In the sacred statutes, much attention is given to the concept of "holy things" - that is, things or food dedicated to the Lord and participating in worship. Thus there arises an understanding of holiness that belongs not only to God alone, not only to the holiness with which He sanctifies a person, but also of holiness that extends to certain objects.

As we saw in the example of the people of Israel or the clans of high priests, priests, and Levites, the Old Testament idea of the sanctification of the world usually touches only a limited circle of people. The same applies to all the other objects around us. But just as there can be no profane moments in the life of a spiritual person, that is, moments not connected with God, so in it there can be neither profane, defiled things, nor unclean food, and the like; now this sacredness has not an exclusive but an all-encompassing character.

For this reason there can no longer be clean or unclean food or defiled objects in our life. Everything is permeated by the Spirit, everything is holy - or at least created for holiness - the whole world, every atom. We ourselves become the only obstacle on the path of the world's sanctification, for the high calling of priests who bring down God's blessing upon this world rests on us, requiring personal holiness from us as well.

The system of ritual rules and prohibitions, especially for priests, as it is set out in Leviticus, may seem excessively formal. In fact, this is not merely religious formalism, although of course in the history of Yahwism it often degenerated into something like that. Originally, however, it was not form for the sake of form. The point is that a priest, by definition, had to maintain a state of consecration constantly; this was the meaning of his service. He was constantly in God's presence; he lived before God in the most literal sense of the word.

Such a life in a fallen world required special care toward what is holy. It requires the same care now, but today, after the coming of Christ, in the age of the advancing Kingdom, when death has already lost its absolute power over the world, the main problem and the main work are connected with ourselves, and therefore this work takes on more of an ascetic character. In pre-Christian times, however, the threat could come not only from within, but also from outside, from the evil that manifested itself in the world with impunity and almost without restraint, diminishing the fullness of its life and plunging it into the death that then reigned in the world absolutely. In such conditions, one had to be careful in everything that concerned God's presence, the sanctuary, holiness, and consecration.

All of this was absolutely foreign to the world; the world was an aggressively hostile environment for it, and its contact with the world was possible each time only through a special act of God. In those times any presence of God would simply have destroyed the world in which we live if God had not made His theophany compatible with its sinfulness. Such a joining, impossible for a human being but possible for God, required special care and caution from the person taking part in the process. Here, in essence, every step was a step along the boundary of two worlds: the world of God's holiness and fallen impurity, the world of life and the world of death.

The boundary ran both within each person, in his heart and in his soul, and this inner boundary still exists today; and also outside, where God's presence came into contact with the world, in the court of the Tabernacle, the Temple, and the priestly home. Today, after the coming of Christ, this external boundary has disappeared, not because we have changed, but because after the coming of Christ the world has changed, and now only Leviticus, with its ritual prohibitions, reminds us what this same world was like before the coming of the Savior.