Numbers 19

Washing with water, sprinkling with blood, and anointing with oil have thus far been indicated as the means of ceremonial purification from defilement. In exclusive connection with uncleanness from personal association with death, there is here introduced as a special ordinance a new and peculiar means of purification. The ordinance (respecting the red heifer) is first recited, and its uses subsequently referred to. B.

The ordinance regarding the red heifer had respect to actual defilements arising from personal contact with the dead, such as the touching of a dead body, or dwelling in a tent where death had entered, or lighting on the bone of a dead man, or having to do with a grave in which a corpse had been deposited. In such cases a bodily uncleanness was contracted, which lasted seven days, and even then could not be removed but by a very peculiar element of cleansing—viz., the application of the ashes, mixed with water, of the body of a heifer, red-colored, without blemish, unaccustomed to the yoke, burned without the camp, and with cedar-wood, hyssop, and scarlet cast into the midst of the burning.

The rite respecting the red heifer presents in bold relief what was one grand design of the Law’s observances—the bringing of sin to remembrance, and teaching the necessity of men’s being purified from its pollution. It is true there was no actual sin in simply touching a dead body, or being in the place where such a body lay. In the case of ordinary persons it was even a matter of duty to defile one’s self in connection with the death of near relatives. But as the corporeal relations were here made the signs and interpreters of the spiritual, there was, in such cases, the coming, on the part of the living body, into contact with what bore on it the awful mark and impress of sin—a breathing of the polluted atmosphere of corruption, most alien to the region where Jehovah has his peculiar dwelling, and which corruption cannot inherit. Therefore, in a symbolical religion like the Mosaic, the neighborhood or touch of a dead body was most fitly regarded as forming an interruption to the intercourse between God and his people. It placed them in a condition of external unfitness for approaching the sanctuary of his presence and glory, or even for having freedom to go out and in among the living in Jerusalem. It was not an ordinance for purging away the guilt of actual sin, but the means of purification from a merely external contact with the consequences of transgression, a symbolical ordinance of cleansing a symbolical defilement. And the bearing of the whole on Christian times, with respect to the higher work of Christ, is so plainly and distinctly intimated in the Epistle to the Hebrews, that there is no need for any further comment: “If the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctified to the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God! Whoever looks with this view to the ordinance, will see in it the perfect purity and completeness of Christ’s character, the corrupt and loathsome nature of that for which he died, and the sole as well as perfect efficacy of his blood, so that he who has not this applied to his conscience must inevitably perish. P. F.

2-10. The two marks of the sin-offering here meet—that it must be in and for itself clean—but becomes unclean through the sin laid upon it. The heifer, therefore, must be clean and without blemish in itself; but all is impure which has to do with the act of sacrifice—i.e., with the laying on of sin upon it, with the whole process of purification: only when all is accomplished which is to serve for the purification does the water of sprinkling defile no more. Then is sin and death overcome by the Divine power of life. In all this may we easily perceive a type of the true offering for sin (Heb. 9:13; 2 Cor. 5:21). Gerl.

But why did the Law make a dead corpse such a defiling thing? (1) Because death is the wages of sin, entered into the world by it, and reigns by the power of it. Death to mankind is another thing from what it is to other creatures. It is a curse, it is the execution of the Law, and therefore the defilement of death signifies the defilement of sin. (2) Because the Law could not conquer death nor abolish it and alter the property of it, as the Gospel does by bringing life and immortality to light and so introducing a better hope. Since our Redeemer was dead and buried death is no more destroying to the Israel of God, and therefore dead bodies are no more defiling; but while the Church was under the Law, to show that it made not the comers thereunto perfect, the pollution contracted by dead bodies could not but form in their minds melancholy and uncomfortable notions concerning death, while believers now through Christ can triumph over it. O grave, where is thy victory? Where is thy pollution? H.