Day 051: Holiness

"For I am the Lord who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God.  You shall therefore be holy, for I, the Lord, am holy."  Leviticus 11:45

Over thousands of years, we have learned more ways to become holy before the Lord.  According to the Old Testament, there was a pretty quick and easy way to achieve this, although today we can look at it as being a backwards method.  Perhaps I could explain this with a parallel image from my personal experience.

Back in high school, I was approaching my unhealthiest state of being, with my years of refusal to perform any physical activity (I'd found a loophole out of it in middle school, and my high school had no physical education class) or to eat healthily.  So, starting around my second year in high school, I started to exercise regularly.  I made some great progress in terms of weight loss.  At the end of my third and final year, I finally learned how to cook, which was a skill that I worked on immensely in my freshman year in college.  During that freshman year, I began counting calories, following guidelines from my own research, and made even more leaps and bounds down the scale.  However, I was quite compulsive with my counting that it was a sort of distraction (mind you, this was in a journal I carried around everywhere).  It was annoying to have to look up every detail about different food that I would eat.  So, after a few months of doing that, I switched over to cutting carbohydrates entirely from my diet (save a cheat day once a week), and I sped down to my final weight (although somewhat far from my unhealthy goal).  In fact, I still must say that cutting carbs entirely is the easiest thing to do since I'm not responsible for portioning things out and keeping track of them.

That's how I see these food laws from the Old Testament: a quick and easy path to sanctification.  It's one thing to keep track of different fasts, prayers, goals, feasts, and traditions, which can seem to be overwhelming to almost anybody.  It's another, though, to paint things in black and white, which makes a complicated thing to be very simple.  It may sound rough, but still simple.

Paul, though, gives us many examples about how we can live out our faith, our holiness, in the New Covenant through Jesus Christ.  We read that we can become teachers, preachers, healers, speakers, evangelists, interpreters, and servants.  We can live a dynamic faith now.  However, that's where we know that we have a large responsibility to God.  God has given us so many ways to be holy, so what is our issue?  We turn away from God.  We need to come back to God.  We need to start taking care of ourselves, sanctifying ourselves through our talents, through our time, through our treasures.  We need to start preparing ourselves to become perfect offerings before God.  Lastly, we need to become the unified body of Christ, with all the many different parts, working for our corporal sanctification.