the face and form once blooming in health and beauty, and beheld the sightless and sunken eyes, the ghastly features and cadaverous hue – pledges of corruption begun – while the very air of the chamber seemed to breathe the cry, “Unclean!” as they realized the instinctive recoil which love itself must feel from the very touch of the departed, and felt as Abraham, concerning the beloved Sarah, the constraint to “bury his dead out of his sight,” – as, in all this, they knew that these last offices even must be fulfilled at the expense of defilement and exclusion from the privileges of God’s earthly courts and the society of his people, for seven days, they and all Israel received a lesson of divine instruction as to the exceeding sinfulness of sin, the wages of which is death, its loathsomeness in God’s sight, its contagious diffusion and power, and its curse, to which human speech or angel eloquence could have added nothing.
4. No less impressive were the ordinances concerning leprosy. The name designated a class of diseases, some of which would appear to have been altogether miraculous in their origin, and peculiar in their symptoms, while others were attributable to natural causes. The disease was peculiar for the shocking and loathsome appearance of its victim, its poisoning the blood and pervading the whole body, and its incurable and inevitably deadly nature. It was, therefore, employed by God as, at once, an extraordinary punishment of sin, and a most fitting symbol of it, as seated in the heart and nature of man, and pervading and corrupting his whole being. (Num. xii, 10; 2 Kings v, 27; 2 Chr. xxvi, 20.) The leper was accounted as one dead (Num. xii, 12), and, therefore, excluded from his family, from the congregation and ordinances at the sanctuary, and from the very camp of Israel, where the living God walked. (Num. v, 2; xii, 14.) Thus, outcast from the abodes of men and the house of God, “the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean! Unclean! All the days wherein the plague shall be in him, he shall be defiled; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall be his habitation.” – Lev. xiii, 45, 46. How dreadful the figure thus presented to the senses of Israel, of the loathsomeness of sin in God’s sight, and of its ruinous effects upon the sinner! The person offensive with scabs and sores, the rent garments, the uncovered head, the wailing cry, “Unclean! Unclean!” while the exclusion from the house of God, and from the abodes of men, and the covered lip, proclaimed to Israel that the spiritual leper, yet in his sins, brings danger to his fellow-men with his very presence, and is an offense and loathing to God, before the eyes of whose purity he may not venture to come, save through the cleansing blood and Spirit of Christ. Hence, the cry of Isaiah, when he beheld the glory of the Lord: “Woe is me! for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” And hence, the coal of fire from off the altar of atonement, and the seraph’s assurance, “Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.” – Isa. vi, 5-7.
Thus, every way, under the idea of indwelling defilement, was sin and its source in man’s corrupted nature held up to Israel as loathsome in itself, propagated to the race and infecting all, defiling in its contact, deadly in its indwelling power, and abhorrent to the eyes of God.
Four circumstances in the ritual on these defilements are peculiar and characteristic:
1. The first of these exhibits a broad and fundamental contrast between these defilements and those which continued only till the even. The latter, as already intimated, presented the conception of an outward soiling of the living person. But the uncleanness of seven days exhibited the idea, not of surface defilement of the living, but of the loathsomeness and pollution of the dead and decaying carcass, pouring out its own corruption, and infecting all around with its unclean and abhorrent presence, – a pollution which no extrinsic or surface washing can ever cleanse.
2. The defilement was for seven days. God’s work of creation ended in the rest of the seventh day. That day was hence appropriated as a type of the final rest of Christ and his people upon the completed work of redemption. Hence, the argument of Paul: “For he spake of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works. And in this place again, If they shall enter into my rest. There remaineth therefore a rest for the people of God.” – Heb. iv, 4-9. “A rest:” literally, as in the margin, “a keeping of a Sabbath,” or, “a Sabbatism.” But the Sabbath thus reserved for God’s people, coincides with “the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.” Hence, a seven days’ uncleanness was typical of such a corruption of nature as is essential and, therefore, persistent to the end; and the exclusion of the defiled from the camp and the sanctuary signified the sentence of the judgment of the last day, when those whose natures are unrenewed, and whose sins are unpurged will be excluded from the Sabbath of redemption and from the new Jerusalem, and remain finally under the woe of the second death: “He that is filthy, let him be filthy still… For without are dogs and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.” – Rev. xxii, 11, 15.
3. The defilement was contagious. If the unclean for seven days touched a clean person, the latter was thereby defiled until the even. For, such is the inveteracy of this native corruption of the race that God’s people are liable to defilement from every intercourse and contact with the world, – a defilement, however, which they will leave behind them when the day of earthly life is ended. Therefore, “Come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you.” – 2 Cor. vi, 17.
4. This seven days’ uncleanness could not be purified without sacrificial rites, and water sprinkled by the hand of one that was clean. For nothing but the atoning merits of Christ’s one offering, and the Spirit of life which he sheds down upon his people, can enter and cleanse our defiled nature, and fit us for admission to the presence of God, or for part in the New Jerusalem. All this will more fully appear as we proceed to notice the rites of purifying appointed for the several kinds of this uncleanness, respectively.
Section XIV. —The Baptism of a healed Leper
The rites appointed for the purifying of a healed leper come under two heads, – those administered by the priest, and those performed by the person himself. When a leper was healed, he was first inspected by the priest, who went forth to him to ascertain that the healing was real, and the disease eradicated. This being ascertained, the priest took two clean birds, and had one of them killed and its blood caught in an earthen vessel, with running water. He then took the remaining bird, alive, with cedar wood, scarlet, and hyssop, and dipped all together in the blood and water; “and he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field.” – Lev. xiv, 7.
The rite which thus ended by the official decree of the priest, “He is clean,” completed the purification, properly so called. The man is now clean. The remaining ordinances were expressive of duties and privileges proper to one who is cleansed and restored to the commonwealth of Israel, and the communion of God’s house. First of these he was required to “wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean.” – Ib., vs. 8. He was now admitted to the camp, but must not yet enter his own tent, nor come to the tabernacle for seven days. On the seventh day he was again required to shave off all his hair, wash his clothes, and bathe his flesh; and “he shall be clean.” – Vs. 9.
Now, on the eighth day, he came to the sanctuary, bringing a sacrifice of a trespass offering, a sin offering, and a burnt offering. The rites attendant upon these offerings completed the ceremonial. Thenceforth, the leper resumed all the privileges of a son of Israel, in his family, in the the congregation, and at the sanctuary.
The general signification of these ordinances is evident. The priest, by whom alone the cleansing rites could be administered, was the official representative of our great high-priest, Christ Jesus. The two birds were with the priest a complex type of him who offered himself without spot to God, who was dead and is alive for evermore, and by the merits
