THE
ATONEMENT
CHAPTER XIV.
The Red Heifer. (Num. xix.)
THE book of Numbers gives us the history of the
wilderness, the testing of the people by the trials and difficulties to which
they are exposed, their failure as so tested, and the triumphant grace of Him
whose love and whose resources for His people cannot fail, and whose word is
pledged to bring them through. The ordinance of the red heifer gives us the
effects of atonement, not in forgiveness, but in the purification of the people
from uncleanness, and this in a special form, which had its peculiar
significance in relation to the wilderness.
For the wilderness is, of
course, the world as the place of our pilgrimage - a place where every thing
about us echoes the divine voice, "Arise ye, and depart; for this is not your
rest: because it is Polluted." The seal of its condition in this respect is
death, in which the life universally forfeited is removed and man given up
wholly to the corruption, which has already been inwardly his state.
Death marks the world as a wilderness before God, and for him therefore
who has the mind of God; it is a scene of death out of which we have escaped as
dead with Christ, and partakers of eternal life in Him beyond it, and
separation from which is an absolute necessity to real holiness. "Pure religion
and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and
widows in their affliction, and to keep ones self unspotted from the
world." (Jas. i. 27.)
The remedy for defilement is here typically put
before us. It is not in a new sacrifice, nor in the shedding of that blood
without which is no remission. It is in the application of that which speaks of
a sacrifice once for all completed, of wrath exhausted and gone, the ashes
alone remaining to testify of the complete consumption of the victim. In this
way the red heifer, in opposition to the many sacrifices constantly being
offered, represents alone among legal ordinances the abiding efficacy of that
which has been offered "once for all."
The victim is here a female - a
type of which I have already spoken. It is passivity, subjection, willlessness,
which we may see in the Lord in Gethsemane, whose "cup" was in fact drunk
afterward upon the cross; a red heifer, as the ram-skins of the tabernacle were
dyed red, to show how far this willless obedience in Him went. "Without spot or
blemish"- with neither defect nor deformity; and "upon which never came yoke" -
not simply sins, but any, for a yoke is an instrument to enforce
subjection, which in Him could not be. At the same time when He was saying,
"Not My will, but Thine, be done," He might have had twelve legions of angels
and gone to the Father, but would not: His was the perfection of a willless
will.
And how suited all this to express the perfection of the
obedience unto death, by which our disobedience was met and removed, and which
is to be fruitful in us as well as for us, in separating us from the
lawlessness and lusts which characterize us as fallen creatures!
The
heifer is brought forth without the camp and slain, like any sin-offering, even
the blood being burned, except what is used in the sevenfold sprinkling before
the tent of meeting, where the people went to meet with God. And into the midst
of the burning of the heifer were cast cedar wood and hyssop - types of all
nature, from the highest to the lowest (I Kings iv. 33), and scarlet - of the
glory of the world: "if any man be in Christ, it is new creation," and by the
cross is severed his connection with the old.
A man that was clean then
gathered up the ashes of the heifer, and they were laid up in a clean place
outside the camp, to be kept for the congregation of the children of Israel,
for a water of separation, a purification for sin.
A person defiled
with the dead remained unclean for seven days; on the third day and on the
seventh he was to be sprinkled with it - running water being put to it in a
vessel - and on the seventh day at even he should be clean. Sprinkling on the
third day was all-important: "if he purify not himself the third day, then the
seventh day he shall not be clean."
The reference to death as the stamp
upon the old creation makes all this clear. The third day is the resurrection
day, deliverance from death; the eighth - first day of the new week - speaks of
new creation. One cleansed by the evening of the seventh day was brought in
fact to the eighth: only by deliverance from the old creation could he be
really clean; but into this resurrection - the resurrection of Christ - is the
necessary introduction: therefore the insisting upon the third day.
Only in the power of resurrection could death become a means of
purification for the soul. We cannot be in any true sense dead to the world
except in the power of a life which is ours beyond it. But thus resurrection is
not the revival of the old, but that which links us with the new creation. This
is the united teaching of this third and seventh-day sprinklings. The power of
the Holy Ghost (the running, or "living," water) applies to the soul the death
of the cross, that death in which for us the old world ended under judgment, to
set us free from all the seductive power of things through which we pass - free
for the enjoyment of what is ours outside it. The world is but the place of the
empty cross, and He who once filled it is now entered for us into the
Fathers house, our Forerunner. This is purification of heart for him who
realizes it; power for true self-judgment, and deliverance from the corruption
that is in the world through lust.
This is "water-washing by the word."
The sacrifice is not again offered, nor the blood afresh sprinkled for him who
is thus to be cleansed. Neither acceptance nor relationship are here in
question, although just as "without holiness, no man shall see the Lord," so
"he that purifieth not himself shall be cut off from Israel."
The
lesson as far as atonement is concerned seems just this dependence of
purification on it. The water as well as the blood comes out of the side of a
dead Christ, with whom we too are dead. How shall we that are dead live any
longer in that to which we are dead?
We have now completed the types of
atonement; before our glance at the Old Testament doctrine is complete, we have
still to consider the prophets and the psalms.
Go
To Chapter Fifteen
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