Today we read the continuation of the commandments about holiness, only now they are not imperative but prohibitive. We consider it quite normal to see, say, in the instructions for a washing machine or binoculars, points that strictly specify what must not be done because it would be destructive for the device. Nor does it raise questions when a coach forbids an athlete certain foods or stops his harmful habits. Yet when it comes to moral life, protest often arises in us: why is something forbidden? How can anyone forbid me anything?

When we understand that commandments of the moral and religious order are also a description of a certain path along which a person seeking God is called to walk, we will see that in spiritual life there are also natural restrictions on what can be destructive to our relationship with Him.

Reading the Book of Leviticus, it is easy to notice that everything connected in one way or another with debauchery, marital unfaithfulness, and violations of the seventh commandment in general often appears here next to mentions of such things as pagan cults, magic, spiritism, mediumship, and the like. With regard to the things listed, one can speak of violations of the first and second commandments: they are the ones that forbid believing Yahwists both participation in pagan cults and various kinds of practices connected with dark spirituality like those mentioned above. Why then do violations connected with the sexual sphere stand in the book alongside violation of the first commandment, and also the second?

The simplest and most obvious answer is that many pagan cults of antiquity involved direct violation of the seventh commandment. This was so, for example, in the case of ritual prostitution connected with the cult of the Great Goddess, which was widespread throughout the Near East, including Palestine. Yet there was also something else linking debauchery and magic more deeply than it may appear at first glance.

This concerns the power for life given by God to human beings, the energy without which life in general is impossible. From the biblical point of view, a human being is a "living soul," and in the Bible the soul is not a static structure but a flow, a dynamic reality. This dynamism is the manifestation of the life force given by God to human beings, and its forms can be very different.

Sexual life is also one of these forms, and therefore it is blessed by God, but only when it does not become an end in itself, only as long as it remains an organic part of that fullness of relationship between two people which is called marriage. If a person uses sexuality solely as an instrument for giving himself pleasure, he thereby abuses the possibilities God has given him, wasting the power granted to him for attaining the fullness of life.

All forms of magic are the same kind of abuse, as are all attempts in general to use God's power present in creation for one's own purposes without turning to God and asking His blessing. In both cases, the issue is the abuse of the possibilities God has given to human beings, with the corresponding consequences.

What is the Torah? Why does God give a person His commandments and laws? At first glance it may appear that the matter concerns a moral and ritual code that has meaning, especially if we speak of ritual, only within a concrete religious tradition. But what matters to God is not ritual, not morality, and not even religion. For Him, all that has been named is, in essence, only a means. The goal is what the biblical authors call sanctification.

Here the issue is no longer the observance of certain norms and rules that God needs for some reason, nor even morality as such, although without the observance of moral norms relationships of love with one's neighbor will hardly be possible. The issue is that entirely real, though not noticeable to everyone, effect that the presence of God has on all and everything that comes into contact with this presence. Of course, a stone remains a stone in such contact, wood remains wood, and metal remains metal. And yet stone, wood, and metal change after such contact. Before us is no longer simply nature, but nature and something else, something that is not in nature and cannot be there by definition. That very "something" that transforms nature when it is touched by the breath of the Kingdom brought into the world by the Savior.

Of course, in the times when the Book of Leviticus was written, the Kingdom was not yet so near, but its effect was still felt, and the result of this effect was called sanctification. For a human being, sanctification was connected with that meeting which a person, unlike stone, metal, wood, and even an animal, had to recognize and experience consciously. And here the commandment was absolutely necessary: otherwise the human heart could not be prepared for this meeting. That means there could be no question of the sanctification of a person without the Torah, without the commandments given by God. This is precisely why the Torah was given to man. This is precisely how, in its time, it would become, according to the apostle's word, a "guardian leading to Christ."