119_Defining holiness Lev 19:1-8 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. 3 Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father, and you shall keep my Sabbaths: I am the Lord your God. 4 Do not turn to idols or make for yourselves any gods of cast metal: I am the Lord your God. 5 “When you offer a sacrifice of peace offerings to the Lord, you shall offer it so that you may be accepted. 6 It shall be eaten the same day you offer it or on the day after, and anything left over until the third day shall be burned up with fire. 7 If it is eaten at all on the third day, it is tainted; it will not be accepted, 8 and everyone who eats it shall bear his iniquity, because he has profaned what is holy to the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from his people. There’s a story about a young boy who visited a great cathedral with his grandmother. As they walked through its towering arches, he saw beautiful stained-glass windows, each depicting a saint. The sunlight streamed through the glass, painting the stone floors with radiant colors. Later, when his Sunday school teacher asked him what a saint was, he thought for a moment and then answered, “A saint is someone the light shines through.” This simple yet profound definition echoes the call of Leviticus 19:1-8, where God declares, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” When the Almighty, All-Knowing God reveals something about Himself, we can only understand it by seeing Him in action. One of the things God repeatedly affirms about Himself is His holiness. But what does holiness mean? How are we to grasp it? Holiness is not merely about moral purity or religious rituals; it is about being set apart for God's purposes. God defines His holiness not in abstract terms but through His expectations for His people’s conduct. His character is revealed in the instructions He gives regarding worship, relationships, justice, and daily life. From the very beginning, man was created in the image of God. Genesis 1 tells us that God shaped a formless and empty world, filled it with life, and exercised His dominion by assigning purpose to each created thing. Then, He commanded mankind to reflect His image by being fruitful, multiplying, and exercising dominion over creation. Humanity was meant to be a living reflection of God's holiness. This is why God strictly prohibited the making of idols—because He had already set His image in man. Any image fashioned by human hands would, at best, be a distorted reflection of man himself, and at worst, an imitation of something far less than himself. The definition of God's holiness unfolds progressively throughout Scripture. In Leviticus 19, we see a detailed expansion of God's moral and ceremonial law as the Israelites prepared to enter Canaan. They would encounter foreign customs