Paul says, “These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ” (Colossians 2:17).
Jesus came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17-18). He fulfilled the Law that we could not satisfy and took on its penalty, nailing it to the cross in His own flesh (Colossians 2:13-17).
We no longer need to go through priests to come before God because Jesus is our perfect kingly High Priest and our perfect intercessor.
“Such a high priest meets our need—one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself” (Hebrews 7:26-27).
Likewise, we do not need to make sacrifices for our sins, because Christ has made the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf–He has given Himself up to death on a cross in order to give us eternal life with the Holy God.
In Old Testament times, God dwelled among men in the Holy Temple. Even then, a curtain separated the most sacred sanctuary (the Holy of Holies, which housed the Ark of the Covenant, where God rested His presence). Before the High Priest went into the Holy of Holies, he would have to go through elaborate purifying ceremonies to cleanse himself. Even then, he would wear a robe with bells and tie a rope to his foot; for even then, if he were to profane God’s holiness, he would die. If the other priests heard that the bells on the High Priest’s robe had stopped ringing, they would know that he had been struck dead, and they would then drag out his body with the rope (for they could not go into the Holy of Holies themselves to retrieve him).
When Jesus, the Son of God, came to earth to dwell among men, he was said by John to have become flesh and to have “tented” among us. In Him was the ultimate Tent of Meeting. Certainly, in Jesus was the full presence of God come to dwell among His sinful people, and not only that, but to redeem them from their sins!
Jesus was the Temple of God that the Old Testament Temple prefigured. He spoke of His own body as the Temple (John 2:19-22) and when He died on the Cross, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies was torn from top to bottom (Matthew 27:50-51; Mark 15:37-38; Luke 23:44-47)–we are no longer cut off from God!
Jesus lived the perfect, pure, and holy life that we ought to but fail to live. He deserved eternal life and communion with God. And yet, He made an unthinkable exchange. Jesus traded His own desserts for the death and separation that we deserve. He took on our sins, and gave us His righteousness. He took the death that we deserve to give us the Life that He deserved.
On the Cross, He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). As Tim Keller noted in his sermon on The Prodigal Son(s), this was the only instance in the Bible when Jesus referred to God as such, instead of as His Father, because at that moment, Jesus was not being treated as God’s Son, but as God’s enemy; and He died, forsaken by God, in order that we may be treated as God’s children, and live forever in the embrace of our Heavenly Father.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
When we receive Christ’s gift of grace (which is free to us only at the tremendous cost to Him), Jesus also gives to us His Holy Spirit, who then dwells within us so that our bodies are as temples of God.
As Paul writes, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20; Ephesians 2:19-22; 1 Peter 2:4-10). How can we continue to live unholy lives then?
This has been a long entry, and perhaps you are feeling as tired as I did, several years ago in that ninth period Social Studies class. Instead of rapping your desk with a ruler, I’ll just wrap things up with a review:
The Holy God of the Old Testament is the same Gracious God of the New Testament. If God were not holy, then Christ would not be necessary. God’s holiness and God’s graciousness together magnify His glory. We cannot understand and fully accept God’s grace unless we understand and fully acknowledge His holiness. We are called to be holy because our Father in Heaven is holy.
Therefore, my dear Brothers and Sisters, let us give up our vain “no kadosh” ways and live as new creations, made holy and righteous after Christ (Ephesians 4:17-5:21) who saved us, who were like burning sticks snatched from a Consuming Fire!
Tags: consuming fire, Gospel, grace, holiness, no kadosh, qadosh
