Welcome to Day 1551 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomSacred Space – Worldview WednesdayWelcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps! Wisdom is the final frontier in gaining true knowledge. Our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, seek out discernment and insights, and boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend; this is Gramps; thanks for coming along on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Today is Day 1551 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. This week, we will expand on the past course work as we continue reviewing the book from Dr. Michael S Heiser titled “Supernatural.” The book is an abbreviated version of his more comprehensive book, “The Unseen Realm.” I highly recommend both of these books. Creating a Biblical Worldview based on how the Old and New Testaments connect with God’s overall plan for humanity is essential. This book review will help us understand what the Bible teaches about the unseen world, and why it matters.
Sacred Space
The Israelites spent over a year at Mount Sinai. Why so long? They had already entered into a covenant with God and received the Ten Commandments. But they still had a lot to learn. It was one thing to promise to believe in and be loyal to the God of their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was another to know what God expected and what he was like.
The Concept of HolinessMany of the Old Testament’s strange laws and practices are grounded in the need to teach people that God is unlike everything else. He is unique in his nature and character; he is entirely other than humanity and anything else. For Israel, that was a truth that had to be reinforced at all times. Otherwise, God might be thought of as ordinary.
The biblical word for the idea of God’s unique otherness is holiness. It means “to be set apart” or “to be distinct.” The concept isn’t necessarily about moral conduct‌—about the idea that we should behave a certain way to reflect God’s distinct moral standards—though that is included (Leviticus 19:2).
God wasn’t content to simply give Israelites an intellectual explanation of holiness. He wanted the concept of his otherness to permeate life in ancient Israel. The Bible tells us this was accomplished through rituals (symbolic acts) and by rules for approaching sacred areas.

How Is God “Other”?The short answer to this question is “in every way,” but that’s too abstract. The Bible is much more down-to-earth, and the rituals and rules for Israelite community living reflect that.
For example, the Bible teaches us that God was not only the source of Israel’s life—he was life. God is not of this earth, a place where there is death, disease, and imperfection. His realm is supernatural. Our realm is terrestrial. The earthly space he occupies is made sacred and otherworldly by his presence. The space we occupy is ordinary. God is the polar opposite of ordinary.
In ancient Israel, these ideas were conveyed by the fact that people had to be invited and purified to occupy the same space as God. Many laws in the Old Testament regulate this purifying.
Israelites could be disqualified (made “unclean”) from sacred space by various activities and conditions. Having sex, losing blood, certain physical handicaps, and touching a dead body (human or animal) all rendered an Israelite unclean. Israelites were forbidden from eating certain birds of prey that ate from dead animals (e.g., vultures, hawks; Leviticus 11:13–19) or animals that might be found on or inside a carcass (e.g., lizards, mice; Leviticus 11:24–40).
In these instances, uncleanness was not about morality but rather about association with loss of life and the incompatibility of that with God’s perfection. Even though...