The Pulpit Commentary — Numbers — Section 264

One of the chief lessons of the ceremonial law. When the grnce of God touches the heart, on,i of its first effects is to open the heart to feel this. "Lorcl, I am vile." As habits of personal cleanliness make a man loathe himself when he has been touched with filth, so the grace of God makes a man lof\the himself for sin. 2. There is provision in Christ for makin~ men clean. Hie blood purges the conscience from dead works to eerve the livmg God. 8. Of this provision we must not omit to avail ourselves. Wilful neglect of the blood of sprinkling is presumptuous sin.-B. Ver. 11.-Dejilement by contact wi,th the dead. The law of Moses was a yoke which neither the fathers of the nation nor their descendants were able to bear. It would be difficult to name any part of the law in regard to which Peter's saying was more applicable than it is to the regulations here laid down regarding rlefilernent by the dead. They must have been not only irksome in a high degree, but trying to some of the purest and most tender of the natural affections. I. For WUAT ARE TUE PROVISIONS OF THE LA w? 1. Contact with a dead body rendered the person unclean, and so disabled him from enjoying the privileges of the sanctuary. Many an Israelite would, like Jacob, desire that a beloved son should be with him when he died, to hear his last words and put his hand upon his eyes. Many a Joseph would covet the honour of paying this last tribute of filial affection. Yet the son who closed his father's eyes found himself branded by the law as unclean, so that if it happened to be the passover time, he could not keep the feast. The same unwelcome disability befell any one who, walking in the field, came upon a dend body and did his duty by it as a good citizen. When a company of neighbours 11ssembled to comfort some Martha or Mary whose brother had died, and to bear the mortal remains to the burial-place, this net of neighbourly kindness rendered every one of them unclean. Our Lord, when he entered the chamber of death in Jairus' house, and when he touched the bier nt the gate of Na.in, thereby took upon himself legal defilement and its consequences. Not only so; if a man happened to touch a grave or a human bone, he contracted defilement, and would have been chargeab'e with presumptuous sin, as a defiler of the sanctuary, if he had ventured thereafter to set foot within the house of the Lord. 2. The defilement consequent on confact with the dead was defilement of the graver sort. Many forms of defilement only disabled till sunset, and were removed by simply washing the person with water. Defilement by the dead lasted a whole week, and could be removed only by the sprinkling of the water of purification on the third and the seventh days: an irksome rule. 8. Hence all specially devoted persons in Israel were forbidden to pay the last offices of kindness to deceased friends. A priest might not defile himself for any except his nearest blood relations: his father, or mother, or brother, or unmarried sister. As for the high priest, he was forbidden to defile himself even for these. Anti the same stringent prohibition applied to the N azatite also. II. WHAT WAS THE REASON OF THIS REMARKABLE LAW? AND WHAT DOES rr TEACH us? 1. According to some it was simply n sanitary regulntion. The sugges- tion is not to be wholly set aside. So long as this law was in force extrnmural interment must have been the rule. No city in Israel contained n crowded burial- ground, diffusing pestilence within its walls, nor was any synagogue made a place of interment. Much less did the Israelites ever revert to the Egyptian custom of giving a place within their houses to the emb11lmed bodies of deceased friends. In theso respects the provisions of the Mosaic law anticipated by 3000 years the teaching of our modem sanitary science. However, this intention of the law was certainly not the principal one. 2. Another view of it is suggested by Heh. ix. 14: "The blood of Christ shall purge your conscience from dead works to serYe the Ii ving God. 11 Dead works are works which have in them no breath of spiritual life. Transgressions of God's law are dead works; so also are "duties II not animated with II loving regard for the glory of God. Such works are de11d, and, being dead, defile the conscience, so that it needs to be pu1ified by the blood of Christ. 8. But the chief reason of the law is, without doubt, to be sought in the principle that death is tlie wage$ of sin. This principle, taught so plainly in Rom. v. and I Cor. xv.:.J was not unknown to the Old Testament Church. It is taught in the story of the nil, and is implied in Ps. ll:C, 1 "the prayer of Moses." The habit of making light of death-as if it wrre nu  248 THE BOOK OF NUllBERS. (en. xix. 1-22.