Bearing False Witness is More Than We Think

God is holy and he desires that his chosen race, his priesthood, his nation, and his people be holy too. This is the point of the book of Leviticus–“You shall be holy for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44). God wants his people to be holy because God’s people are a revelatory people, meaning they exist to reveal God not only to each other as the people of God, but also to the people without God in the world. So should anyone fail to be holy, ignore God’s commands, or take his commands lightly, they should expect God’s judgment, either on themselves or on the sacrifices they offer.

This is because, essentially, they are bearing false witness about the Lord. They are bearing false witness because in the diminishing of their set-apartness, they are diminishing God’s set-apartness to a watching world. The result of this is that the Lord, who is holy, is not being exalted among the nations as he should be, as he desires to be, and he is being portrayed as no different than the false gods of the pagans.

So when Nadab and Abihu offered strange, or we could say, “any ole fire” to the Lord, “God answered their false fire with the real fire of his holy anger,” writes Christopher J. H. Wright. He did this because he wasn’t being treated as holy before the people. And he did this because Nadab and Abihu did not, as Paul House writes, “guard the people’s perception of Yahweh’s holiness.” Moses said to Aaron in verse three, “This is what the LORD has said: ‘Among those who are near me I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified [or I must be treated as holy (NEB)].”

1 Peter 2:9-10 says that we, as believers in Christ, “are [too] a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, [in order that we, like the Israelites] may proclaim the excellencies of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light. And while it is true that lightning will probably not strike us dead if we happen to act contrary to our holy identity, we are still God’s revelatory people. Therefore, we must not tell lies. We must be holy as he is holy. Wright says, “The closer a person is to God, the more careful they need to be about his holiness. Otherwise, they bring dishonour on God among the rest of the people. [For] it is bad enough to treat the things of God with contempt oneself; it is far worse to cause others to do so.”

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