Most Holy to Yahweh: The Irrevocable Vow Text: Leviticus 27:28-29
Introduction: God's Hard Edges
We come this morning to the very end of Leviticus, and as is often the case, the book saves some of its hardest lessons for last. Our modern, sentimental age is in the business of sanding down all of God's hard edges. We want a God who is manageable, comfortable, and above all, nice. We want a deity who fits neatly into our categories of therapeutic affirmation. But the God of the Bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, refuses to be domesticated. He is holy, which means He is separate, other, and at times, terrifyingly different from us. And because He is holy, His law is holy, righteous, and good, even those parts that make our twenty-first-century sensibilities squirm.
The temptation for the modern Christian is to approach a text like this one with a sense of embarrassment. We are tempted to apologize for it, to explain it away, or to quickly pivot to something more palatable. But this is a profound failure of nerve. If we believe that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable, then that includes the parts that talk about things being "devoted to destruction." To be ashamed of God's Word at any point is to be ashamed of Him. Our task is not to edit God, but to understand Him. Our task is not to apologize for the text, but to preach it, in all its sharp-edged glory.
This passage deals with a very specific kind of vow, the herem, the devoted thing. It is a concept that is utterly foreign to us, but it was central to understanding God's holiness and His dealings with Israel, particularly in the conquest of Canaan. It teaches us about absolute surrender, the gravity of sin, the nature of God's judgment, and ultimately, it points us to the one Man who was truly and finally devoted to destruction for our sake. So let us set aside our modern squeamishness and ask the Spirit of God to give us ears to hear what He has to say to us through this difficult, but necessary, portion of His holy law.
The Text
‘Nevertheless, anything which a man devotes to Yahweh out of all that he has, of man or animal or of the fields of his own possession, shall not be sold or redeemed. Anything devoted to destruction is most holy to Yahweh. No one who may have been devoted among men shall be ransomed; he shall surely be put to death.
(Leviticus 27:28-29)
The Un-Redeemable Devotion (v. 28)
We begin with the principle of the irrevocable vow.
"‘Nevertheless, anything which a man devotes to Yahweh out of all that he has, of man or animal or of the fields of his own possession, shall not be sold or redeemed. Anything devoted to destruction is most holy to Yahweh." (Leviticus 27:28)
The chapter leading up to this point has been dealing with various vows and how things dedicated to God could be redeemed, usually by paying a valuation plus a twenty percent penalty. But this verse begins with a stark "Nevertheless." It introduces a completely different category. This is the herem. The word translated "devotes" or "devoted to destruction" is from this Hebrew root. It does not mean "dedicated" in the way we dedicate a new church building. It means something has been utterly and irrevocably given over to God.
Notice the key phrases: "shall not be sold or redeemed." This is a one-way transaction. Once something is placed under this ban, it is removed from the realm of human economy and human use forever. There is no buy-back clause. There is no changing your mind. This is the point of no return. Achan learned this lesson the hard way at Jericho. The entire city was placed under the herem. The silver and gold were to go into the Lord's treasury, and everything else was to be burned. Achan saw the "accursed thing," the devoted thing, and thought he could pull it back into his own economy. He tried to redeem what God had declared irredeemable. The result was judgment and death for him and his family. He trespassed against what was "most holy to Yahweh."
Now, we must pay close attention to that last phrase. How can something devoted to destruction be "most holy"? This is where our categories get scrambled. We think of holiness as purity, goodness, and light. And it is. But holiness, at its root, means "set apart." Something is holy because it is set apart for God's exclusive use. In the case of a priest or a temple vessel, it is set apart for service. In the case of a herem object, it is set apart for judgment. It is so contaminated by sin, so identified with rebellion against God, that the only way for it to be made "holy" is for it to be removed from the earth and given over entirely to God's destructive wrath. It is "most holy" in the sense that it belongs to God so completely that no man may ever touch it again.
This was the status of the Canaanite cities. Their sin had reached its full measure, as God told Abraham centuries earlier (Gen. 15:16). Their idolatry was a spiritual pandemic, characterized by child sacrifice and sexual perversion. To leave them standing would be to leave a virulent cancer in the land that would inevitably infect Israel. So God, as the Divine Judge, declared them herem. The conquest of Canaan was not a simple land grab; it was a massive, corporate capital punishment, a divine sanitation project carried out by the hand of Israel. It was a unique, unrepeatable event in redemptive history.
The Human Subject of the Ban (v. 29)
Verse 29 applies this principle directly and jarringly to human beings.
"No one who may have been devoted among men shall be ransomed; he shall surely be put to death." (Leviticus 27:29)
This is the verse that causes the most trouble. Does this mean an Israelite could simply "devote" his neighbor to destruction out of spite? Of course not. The law of God is a coherent whole. This is not giving a license for vigilante justice or human sacrifice, which God explicitly condemns. Rather, this is explaining the legal status of a person who has been placed under God's ban by God's own command. The primary application is to the enemies of God in the context of holy war, such as the Canaanites or the Amalekites. When God commanded Saul to put the Amalekites under the ban, and Saul spared King Agag, he was attempting to "ransom" one who had been devoted to destruction. For this act of disobedience, Samuel rebuked him and the kingdom was torn from him.
The principle is this: when God pronounces a final judgment, man has no authority to reverse it. There is no appeal. There is no ransom. The sentence must be carried out. This establishes the absolute sovereignty of God over life and death. He is the Creator; He gives life, and He has the right to take it. To deny this is to set ourselves up as judges over God, which is the very definition of arrogance.
We must affirm, without flinching, that this law was righteous and good when it was given. For God to command the execution of those whose sin had reached its fullness was an act of justice and, in a strange way, mercy. It was a mercy to the rest of the world to quarantine and eliminate such a potent source of spiritual and moral poison. It was a holy act of cosmic justice. To apologize for it is to imply that we know better than God what justice requires.
The Gospel of the Devoted One
Now, how are we to understand this today? We are not in the old covenant. The period of holy war, with Israel as a geopolitical nation executing God's judgment with the sword, is over. It was a type and a shadow that has been fulfilled in Christ. But the principle of herem has not been abolished; it has been consummated at the cross.
The apostle Paul picks up this very language. In Romans 9:3, in his anguish over his kinsmen the Jews, he says, "For I could wish that I myself were accursed [anathema] from Christ for my brethren's sake." In Galatians 1:8, he says that if anyone preaches another gospel, "let him be accursed [anathema]." The Greek word anathema is the same word the Septuagint uses to translate the Hebrew herem. It means to be devoted to destruction.
All of humanity, because of our sin, stands under the divine ban. We are all, by nature, devoted to destruction. We are guilty, and the sentence is death. There is no ransom we can pay. "No one...shall be ransomed." That is our condition. We are the men devoted to death.
But the glory of the gospel is this: God the Son stepped into our place. On the cross, Jesus Christ was made herem for us. He was made a curse for us. Paul is explicit: "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree')" (Galatians 3:13). He who was perfectly holy was made "most holy to Yahweh" in the sense of our text. He was set apart for the full outpouring of God's destructive wrath against sin. He was the one devoted among men who could not be ransomed, and so He was surely put to death.
God took all of His righteous fury against our sin, rebellion, and idolatry, and He poured it out onto His own Son. Jesus absorbed the full force of the ban. He was forsaken so that we could be accepted. He was devoted to destruction so that we could be devoted to life. He drank the cup of wrath down to the dregs so that we could drink the cup of salvation.
Therefore, the principle of herem still divides humanity. There are only two categories of people in the world. There are those who remain under the ban, who reject Christ and will therefore face the wrath of God themselves, a destruction from which there is no ransom. And there are those who, by faith, are found "in Christ." For us, the ban has already fallen. It fell on our substitute at Calvary. We are now the ones who are "most holy to Yahweh," not for judgment, but for service and for fellowship. We have been bought with a price, the precious blood of the one who was devoted in our place. Our lives, therefore, are no longer our own. They are irrevocably, un-redeemably His. And our response should be one of absolute, grateful surrender to the one who took the curse that we deserved.