Holiness Blog: Holiness\nas Necessarily Non-Compartmentalized <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was a part of a Sunday\nSchool class once where the teacher insisted that we all go off with our\nspouses and then come back and say what we liked about our spouse and what we\nloved about our spouse. The exercise was going as the teacher planned until one\nyoung, new(ish) married woman abruptly responded, “PASS!” This blunt\ninconsistency in the class created a serious awkwardness, but her husband\nseemed unphased. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the face of his wife\nrefusing even minimally to compliment him before the class, he launched into a\nlitany of her excellencies. As his poetic rehearsal of his wife’s supremacy\ncontinued, she began to grow a vein that ran up the side of her neck and across\nher forehead. Finally, unable to handle her husband’s recitation of her glories\nany longer, she launched out of her chair and stormed out of the class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We discovered later that\nthe man had routinely cheated on her, even in the earliest days of their\nmarriage. In the mundane and ordinary routine of life, she was, at best, just\nanother female. In front of others at church, she was magnificent. That\napproach to a spouse is treasonous. Yet, there is little difference between\nthis story and how people often think about “worship” and holiness.\nIsrael throughout their history acted out similarly. However, that was not the\noriginal idea God presented them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The typical\ncompartmentalization of worship and ethics today is nowhere apparent in\nLeviticus (or the rest of the Bible). Leviticus presents an inextricable\nrelationship between worship and holiness. Worship<\/em>\nrequirements appear in the sacrificial system of chapters 1-16, while holiness<\/em> represents the fundamental\nethic of chapters 17-26. Together, these two ideas paint a beautiful picture of\nredemption from sin and perpetual dependence on God’s sustaining hand. Thus,\nholiness is the mundane testimony that consistently embraces and proclaims the\nreality of God, who Israel celebrates during worship. God’s holiness demands an\nappropriate God-directed reaction from His people, whether in family, war,\nworship, sex, economics, or the judicial system. In every ordinary facet of\nlife, Israel was to image forth the holiness of their God. A few examples of the\nnature of holiness from Leviticus should make this point clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, holiness\nshapes individuals together into a system of thinking and acting toward one\nanother. This system finds its roots in God\u2019s own character, redemptive power,\nand ongoing kindness. Here holiness comprises personal and systemic ethics.\nThere is no hierarchy of sexual and judicial improprieties. Moses equally\ncondemns as unholy sacrificing one’s child, abusing the elderly or disabled,\nand neglecting the poor. They cannot worship this God, their God, and live\ninconsistently toward one another. Such an ethic denies the reality of the one\nwhom Israel claims as their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later Biblical writers\nhave no categories for a worshipper whose actions don\u2019t match God\u2019s demands (Isa.\n1:11\u201314; Isa. 40:16; Isa. 66:3; Jer. 6:20; Jer. 7:21\u201323; Jer. 14:12; Hos. 6:6;\nHos. 8:13; Amos 5:21\u201324; Mic. 6:6\u20138). God, speaking through Isaiah, told Israel\nto quit worshipping and praying to him due to their committing injustice and\noppression (Isa 1:10-18). Jeremiah condemned Israel for successfully recasting\nGod into a common deity that had little to no concern about the inconsistency\nbetween life and worship. He rhetorically asks, \u201cHow dare you come before me\nwhile ignoring the manner in which I instructed you to live?\u201d (see Jer 7:8-11).\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jonah later personified\nIsrael\u2019s complete capitulation to the ethnocentric culture around him as early\nas the 8th century. Jesus emphasized that the religious and social power of his\nday embraced the eye-straining minutiae of the law that benefited them while\nignoring the actual spirit and meaning of the law that magnified God and helped\nthe least of those within the covenant (Matt 23:23). Paul warned the Corinthian\nChristians of the dangers of taking the supper, a corporate proclamation\nof God the Son, in an unworthy manner (1 Cor 11:27-32). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Holiness privately and publicly ties the individual and community directly to the person and work of the Triune God. We are both made holy and made to be holy in all we do by our redeeming, sheltering, sustaining Savior, who is worthy of all worship. Perhaps there is nothing more appealing than to compartmentalize life. Such behavior betrays self-worship, however. It indicates that God, whom one claims to know, is nothing more than a divine name attached to a self-projected image. Worship and holiness are daily-all-the-time expectations for God\u2019s people. All approaches that seek to short-circuit such an approach to life are\u2014like the cheating husband–traitors to the One they publicly claim to love.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dr. Jeff Mooney discusses the importance of not compartmentalizing our lives, but consistently embracing and proclaiming the reality of God. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":296,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions\/297"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/scm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}