Cleansing of the Leper
The 13th chapter told how the priest could decide if a sick person had leprosy, and if he had, what should be done with him—he must be shut out of the camp, his clothes should be torn, and his head bare; with a covering on his upper lip, he was to cry, “Unclean, unclean.”
Not a word is said about a cure for the disease, but the 14th chapter goes right on to tell about a man who had been cured. As we have said, leprosy is a type, or picture, of sin, and there is no cure for sin, except through God’s power. The priest must go outside of the camp of Israel to meet the leper. Did not Jesus come from heaven to meet us, and do everything for us sinners?
We will think of this leper who has been healed; then as a sinner who has been converted. Sin is not any more the thing that he lives In. As Rom. 6:1111Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 6:11) puts it, he is to reckon himself to be “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” But that is not the end of the story—it is only its beginning.
Two birds, alive and clean, and cedar wood and scarlet and hyssop are brought. Let us see what is done with them. The priest commands that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water. It is that old, old story in God’s Word about the shedding of blood, for this is a type of Jesus, God’s Lamb. The “earthen vessel” tells of the Lord Jesus being really man. and the “running water” is to show that His death was connected, as was His life, with the power of the Holy Spirit.
But the other bird, is alive; what shall be done with it? There was a type needed of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and the living bird is a type of that. It was to be set free, but first it must be dipped in the blood of the dead bird, to link together the living and the dead, as Jesus who was dead, and lives again.
But together with the living bird, the cedar wood, the scarlet and the hyssop are all dipped in the blood. What does that mean? Perhaps a glance at 1 Kings 4:3333And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes. (1 Kings 4:33) will help. The cedar was the tallest and grandest of trees; and the hyssop was almost a common weed. These and the scarlet are to tell us, when dipped in the blood of the dead bird, of what this world is to be to a Christian—all changed for him by Jesus’ death. Everything is stained, so to speak, with the blood of the rejected Jesus, for the world will not have Him.
Now the man has to be sprinkled seven times with the blood; the priest can say that he is clean, and the living bird is let loose. Do you see that all that is done is connected with the blood?
“The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleaneth us from all sin,” and the believer is “redeemed with the precious blood of Christ.” The cured leper, and the saved sinner, do nothing to help themselves; God (or the priest who here takes the place of God in the type) does everything. Next, the man washes his clothes, shaves off all his hair and washes himself in water. He has been pronounced clean already, on the authority of God’s Word, and now he can do something for himself; he changes his ways, he gives up bad companions, we will say. He makes a clean, new start, as he goes now into the camp; he is taken in as one who has to do with God.
The man who was a leper, but is one no more—healed and cleansed—is inside the place where God is named. If we look at him as a sinner who has confessed his case to God, we can say, Here is one who has been redeemed with the precious blood of Christ. Surely he ought to be happy, whether we think of this man as a cleansed leper, or a confessed and forgiven sinner! But he can be happier, and while God’s children are going to be happy in eternity beyond any one’s present understanding, He has a way to make them more and more happy here, before even they go to be with Him in His eternal home.
First, let us think again about verse 6. Have you noticed that the cedar wood, the scarlet and the hyssop, after they were dipped in the blood, are never spoken of again? I think that is God’s way of telling those who love Him, and seek to please Him, that the world has been changed for them by the Lord’s death, so that they should not love its ways any more. We saw last time that these things were brought in to give us a picture in our minds of the world in its pride and its nature.
Then I think God means us to learn from the “seventh day” of verse 9, that the man in God’s purposes has been thinking of what has been done for him, and the more he thinks about his new place near to God, (because he is no longer outside, in misery, without hope, but cleansed and inside the enclosure that separated the people whom God had chosen from the world around) the more he sees that what comes out from the old bad heart, is not fit for one who belongs to Him, so he cuts off very carefully his hair, even his eyebrows, so careful is he to put away everything that, in a symbol or type, might be called the fruit of the old, bad tree, the believer’s old nature, the one he had before he was born again. (John 3). And again he washes himself and his clothes. If he understood what it all meant, he would be saying to himself,
“All my old ways and the company I used to keep that are not suitable now, for I belong to God, I am done with, and with God’s help I shall live for Him. I lived long enough in my old life.”
The Eight Day
The “eighth day” finishes everything: it is a new beginning; the first day of a new week; the dawn of a new life, practically. The man brings to the priest to be offered, those sacrifices and offerings which we have been talking about in connection with the earlier chapters of Leviticus. Every one of the offerings are here, except the peace or thank offering. The first one we read of here is the trespass offering, because he has been a trespasser against God: He brings first that which calls to mind what he had been.
We have talked about these interesting sacrifices before, though we might well go over them again.
Then like the priests in chapter 8:4, 30, the man is now set apart to God in thought, and act, and way, by the putting of the blood of the trespass offering on his right ear, thumb, and great toe; and after that, the oil which stands, in these types, for the Holy Spirit. The remainder of this oil is poured on his head—he is to be led by the Spirit of God, as well as sealed by the Spirit.
Verses 21 to 32, show again how God thinks of the poor, but in the answer to this in our lives, it is not poor people that are meant, but those whose thoughts of the Lord are not as worthy of Him as they should be, and that takes in you and me, dear young Christian.
Though we do not think of Him as we ought, yet we are not to be discouraged, but to give Him the best we have, and if we do, we shall find our hearts growing warmer in love towards Him.
Now as we say “good bye” to the cleansed leper, or as we should prefer to say, the saved man, we can think of him in all that we have read, with everything to make him happy for ever, if he believed all that God had said—if he knew what those shadows and types stood for.
Once he was an outcast, now in the family of God; once wretched and miserable, now cleansed; once apart from God, now set apart to God, and all as the direct result of the dying of Jesus on the cross. He has seen the Lord in the trespass offering, the sin offering, the burnt offering and the meat offering, telling of Him as offered for the sinner’s sins, and as devoted in death, as in life here below.
Is this all true of my dear young reader?
What a wonderful book the Bible is!
In the Land
Here we come to something different from what has gone before, for the verses begin with, “When ye be come into the land of Canaan.”
They were yet at Mount Sinai, and many years were to pass before the people came to the land which God had appointed for them. But God has been speaking to them, as we have been noting, of sin in the person and in his habits, looked at as leprosy.
One side has not been mentioned,—sin in the Church, in the meeting which we are connected with. The last four verses in this chapter show that it was God’s purpose to tell in these chapters 13 and 14 what should be done when leprosy was found, and what should be done when it was put away. By leprosy, as the Old Testament foreshadowed the New, we may say that in type sin, generally speaking, is meant.
If it was even thought to be in the house, the priest was to be told. Several scriptures tell us that those who profess to be Christians, and to be obedient to the Word of God, are looked at by God as a spiritual house, or dwelling place; an enclosure of which the Lord Jesus is to be the center.
I will not go with my young readers very much into details, interesting though they are, but just to say this, that the Holy Spirit has here given directions about sin of a serious kind coming in among those who profess to be gathered to the name of the Lord Jesus, in obedience to His Word.
If sin is found among them, the guilty one or ones are to be put away (verse 40), but if it were so that the whole company was infected, the only thing that could be done would be for the godly ones from outside to “come and look, and, behold, it the plague be spread in the house, it is a fretting leprosy in the house: it is unclean.” It would have to be set aside as a house owned of God. Sin and Holiness cannot go on together: God and allowed sin cannot be united.
This scripture shows us, that we who are really the Lord’s, we who know Him as Saviour and Lord, need to be most careful about sin. In every way, the Word of God is to be our guide, and in these days of man’s will, and Satan’s power, those who fear the Lord, must be always on the watch, lest Satan entrap us, either ourselves individually, or the meeting, for he has many devices, many traps for unwary feet.
There is a remedy, and verses 49 to 53 tell us that in the shadow-way of the Old Testament, it is always confession, and “The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.” Praise His name for that!
Do you walk with God? Is the Lord Jesus the One you are trying to set first in your life? I trust He is. See, then, that in everything He is first, not yourself, nor friends nor relations, and you will be led on in His paths to glory.