“Be my holy people. You must not eat the meat of a mauled animal found in the field; throw it to the dogs.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I remember visiting Yellowstone National Park when I was growing up. It was pretty incredible. I look forward to being able to take my own family back there someday. Everywhere you looked there was an almost overwhelming natural beauty. We saw so many amazing things that by the end of the trip we had actually started to get tired of it. My parents would announce something from the front seat, and we would hardly look up from our books in the back. At one point on the trip, we took a short hike to see a small waterfall. I had a bottle of water with me that I finished on the hike. When we got to the falls it was empty and I was still thirsty. So, I filled it in the beautiful river in the pristine-looking wilderness and took a nice, long drink. It was satisfying in the moment, but it could have also been deadly if there had been in bacteria in it from further upriver. I got lucky, but I should not have done that. Knowing how to get along in nature and not die from something foolish like drinking in the wrong place is important. Sometimes Israel’s laws had an obvious religious bent to them; sometimes they were really just about good hygiene. Let’s talk here about one of the latter kind.

We are introduced here for the first time to an important idea: God was creating Israel to be a holy people. Okay, but what does that mean? Well, there are two frames of reference when it comes to thinking about holiness in the Scriptures. They are distinct, but not necessarily different. In other words, holiness is one idea, but it operates in two different contexts, one specific, and one more generalized. The more generalized context is the kind of personal holiness as a reflection of the holiness of God that all of God’s people are called to bear. This means consciously standing out as different from the people around us, but not just for the sake of being different. We are to strive to be better than the average bear. We are to be kinder, gentler, more compassionate, more loving, more patient, more hopeful, more joyful, more self-controlled, and so on and so forth. We are, in other words, to live our lives in such a way that we are a fitting picture of who God is to the world around us.

The specific context is what we might call ritual holiness. This is the day-to-day holiness with which the people need to operate in order to be able to engage with God in the context of the tabernacle and later the temple. This holiness was concerned with doing or not doing things that would allow the people to remain ceremonially clean in order to be able to worship God properly.

Think about it like this: If you know you are having company at your house, what do you do? You clean up. You clean up your house and you clean up yourself. Your goal is to make sure both things are presentable, that is, that they look like you consider the company at least somewhat important. Depending on just how important you consider the company to be, your efforts toward cleaning yourself up will be more or less thorough. The same thing goes if you are going to someone else’s house. A friend of mine shared the story with me the other day of being invited to the home of a very wealthy attorney. The man was a collector of fine things and there were priceless antiques everywhere you looked including in the bathrooms. If you were going to his house, you wouldn’t head that way immediately after finishing a long day of working in the yard. You would first take a shower and put on decent clothes, and then you would consider dropping by.

God wanted the people to understand that He was different from the other gods. He wanted them to think about Him differently. He wanted them to put Him in the category of “more important than other things in life.” Because of this, He gave them a variety of laws aimed at framing their thinking. They needed to live in such a way that they were prepared to be in His presence all the time. Now, He knew real life is messy and often leaves us not so prepared and in ways and times that are beyond our control. He allowed for those kinds of circumstances. But when things were within their control, He wanted them to be different.

This kind of a law fits in with more specific holiness context. If you came upon an animal that had been killed in the field, you were not supposed to eat it. Okay, but how does that contribute or take away from a person’s ritual holiness before God? A couple of ways. First, if an animal – let’s say a dog since that’s the illustration point here – came across another dead animal in the wild, the dog is going to eat it. As far as an animal is concerned, food is food. Now, you shouldn’t imagine your faithful furry friend here. These would have been wild, feral dogs that lived on the margins of human society and ate whatever carrion they could sink their teeth into. What dogs can eat in order to thrive is not the same thing as what people can eat. What God was saying here to the people was that they were not to behave like wild animals. People and animals are not the same. They don’t behave like us, and we shouldn’t behave like them. We should be different.

The second thing here is a bit subtler, but just as important. If someone comes upon a mauled animal in a field, what are the circumstances surrounding that discovery? The field here is probably not just some random, open field, but a field for grazing flocks or herds. That means the animal is probably a livestock animal of some sort. Perhaps a cow or a sheep. And the person making this discovery is almost assuredly not just some random passerby, but someone who is supposed to be there, namely, a shepherd. Shepherding was fairly lonely work. That means this was likely a single shepherd discovering that one of the animals in the flock he was assigned to watch had been mauled by some wild animal. In other words, no one was watching over his shoulder to see what he was going to do with this animal carcass he has discovered. It would have been easy for him to just butcher it up, grill it up, and have a nice meal for himself.

God was saying, “Don’t do that.” They were not to do it in part for reasons of good hygiene. When you come across a mauled animal in a field, you don’t have any idea where that meat has been. Eating it might not hurt you, but it also might make you really sick. We understand this today. If you see an animal lying dead on the side of the road, you don’t scoop it up, take it home, and have a barbecue with all your friends. You leave it there and let the carrion eaters take care of it. That’s what God designed them to do in the first place.

Even in midst of this more mundane reasoning behind this kind of a law, there’s more here for us to consider. God wasn’t just saying don’t for the sake of saying don’t. He was trying to shape their character in a way that set them apart from the people around them. He was saying, “Don’t settle for less than the holy calling I have placed upon you just because no one is looking.” “Don’t reduce your humanity to something entirely more animalistic just because you are all by yourself.” “Don’t give in to base desires just because they are easy to satisfy.” “Don’t grab the food in front of you just because it is there. Trust that I will provide you good and sufficient food.” “Be my holy people.” He was calling the people here to a life of integrity.

Here is where we find a connection point for us. We may not eat roadkill (well, some people do, but we’re not going to deal with that right now), but this law doesn’t have any bearing on why. This law was given to Israel, not us. We’re not liable for keeping it. But this larger principle of pursuing holiness in everything we do is something that still applies to us. The apostle Peter called us to it. In light of the incredible salvation we have in Christ, Peter insisted that Jesus’ followers pursue a life of holiness that is a fitting reflection of His own holiness. The apostle Paul said that we are to seek to glorify God in everything that we do. Everything includes all of the big stuff, but it also includes all of the small stuff. It includes all of the mundane stuff. It includes the times when people are around and watching. It includes the times when we are all by ourselves and God is the only one watching. God’s character is the same in every single situation. If we are going to be called His people, ours must be too. So, yes, leave the roadkill alone, but give even more attention to making sure you are bearing the image of Christ in every single situation you are in.