The irksome and humiliating nature of the regulations concerning uncleanness and purifying were very efficient means of separating between the believing and the profane. As we shall presently see, occasions of uncleanness were of almost daily occurrence, in every house. These required a conscientious watchfulness and assiduity, in guarding against defilement, and in using the appointed rites of purifying, which often involved the interruption and expense of journeys to the sanctuary and offerings there.
The communion of the church of Israel thus consisted of those only, with their families, who added to the obligations of a public profession of faith, a fidelity to all the requirements of the law, its moral precepts, its ritual observances, its tithes and offerings, its rites of purifying and its annual feasts. In a word, the account given of Zacharias and Elizabeth describes the character required, in order to fellowship in the church of Israel: “Righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.” – Luke i, 6. Such, and such only, were the clean, to whom the privileges of Israel’s communion belonged. To them they were certified by the seal of baptism.
Section XII. —Circumcision and Baptism
It is commonly assumed that baptism has come into the place and office of circumcision. This I conceive to be a mistaken view, which involves the whole subject in confusion. Circumcision is the distinctive and peculiar seal of the Abrahamic covenant. While it is true, that in that covenant, as relating to the terms of salvation, all believers were accounted as seed of Abraham, and heirs of the promises, it is equally true that, by its terms, peculiar blessings unspeakably great were assured to the seed of the patriarch after the flesh. Not only was Christ to come of his flesh; not only was the church to be for fifteen centuries constituted of his offspring, but Paul moreover testifies, that richer blessings than they have ever yet enjoyed are to be bestowed on Israel and on the Gentiles through Israel, in the coming future: “If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fullness?.. For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead?” – Rom. xi, 12, 15. This the apostle, futhermore, puts upon the ground that “the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” – Ib. 29. It was with a view to this relation of the covenant to Abraham’s natural seed, that circumcision was appointed as its seal. Said God: “I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee.” – Gen. xvii, 7. Hence, by circumcision, the token of the covenant was set in the flesh of the males, through whom the descent is counted. So long, therefore, as the church was, for the divine purposes, restricted to the family of Israel, the rite of circumcision was necessary as a prerequisite condition of admission to its privileges, because it was the seal of incorporation by birth or adoption into that family. But this did not constitute admission into the church. The Sinai covenant had its own baptismal seal. The church consisted, not of Israel, the circumcised; but only of the clean of Israel. Of this, baptism was the token and seal. It hence resulted that when the restriction was removed, and the gospel was given to the Gentiles, emancipated from the yoke of circumcision, baptism remained unchanged in place or office, the original and only seal of actual admission to the fellowship and privileges of the church of God. Of all this we shall see more hereafter.
Part III.
ADMINISTERED BAPTISMS=SPRINKLINGS
Section XIII. —Unclean Seven Days
In the laws of Moses there were two grades of uncleanness defined – uncleanness of seven days, and uncleanness till the even. The former was a symbol of that essential corruption which is in us by nature, to which are essential the redeeming blood of Christ and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, without which no man can see God in peace. Uncleanness till the even symbolized those casual defilements to which God’s renewed people are liable by contact with the evil of the world. The ritual, concerning the uncleanness of seven days, was designed to signalize the light in which man’s apostate nature, and the depravity and sin thence resulting, appear in the sight of a God of ineffable holiness. To this conception the word unclean was designed to give expression, the intense meaning of which is liable to escape the casual reader of the Scriptures. It signified, not the mere external soiling of the living person, but death, corruption, and rottenness within the heart, the fermenting source of pollution poured forth in the outward life. To impress us with a just sense of the exceeding evil of this thing the Spirit employs every variety of figure expressive of deformity and loathsomeness. In the primitive faith, of which the book of Job is a record, it is characterized in language which is a key-note to all the Scriptures on the subject. “Behold he putteth no trust in his saints” (his holy angels); “yea, the heavens are not pure in his sight. How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water.” – Job xv, 15, 16. Says the Psalmist, “The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand and seek God. They are all gone aside; they are all together become filthy.” – Psa. xiv, 3. Here the word “filthy” is in the margin rendered “stinking.” It is the same in the original as in the above place in Job, and means the offensiveness of putrefaction. David, in his penitential Psalm, indicates his sense of this radical evil of his nature. “Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin… Behold I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me and I shall be whiter than snow… Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” – Psa. li, 2-10. Isaiah and other sacred writers represent the same evil by the figures of the vomit and filthiness of a drunken debauch, and by every kind of abominable and loathsome thing. (Isa. xxviii, 8; Prov. xxx, 12.) By the designation, unclean, the moral deformity and offensiveness of Satan and the “unclean spirits,” his angels, are described. And in the accounts of the riches of grace and glory in store for the church, the crowning feature is the exclusion of the unclean. “A highway shall be there, and a way; and it shall be called, The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it.” – Isa. xxxv, 8. The church is called upon for this cause to exult: “Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city; for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean.” – Ib. lii, 1. And again, John, in the vision of the glory of the new Jerusalem, which crowns and closes his revelation, says of her: “And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth” (literally, “any thing unclean”), “neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie; but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” – Rev. xxi, 27.
For the purpose of inducing a profound sense of this evil and loathsomeness of sin, as working in the heart, the ordinances respecting the uncleanness of seven days were appointed, each having its own lesson.
1. The birth of a child was the actual propagation, from the parents, of part in the uncleanness of the apostate nature. It was, therefore, attended with natural phenomena, and marked by ritual ordinances which characterized it, and every function connected with it, as unclean and defiling. Emphasis was thus given to the challenge, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.” – Job xiv, 4.
2. Running issues of all kinds were appropriated as symbols of the corruption of man’s nature, festering within, and breaking forth in putrescent streams of depravity and sin in the active life. (Ezek. xvi, 6, 9.)
3. Death is “the wages of sin” (Rom. vi, 23), and physical death is a terrible emblem of its loathsome and accursed nature. And as sin and the curse are diffused to Adam’s seed by the very contagion of nature, this, their symbol, was ritually endowed with the same contagious character. He that touched the dead was reckoned no longer among the living but the dead. He was, therefore, cast out from the camp, from his family, the sanctuary, and the privileges of the covenant. To them all he was dead. He was unclean.
