“‘Thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, lest they die in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst.’” —Leviticus 15:31
The book of Leviticus can get… interesting. It’s filled with a host of laws that are at best confusing and sometimes downright strange. God has something to say about every aspect of life, from what His people were to eat to what they were to wear to how they were to proceed if mold showed up in their house.
How were the people supposed to take all this? Was God a ritualistic neat freak who needed everything to be in order? Or was there perhaps a deeper meaning behind these rules He was teaching them?
All of these oddly specific rules center around one main theme: cleanliness. God wants His people to be clean. This isn’t because He has something against dirt (or other forms of uncleanliness). It’s because cleanliness is the best picture we have of holiness.
And who is holy? God Himself.
The laws of Leviticus exist to teach us about God’s holiness. To be holy is to be pure, to be separate from everything else. So as the people of Israel offered sacrifices to cleanse them of their sin, as they abstained from certain foods in favor of those God had named clean, as they washed themselves and stayed away from others after burying a dead body, they were demonstrating that principle.
The holy cannot be around the common. The clean cannot be in the presence of the unclean.
These rules are strange—there’s no denying that. But each one of them has a purpose. God taught them so that we would all understand how holy He is, and that He wants us to be holy, too.
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