Leviticus 20:26

this is the message that we have heard from him and proclaimed to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.

As you can see, he is absolutely perfect. Point number one, the holiness of God demands separation. The holiness of God demands separation. So holiness was demanded to the Israelite separation from among the nations. We can see that if we go back to verse 23.

And you shall not walk in the customs of the nations that I'm driving out before you, for they did all these things, and therefore I detested them.

So, there were two systems of living, two ways to live, that were before Israel. Walking the ways of God, or walking the ways of the people, who are around them. And the truth is, and the truth is the same today for all of us in our lives. There are two ways basically, two different ways to walk. The ways of the Lord and the ways of everybody else. The Israelites were prohibited from doing some pretty nasty stuff, things that the nations around them were actively practicing. Now, don't use your imagination too much to visualize this stuff, but child sacrifice? It was happening within the nation around Israel. And not only child sacrifice, witchcraft, all sorts of strange sexual perversion, which we're not even going to talk about it, but there is all sorts of things that are happening within the culture and the context. within which the people of Israel will find themselves living. And the Lord says, you shall not act on those ways. Now, here we shall get a little bit uncomfortable. God perfection is not just a dead quality or passive quality. It's not something to just put aside like, yeah, he's a really great person or a really great God. His will and perfection of being is holiness, and his holiness is purveyed by his will, and he expressed that holiness is a relational God in every sense. He wants holiness in his desire for them to be holy. That's why he says to the people of Israel in our verse tonight,

for I, the Lord, I am holy.

God cannot demand nothing less than holiness because holiness permits his will, his will and perfection of being. His own perfection is maintained and upheld by his own perfection, and he will never cease to be holy, and he will never cease to want holiness in all that he has created. That's why I like Ezekiel chapter 36, 23,

and I will vindicate the holiness of my great name,

He acts on his holiness. Amos chapter four verse two says,

the Lord has sown by his holiness.

Holiness is the root cause of God's activity within our lives. It is the root cause of what God does with the world. Absolute perfection defines God being. He pervades God's will and he contains all that God does. Point number two, God is the one who chooses. It was a calling to God. God's half separated them, not because they had something to cut God's eye. The Bible is very clear. In Exodus 33, 19, he say, And he said, this is God talking to Moses,

I will make all my goodness pass before you and I will proclaim before you my name, the Lord, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.

Clearly, Israel didn't choose to follow God. In fact, they murmured, and they complained against God so many times, but God has separated them to be holy to God. Israel was called not merely to be separated from the peoples and from the nation, but they were to be separated to God. It wasn't just to hide in a bush somewhere. No, Israel was calling to proclaim the name of the Lord among the nation, to worship God, to be different than the rest of the nations, but they misunderstand the message. This is who God is. Your God, my God, our God is holy, morally perfect. That's who he is, absolutely perfect in every way. Not only is he perfect, but his perfections define the world. If you want to know what love is, you look the love of God. If you want to know what love, sorry, if you look, because his love and his, only his love is perfect. If you want to know what justice is, you look no farther than God alone, because he is the one who is perfect in justice. And so we do ourselves a great disservice by attempting to understand morality and ethics apart from our own understanding of God. We need to look to his word, we need to look to the 66 books of the scripture to understand what it means when God says that this thing is right and this thing is wrong. So I will encourage you to take the time to contemplate God's perfection, contemplate his holiness. And as you contemplate his perfection, in every one of those moral issues, whether it's love or justice or whatever it might be in your life, as you contemplate it, I guarantee that you will walk away from that experience with the same kind of overwhelm as the angels have in Isaiah's vision in chapter 6, verse 3.

Holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

So what difference does this make? Well, this is who God is. And secondly, this is what God wants. It's been a long time since the book of Leviticus has been written. And in that time, a lot has changed. but one thing has not, God. He's still holy and God wants us to be holy. He still wants his people to be holy until this day. Let me tell you something, that separation will not be easy. In fact, will be difficult because we will find that we are obeying and expressing allegiance to a power that we cannot even see. Rather than to the pressures that are visible all around us. Peter picks up the same language in the first century. He uses the same language from Leviticus when he writes to the early Christians in Asia. In 1 Peter chapter one, he says to the Christians, repeating Leviticus chapter 20, verse 14, in Peter,

obedient children, Do not be conformed to the passion of your former ignorance. But as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all of your conduct. Since it's written, you shall be holy because I am holy.

This is still what God wants. God still wants holiness. He's not a tolerant God. He doesn't sit down with you and say, look, come on, let's make a compromise here. You know you are like that, and I am like this, and let's kind of meet on the middle. He's not a tolerant guy. He doesn't hold, extend conversations about us, about what's right and wrong. He say it, and that's it. So, let that sink for a minute, because that should frighten us. And my friend, if you're here tonight and you're not a Christian, let me ask you this question. How are you gonna stand before a God that is so perfect? You can work really hard to clean up your actions, but the truth is that there is something deeper on the side that it needs to change. If we're truly going to measure ourselves against the standard of God, Holiness is perfection of being. Believe me, we are going to find that that measurement, we are going to fall short. We can see that in Romans chapter three, verse 23.

For all have seen and fall short to the glory of God.

And as we can see in Leviticus, failure to conform the holiness of God result in consequences, result in punishment. As we read in verse 27,

a man or a woman who is a medium or necromancer shall surely be put to death. They shall be stoned with stone, their blood be upon them.

We are unholy. We are imperfect. He's holy and he's perfect. So at this point, we are kind of left on a quandary. This is who God is, this is what God wants. Yet, how do I find that perfection? And you may be saying to yourself, I try so hard and I always fail. And this is great. And you can say, how this can be great? This is great because God is allowing you to see your spiritual misery. and praise the Lord for that because this is what he offers in Jesus. As we can see in the Old Testament story, bear witness to the fact that that human heart is desperately sick and holiness is impossible in our own. We cannot do it. We need grace. We need God's intervention. We need his power to invade our lives. We can see that in Colossians 1 verse 21.

And you who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh, but he's dead in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. If you indeed, you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven.

So Jesus died to make you holy. He died to make this possible for us to become the kind of people that God wants us to be. In Christ, We have been separated to him. We have been called holy. But in Christ, it's not just about being called holy. It's about becoming holy. And that's the process of the growth with the Christian life. This is the goal of the gospel. The goal of the gospel is conformity to the image of Christ in maturity and transformation. Holiness is that what the gospel accomplishes within our lives. Holiness is our calling because holiness is God's character. And holiness is our calling because holiness is God's character. The gospel of Jesus Christ, the death of Jesus upon the cross, that makes it possible. Because in the gospel, the spirit of God invades your life and is the process of making you new. but you have to let him intervene in your life, surrender to him, and be obedient. In our day, it's far more socially acceptable to declare that your life is messed up than to say you are striving to be holy. In our world, our culture, our society, our families, our church, desperately need more men and women, boys and girls, people of all ages who will give up being socially accepted, give it up, and give it in to the hard work of obedience, because holiness is our calling, because holiness is Christ's character. Will you pray with me? Heavenly Father, we give you thanks in this time because you are so gracious, and even that sometimes we cannot understand your holiness, you show up mercy on us. Thank you for the gift of Jesus Christ, and thank you for allowing us to see our spiritual misery. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.