You Cannot Climb To A Holy God

Holiness can sound like a church word until you feel what Scripture is actually asking: how can unclean people live near a God who is entirely other. That question sits underneath Leviticus, and Pastor Harry Behrens shows why it is also the weight-bearing beam that holds up John 7, John 8, and the road into John 9.

We walk through the lived world of Leviticus: separation that marks God’s people, uncleanness that pushes someone outside the camp, restricted access behind the veil, and the Day of Atonement that returns every year because the blood can cover but cannot finish. Then the thread snaps into focus when John the Baptist points to Jesus and says, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” The sacrifices were never the destination. They were signposts.

From there, we get painfully practical. If you have been treating God’s law like a ladder, you already know the fatigue of trying harder and still falling short. This teaching reframes the law as a mirror that reveals the gap and a guardian that walks us to Christ. Jesus does not wait for the clean to come near. He goes outside the camp, makes the unclean clean, and invites us to stop climbing and come close through him. If you want a clearer way to read the Gospel of John, a deeper understanding of atonement, and a more honest path toward knowing God, press play.

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Transcript

The Question Behind Holiness

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In Scripture, holiness is a question before it is an answer. What does it mean for an unclean people to live near a God who is entirely other? Leviticus answers that question with a system, a priesthood, a tabernacle, and a day of atonement that came every year and never finished. And then John's gospel introduces a man and calls him the Lamb of God. In this episode, Pastor Henry steps back from the verse-by-verse word to show how Leviticus is the weight-bearing beam underneath John chapter 7, 8, and 9, and how the question Leviticus asks is the question that lands the listener at the foot of the door Christ has opened. Here's Pastor Harry Barons with today's teaching.

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And the chapter we're about to walk into. Because Jesus is not just teaching in those chapters. He is not just performing miracles. He is doing something very specific in a very specific place at a very specific time of the year. And once you see what he is doing, every single piece of John 7, 8, and 9 starts to make sense in a way that it never quite did before. Now we've done this before in this series. When we went through John chapter 1, we couldn't fully understand what John was doing until we went back to Genesis. That was episode 9. When we got to John chapters 5 and 6, we couldn't fully understand what Jesus was doing with the bread, the water, and walking on water until we went back to Exodus. And now that was found in episode 28, if you want to go back and review. And now we are in chapters 7, 8, and 9. And the same thing is true here also. We cannot fully understand what Jesus is doing in these chapters until we go back to the third book of the Torah. Now that book is Leviticus. And the question Leviticus answers is the question that holds all of John 7, 8, and 9 together. What is holiness? What does it actually mean for unclean people to live near a God who is entirely other? Because once you see what Leviticus is doing, what it is asking, what it is providing, and what it is pointing forward to, the whole Gospel of John starts to read differently. And the chapters we have just walked through and the chapter we are about to walk into, all of it lands with weight you may have never felt before. So if Leviticus has always felt to you like one of those books in the Bible you're not sure what to do with, if it's one of those places you tend to skip past on your way to somewhere more familiar, that's exactly the place I want to take you to today. Because what Leviticus is doing is the weight-bearing beam underneath what John is writing about Jesus. You take Leviticus out, the whole structure sags. Put it back in, and chapters 7, 8, and 9 stand up clearly.

The Standard That Never Changed

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So with that, let's start where Leviticus starts. The opening question of the entire book is what does it mean for sinful, unclean human beings to live in the presence of a God who is holy? And the answer to that question, the foundation that everything else in the book is going to be built on, is given to us in Leviticus 19, 2, where the Lord says, You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy. Now that sentence is the foundation of the entire book, and really it's the foundation of everything we're going to talk about today. But before we go any further, I want you to see something that most readers miss. The standard did not pass away with the old covenant. Jesus restated it at the very heart of his Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew chapter 5, verse 48, Jesus says, You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And Peter, writing to the early church, quoted Leviticus directly into the New Testament. In 1 Peter 1:15 and 16, Peter says, As he who is called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, you should be holy, for I am holy. Now the standard never changed. The holiness of God is what Leviticus introduced, what Jesus restated, what Peter brought into the church, and what we as believers are still accountable to. So when we ask, what is holiness? We are not asking an academic question about an old book. We are asking the question every honest believer has to answer. Because this is the standard Jesus met on our behalf. And this is what we have been reading about across the entire Gospel of John. So with that, let's understand what that word holy actually means.

What Holy Actually Means

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Because most of us, when we hear it, we hear something vague, something of reverence, a sense of being set apart, and something that has to do with the church. But the Bible is far more precise than that. The Hebrew word that gets translated as holy means to be set apart, to be cut off from the common, to be entirely other. So when God declares himself holy, what he is declaring is that he is categorically different from everything else that exists. He is not a bigger or better version of created things. He is the source from which everything else has been made. He is pure in a way that has no mixture of darkness or corruption or falsehood. And he is set apart in a way that has no parallel anywhere in creation. And Isaiah saw it. In Isaiah chapter 6, the prophet sees the Lord on his throne, and the seraphim are crying out, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And Isaiah's response is not all. His response is collapse. He says, Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. He sees holiness, and at the very same moment, he sees what he is. The two come together, and that is what holiness does. It reveals. It reveals who God is, and it reveals what we are not, both at the exact same time. So if God is entirely other, pure, set apart, holy in a way that nothing in creation can match, then the rest of Leviticus is going to spell out in painful and precise detail what it actually means for unclean people to live near a God like that. And that brings us to the part of this teaching that the disciples would have felt in their bones. Because the disciples did not read Leviticus the way most of us read it. To them, it wasn't ancient and it wasn't theory. It was the structure of their world, the priesthood, the tabernacle, the festivals, the sacrifices, the laws of clean and unclean. All of it shaped how they ate, how they worshiped, how they grieved, how they cleaned themselves, how they came near to God. Their parents had lived under it. Their grandparents had lived under it. And every page of it was making the same point from a different angle. So with that, let's walk through it the way they would have known

Life Under Clean And Unclean

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it. Not as a list of rules, but as the weight of a real life. They would have seen separation. In Leviticus 20, 26, the Lord says, You should be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy, and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine. And to them, holiness meant distinction. It meant being marked out, being set apart, belonging to God in a way that shaped everything from what they ate to how they kept time to who they could marry. They lived a different kind of life because they belonged to a different kind of God. And the holiness of the one who claimed them shaped every single ordinary day. Then there was the uncleanness. And Leviticus chapter 13 spends an enormous amount of detail laying out what that looked like in real life. If a person developed a skin disease, the priest would examine them. And if they were declared unclean, they had to leave the camp. Leviticus chapter 13, verse 45 and 46 says, The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let their hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, Unclean, unclean. He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp. Now picture that. A real person with a real family hears the priest declare him unclean. And he walks out of the camp alone. And then from that day forward, if anyone came near to him, he would cry out. So they would stay back. He would say, Uncle, unclean. That is what uncleanness looked like in the presence of a holy God. It separated. It removed you from the community of the covenant. It put you outside the camp, outside the dwelling place of the God who lived at the center of his people. Then there was restricted access. In Leviticus 16, too, the Lord tells Moses, Tell Aaron your brother, not to come at any time into the holy place inside the veil, before the mercy seat that is on the ark, so that he may not die. And what we have to slow down on here is that even the high priest, the most holy man in Israel, the one who had been set apart above all the rest of the people, specifically to stand before God, even he could not walk into the immediate presence of God whenever he chose. The veil hung there as a permanent reminder. And what it was saying every single day was this there is a place beyond this curtain where God dwells, and you cannot come in, not on your own terms, not on your day, and not without blood. And then there was the atonement. Once a year, on the day of atonement, the high priest entered the most holy place with the blood of sacrifice, and Leviticus chapter 16, verse 30 says, For on this day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse you. You shall be clean before the Lord from all your sins. One day, one man, the blood of a goat, for the sin of an entire nation accumulated over an entire year. And then just a few verses later, in Leviticus chapter 16, verse 34, the text adds something we have to slow down on because it says it shall be a statute forever that atonement be made for the people of Israel once in the year because of all their sins. Once a year, every year, for generation after generation. Now let's pause here because I really want this to land. The disciples felt this. Their parents and their grandparents felt it. Every year the Day of Atonement came around again, and every year the high priest went behind the veil, and every year the blood was offered, and every year the next year came around, and the blood had to be offered again. That repetition was not a small thing. It was the weight of being a Jew under the law. And the writer of Hebrews names exactly what that repetition was saying. In Hebrews chapter 10, beginning in verse 1, he writes, The law has but a shadow of the good things to come. In these sacrifices, there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. So the very repetition that the law required, the very system that the disciples and their families had lived under for generations, was itself a confession that the system could not finish the job. The blood covered, it did not remove. The standard remained, and the gap between unclean people and a holy God remained. And every year, the same blood had to be brought back into the same place by another high priest who himself was going to die and be replaced. That is the weight the disciples carried. And if you have ever stood in front of a standard you could not meet, no matter how hard you tried, you have stood close to the edge of what they felt every single year of their lives. The holiness of God was real. The standard was unmovable. And the system that managed the gap was working, but it was never finishing. So if the law could not lift unclean people up to a holy God, then we have to ask, what was it actually for?

The Lamb Who Finishes Atonement

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Now this is where we enter back into the Gospel of John. After 1,500 years of repetition, generation after generation of high priests entering behind the veil once a year, after all that weight that we just walked through, a man stands at the Jordan River. And when he sees Jesus walking toward him, he says this. In John chapter 1, verse 29, John says, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, the Lamb of God. That is sacrificial language, as we find in Leviticus. And John the Baptist is putting it on a person, a man walking toward the water. So everything we just walk through, the priesthood, the tabernacle, the blood, the day of atonement, the repetition that never ended, was always pointing forward to this man, to this moment, to the one walking toward John at the river. And here is what the disciples had to learn, and what we still have to learn today, because the human heart never gets it right the first time. They grew up under the law, thinking it was a ladder, a ladder they had to climb, where every commandment was a rung, every regulation was a step closer, every sacrifice was an attempt to reach a God who was higher than they could climb. And that is how the human heart hears the law. That is how we still hear it today. We hear a standard and we instinctively try to climb up to it. And when we can't, we just try harder. And when we still can't, we try harder again. And the whole time we are exhausting ourselves on something the law was never designed to give us. Because the law has always been a mirror. Let me say that one more time. Because this is the line that the entire weight of Leviticus was leading the disciples to see. The law has always been a mirror. Paul names it as plainly as it could be named. In Romans 3 20, Paul says, Through the law comes knowledge of sin. The law was given so that when we stood in front of the standard of God's holiness, you would see clearly what you actually are. The mirror was given so that the gap would become unmistakable, so that you would stop trying to climb and start looking for the one who was coming down. And in Galatians 3 24, Paul names what the mirror was for when he says the law was our guardian until Christ came. And a guardian in the ancient world was a slave whose job was to walk a child to school, to deliver them safely to the teacher. So when Paul says the law was a guardian, he is saying the law was always walking the disciples somewhere to a door, to a person. The disciples thought they were climbing the whole time, but the law was walking them to Christ. And when John the Baptist saw Jesus walking toward him and said, Behold, the Lamb of God, that was the moment the door opened, the Lamb who would not cover for a year but take away, the high priest who would enter once and finish, the blood that would not be repeated because it would never need to be. And the writer of Hebrews puts it as cleanly as it can be put. In Hebrews chapter 10, verse 14, when he says, By a single offering, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. Which means what Leviticus required, Christ provided, what the mirror revealed, the Lamb resolved, what the high priest could only cover, the Son of God completely removed. So the question that hung over the disciples' entire lives is how can unclean people live near a holy God has an answer. And the answer is not a system, a sacrifice, or a higher rung on a ladder. The answer is a person, the one who walked toward John at the Jordan. And if the law has always been a mirror and the Lamb has come and the door is open, then what is God actually after right now?

Knowing God Beyond Religious Effort

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Well, Jesus answers that question himself. On the night before the cross, in his prayer to the Father, in John chapter 17, verse 3, Jesus says, This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, in Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. That is what God has been after all along. The wilderness generation was sustained by him for 40 years and never came to know him. The Pharisees in John chapter 7 and 8 had the law, the temple, and Abraham, yet never came to know him. They were near the provision, but not near the presence. They had everything the covenant could give them on the outside. But his word never found a home in them on the inside. And what God is doing now on the other side of the door that the Lamb opened is gathering a people who actually know him, a people in whom his word finds a home, a people who hear his voice and recognize it as the voice of the one who came down because they could not climb up. So let me ask you something. And I want you to actually let this question sit, because it is the question this entire episode has been moving toward. If I am not holy, how do I come close? That is the question Leviticus asked for 1,500 years, and that is the question every honest human heart asks the moment it stops pretending. If God is entirely other and I am not, then how could I ever stand near him? And most of us, even those of us who have been in church our whole lives, even those of us who said yes to Jesus a long time ago, are still somewhere underneath all of it trying to climb. We're still trying to be good enough, clean enough, the kind of person God would want near him. And every year, in our own private liturgy, we discover that it wasn't enough. So we promise again and we try again and we climb again and we wonder why we feel so tired. Now I want you to listen to this. The law has always been a mirror, not a ladder. It was never The ladder you thought it was. And the mirror was given for a very specific reason. It was given to destroy your self-will, to show you that you cannot come near a holy God on your own. That no matter how disciplined you become, no matter how religious you make yourself, no matter how high you stack the rungs of your effort, the gap between you and a holy God will never be closed by anything you do. The mirror was given so that you would stop trying to come up and you would wait for the one who is coming down. And he has come. The Lamb of God has come and the door is open. So the question is not whether you are holy enough to come close. The question is whether you will walk in through the one who is. Because the sign that you have walked in is not a perfect record. The sign is that something in you has begun to recognize his voice, that his word has begun to find a home in you, that something inside has begun to want to abide. And that word abide is not a word I'm putting in his mouth. It is the word Jesus Himself used. In John 8, 31, Jesus says, If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples. And that abiding is everything we've been reading about across the gospel. Being born from above in chapter three, drinking the living water in chapter four, eating the bread of life in chapter six, following the light of the world in chapter eight. The Christian life Jesus described is active. It is partaking. It is being near Him, hearing His voice, walking in His word. And it has never been about an intellectual belief that gets filed away on a shelf and brought out on Sundays. Now here is what we have to see, because this is exactly what we have just been reading about in John 7 and 8, and exactly what we are about to walk into in John chapter 9.

God Comes To The Unclean

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The God who came down does not wait at the gate of the camps for the clean to come in. He goes outside the camp. He goes to the unclean, to the blind, to the deaf, to the leper, to the woman caught in sin, to the man at the pool who could not walk. And he makes them clean. He brings them in. And next week in John chapter 9, we are going to watch him do exactly that in real time with a man who has been outside the camp his entire life because he was born blind. The pattern of Leviticus, reversed in a single act of grace, the mirror replaced by the Lamb, the unclean made clean by the one who came down to them. Which means the deeper question, the question that has been hiding underneath everything we have walked through today is this What can we do to make God come near? The answer scripture gives us from beginning to end is nothing. Paul says it as plainly as it can be said in Ephesians chapter two, Paul says, And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world. We all once lived in the passions of the flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath. You were dead, not weak, not struggling, you were dead. And in Romans chapter three, Paul says, None is righteous, no, not one, no one understands, no one seeks for God. So if no one is seeking, and no one is climbing high enough to make him come near, how does anyone ever come? And Jesus answered that question himself in John 6 44. Jesus says, No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And Paul names where that drawing began in Ephesians chapter 1, verse 4. Paul says, He chose us in him before the foundations of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him, before the foundation of the world, before you were born, before you breathed your first breath, before you ever heard the name of Jesus, the Father had already said his love on you and was already drawing you toward him. So if you are seeking him today, if there is anything in you that wants to abide in his word, if there is anything in you that is responding to what you've been hearing across this gospel of John, it is not because you climbed high enough, or because you finally got serious enough, or because you woke up one day and decided to come close. It is because he came for you first. He chose you, he called you, he drew you to himself, and he made you holy in him because he is holy, and he brought you near to God. Not because you earned it, not because you asked for it, but because he made you for this very purpose. The latter was never going to hold your weight anyway. The mirror was always there to show you that, and the door has been open since the Lamb walked toward John at the Jordan. So come close, not because you have made yourself holy, but because the one who is entirely other has come near to you, and his nearness is the only holiness that has ever brought a human being home.

Prayer And Next Steps

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Let's pray. Father, we have spent so many years climbing, trying to make ourselves holy, trying to make ourselves clean, trying to earn our way near you. And today you have shown us the mirror, and in the mirror, you have shown us the Lamb. I want to thank you for the door he opened. Thank you that what you require, you have provided. Thank you that you came down to us when we could not come up to you, and that the blood of your son has finished what the blood of bulls and goats could only foreshadow. And thank you, Father, that you came for us before we ever came looking for you, that you set your love on us before the foundation of the world, that every desire we have to abide in your word is itself a gift from your hand, evidence that we belong to you. Help us to stop climbing. Help us to walk in through Him. And help us to be a people who not only receive what you do, but actually come to know you. A people in whom your word finds a home, a people who hear your voice and recognize it as the voice of mercy. In Jesus' name. Amen. Now I want to thank you again for joining us today, and I hope this message has helped you take a step closer in knowing just how much God loves you and wants you to know Him. Now, if anything today resonated with you, or if you have any questions or comments, please visit us at thetaway.faith. There you can send us an email, or you can click on the text us link in the episode description, as we would truly love to hear from you. Now, next time we're gonna step into John chapter 9, a man born blind, a miracle that divides a community, and the clearest picture yet of what it looks like when the light of the world gives sight to someone who has never seen. God bless, and we'll see you next time on the takeaway.