Num. 19
Of the use of the third day and the seventh day in Num. 19:1212He shall purify himself with it on the third day, and on the seventh day he shall be clean: but if he purify not himself the third day, then the seventh day he shall not be clean. (Numbers 19:12), I should not give any very dogmatically certain interpretation, drawing its meaning more from the experiences pointed to by the figure than from directly scriptural proofs. " Third" is little used in scripture as a number to which meaning is attached; it is, however, somewhat as that which is beyond two. Two seems to import completeness by corroboration in witness; the third more than enough, and hence, also, what leaves the previous state whose witness is complete. It is here used, I believe, only as a division of seven.
But the moral bearing I apprehend is this. The red heifer was a provision for defilement in the way-hence introduced into the Book of Numbers, not in Leviticus. Its use was not to found communion by blood (though that groundwork was first laid and perfectly laid, in that the blood was sprinkled seven times there where Jehovah was to meet the people), but to restore communion interrupted by defilement. The sign (the ashes) of sin having been consumed long ago, was put into running water, and the unclean sprinkled with it the third day. For two days he lay under the uncleanness-must feel it as such. There was no haste in restoration to communion till the privation of it, and thus the uncleanness of sin, was felt. Then in the water (the application by the word in the power of the Holy Ghost), the sense that the sin which interrupted communion was put away before God was given, after the full witness in the soul of the evil. The man was brought out of it in the sense of the grace that put it away, and that cleansed from it; and connected the sense of sin, not with the bitterness of lost communion, but with the grace that had put it away: giving a deeper and more justifying sense of it in connection with grace, making us judge it with God in grace; not in the sense of being, as to enjoyment, without Him, and the Holy Ghost a reprover. Still this is not communion; it is not the soul occupied with God without the conscience having to be exercised, but the conscience in exercise, though now no longer a bad one, but in a renewed sense of grace and goodness. Judging the evil thence, one is in a sense purified, but not so as to be peacefully in communion with God; enjoying Christ for His own precious excellences, which we do in communion. When the full work is wrought; when this purifying is complete, and grace in respect of sin is fully entered into, then communion is entered into, which leaves sin and all thoughts about it behind. The grace that has purified in making us judge sin according to grace makes us now enjoy grace without any more thinking of sin-in a word, enjoy God. Communion is restored, and in the full acceptableness of the offering of Christ understood and enjoyed. I enter into the presence of, and communion with, God-sin, as the subject of my thoughts, being wholly left behind. This is the seventh day. All is complete.