“Holiness to the LORD”
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Exodus 28:1-43
Matthew 25:31-26:13
Psalm 31:9-18
Proverbs 8:12-13
“You shall also make a plate of pure gold and engrave on it, like the engraving of a signet:
HOLINESS TO THE LORD.
And you shall put it on a blue cord, that it may be on the turban; it shall be on the front of the turban. So it shall be on Aaron’s forehead, that Aaron may bear the iniquity of the holy things which the children of Israel hallow in all their holy gifts; and it shall always be on his forehead, that they may be accepted before the Lord” (Exodus 28:36-38).
What was Aaron thinking that first day, when a helpful someone centered that gold plate on his forehead, and tied the blue cord securely behind his head? He’d read the inscription. He knew what those words meant. He knew what it all meant far more than we know, for holiness wasn’t a foreign concept to Aaron and his contemporaries. Sadly, in our day and age, “holiness” is often nothing more than an informal adjective. As much as I love my Seahawks and their spokesmen, Steve Raible, I will never understand his repetitive and effusive use of the term, “Holy catfish.” Um … what?
Unlike Steve, Aaron understood the weight and heft of the term “holy.” He knew that by donning that golden plate, he was announcing to the world that he had drawn a giant line around his life — a border of purity and detachment. “I will not value what you value; I will not embrace what you embrace; I will not pour my life out for the things that you settle for.” Surrounded as he was by pagan cultures and their plethora of idols, this inscription would serve as a reminder that Aaron and the people he represented had been set apart to belong to God.
Like us.
What might change in your life, and mine, if we walked around with a sign on our forehead that read, “HOLINESS TO THE LORD”? What words would die on our lips, what compromise would we avoid, what regret might we prevent, if we would only remind ourselves daily that our life was not our own, and that we’d been bought with a price?
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