The ashes of the Heifer in Num. 19 were but or only a remembrance. The thing itself, “ashes,” would intimate that. It was the remains of the victim, and not the victim itself: It is not atonement, but cleansing. It is the washing of the feet, and not the washing of the body. It is the personal action of the Lord in heaven, upon the remembrance or virtue of His own accomplished redemption at Calvary.
But in that same chapter (Num. 19) we see the sensitiveness of divine holiness. The slightest touch of anything dead, conveyed pollution. Yea, the priest who prepared the victim, the Israelite who buried the ashes, the Israelite who sprinkled the unclean were all alike unclean, and had to wash themselves, for they had dealt with that which dealt with sin, and that was enough to make washing needful. They were outside the sanctuary till they were cleansed.
But, beloved, how will all this magnify the Lord Jesus, when we think of His life in connection with this. He was ever dealing with sin and the results of it. He was raising the dead, He was cleansing the leper, He was touched by the polluted, He was allowing the approach and the contact of all kinds of defiled ones. And yet, unstained in the midst of all—just because He took in relation to all, not merely the place of a Priest or an Israelite, but the place of the cleansing Victim.
The Heifer is the only thing (the ashes for sprinkling) that is undefilable in Num. 19 And Jesus is the only One that was here alike undefilable. Instead of pollution getting into Him through the touch, virtue went out of Him to dismiss the power of death and blot out the stain.
The Heifer was without blemish and never had yoke. She was pure, and she was free. Beautiful premonitions of Jesus! He was free as well as spotless, which none are but “Jehovah’s Fellow.”
Indeed, Christ’s relationship to sin, is God’s. In Genesis man became like God, in knowing good and evil—but man knew it, because he had brought himself under the power of evil; God knows it as being essentially and infinitely above it. Man touching it, sympathizes with it; God touching it, withers it. And so, Jesus.
Jesus was ever dealing with sin in the days of His flesh, but was as unspotted at the end as He was at the beginning—for He dealt with it either as the Victim who put it away, or as the God of holiness, that is in Himself supremely above it; in whose presence it cannot abide and who touching it, dismisses it, and withers it.