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by Charlie Wolcott

We live in a post-modern culture where truth cannot be known and that all things are up to one’s own understanding, thinking, and preferences. The very concepts of right and wrong are blurred. This mindset has not merely crept into the church but nearly completely overtaken it. It has become increasingly difficult to find a church where the preacher actually says, “Thus says the Lord” and preaches straight from Scripture, rightly dividing it, correctly interpreting it, and then applying that truth to our lives. Instead, most of what is out there is one man’s opinion, often in direct violation of what God actually said. Then when someone calls them out on it and says what God actually said, the reply is, “I don’t reject what God said; I reject your interpretation of it.” One of the main jobs of a prophet, a priest, or a preacher is to declare what God said and to draw the line between what is holy and what is unholy. There is so much mixture today that few actually believe that such a line can be drawn.

Leviticus 10 is the account of Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu giving strange fire before the Lord and being killed on the spot for not being obedient to God’s commands. Nadab was in line to be the next high priest and had seen the presence of God while he was with Moses and Aaron at times when God showed Himself. Yet for some reason, both he and his brother thought they could do things their own way, and it cost them their lives. In this fierce rebuke, God tells Moses and Aaron to not mourn their deaths because of their disobedience, but that the job of the priest was to teach the people how to distinguish the clean from the unclean, the holy from the unholy.

It is very hard to find people out there who are willing to draw the line and say, “This is of God and that is not, and here is where God shows us what is what.” Anything that comes from God is good and true. Anything that does not have its origin in God, even what appears good, is corrupt and skeptic at best. Many will argue, “How do we know if its from God or not?” The simple answer is to read the Bible. One pastor I know gives this guideline: “If you want to know what the will of God is, take a look at what the world is doing and do the opposite. You will be pretty close.” One big clue about what is clean and holy versus unclean and unholy is whether it is something the world’s system promotes and teaches.

In the days of the Old Testament, the world’s culture was marked by the surrounding nations, particularly their idolatrous practices. Over and over again, God told Israel to destroy their idols and to destroy all the high places where idols were worshiped. God knew what would happen if those cultures remained around, and yet Israel never did fully chase them out and destroy them all. As a result, they kept turning back to idolatry so they could be like the nations around them. The question lingers: why did they keep turning back?

The answer is rather simple: the priests were not teaching how to distinguish the holy and unholy. It was a command for a king to make a physical copy of the Law by hand so he would know what God commanded of them. Yet there is no record of any king do such a thing. The only ones I can think who might have would be David, Solomon, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and maybe Josiah after he found the book of the Law. Even then, these kings struggled to follow it even if they did make the copies. We do know that there were feasts held in Nehemiah’s day that hadn’t been kept since leaving Egypt. We know Judah went into captivity for 70 years to give 490 years their sabbath rest. That went back before David. The priests weren’t doing their job, and God had a severe message for them.

In Ezekiel 22, God calls out the false priests who refused to distinguish the holy from the unholy. He called them conspirators against God and ravenous wolves, devouring the people instead of equipping them and arming them. The only reason they lived that long was because God chose to intercede upon His own wrath to save them. There was no intercessor, no one like Moses to plead before God to save those wicked, idolatrous sinners. God sent Jesus to be that Intercessor. God chose to send Jesus to be the one who would teach things correctly. Jesus would then pass to us the Holy Spirit. One of the Spirit’s primary jobs is to convict the world of its sin. If we don’t know what is holy and unholy, we simply are not listening to God. And more than likely, if we are thinking that way, we are probably trying to harbor an idol the Holy Spirit is telling us to tear down.

But God has also allowed false teachers to remain present. It’s not merely because they are tares among the wheat and to pluck them out would pluck out the good wheat. It is also to test and prove the true and false believer. God told Moses that false prophets would regularly come, and they were to be tested by whether what they said would turn out to be true. Those that did not were to be put to death. This was rarely carried out except by true prophets like Elijah after the Mt Carmel incident. Why? Because the people didn’t carry out this command to test the prophets and stay true to God’s word.

You cannot take anything that the world and the God-hating system has created and redeem it. God has already judged it. It will burn. While God can take a sinful soul and redeem it, He is not going to redeem anything that the world has created. There is no amount of decorating anything the world gives us in Christianese to make it salvageable. Our own righteousness is as filthy rags before God; that is something good corrupted by sin. But this is worse. Instead of a good thing tarnished by evil, this is an evil thing that we attempt to make good, and that will never happen. You cannot make the unholy to be holy. Only God can make something holy, and He has already set the limits for where that line is to be drawn. Our job is to believe that line and declare it.

Teaching the difference between the holy and the unholy is one thing, but living it out is another matter. I’ll address that next week.

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