Numbers 19:11–12

In every case a person became defiled by contact with death, or with the result of death. No one who was unclean could claim ignorance as an excuse. No one could deny what death was. It was the clearest and most absolute proof of sin: "In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." "The wages of sin is death." Its consequences made sin plain. So the man who touched death had no excuse to offer.

The ordinance of the red heifer was not only for the priests or the Levites; it was for the whole congregation... The sprinkled blood, as on the Passover night, keeps us safe from judgment. The great day of atonement sets out the full answer of the cross — a perfect redemption. It meets the need of guilty sinners and establishes new relationships between God and the redeemed. In a word, both of these ordinances have the sinner in view. The red heifer is instead a provision for believers, to cleanse them from all defilement along the way. It is no less necessary for the saint than the shed blood is for the sinner.

He cannot tolerate any uncleanness on those with whom He stoops to walk, and in whom He dwells. He can pardon and blot out. He can heal, cleanse and restore. But He cannot approve unjudged evil, or allow it on His people... True, we are not defiled today by touching "a dead body, a human bone, or a grave." These things stood for moral and spiritual things. We are in danger of touching them every day and every hour.

It shows, too, that a saint may not always bring defilement on himself by his own act. He may come into touch with defilement, even without knowing it, and so be defiled and need the "water of purification." One may have to judge some sin in the assembly, and listening to the sordid story may defile the mind, so that he needs a purification.

But this act of restoration does not give us the idea of either a slight or a rapid process. We know that sometimes a long time passes before someone who has felt his uncleanness is fully restored. As we have seen, the man was unclean "seven days," during which the process of restoration was going on. Seven, in the language of types, means what is complete. So we learn that a fully adequate time must pass, in which he may know certain experiences, before he could be fully restored. In our case that time may be short or long.

First her blood was sprinkled seven times, in full, before the tent of meeting. On that basis the rest of the sacrifice was burned to ashes, as a standing purification for sin. Then, if an Israelite became defiled, the remedy was not to sprinkle the blood again. The unclean person was sprinkled instead with the water of separation — running water mixed with some of the ashes of the burnt heifer. The Spirit and the word of God make the defiled soul feel what his trifling with sin cost Christ, the Son of God. Christ bore the unsparing judgment of it all before God, when He was made sin for him.

It shows how small a matter is enough to check and hinder communion. Sometimes this comes from circumstances we had no control over, as a man dying in a tent made everyone in it unclean. And yet in every instance we find the exact way of restoration, provided in grace. It teaches lessons especially to us, who are travelling on to our rest through a region of sin and death.

If a man tampered with sin, God at least would not make light of his sin. He would let the soul gain by being troubled about it. It was useless for such a person to say: I am sprinkled with the blood. I am clean. Why should I trouble myself more about the sin? Such thoughts do not come from the Holy Spirit... The blood is not the appointed way for meeting sin afterwards. The flesh uses that to make light of sin. Here it was not the blood that purified, but the ashes of the heifer. What did they represent? The full proof of judgment.

The ashes are the death of Christ, and the running water is the energy of the Holy Spirit of God bringing to my soul what Christ passed through. He says: Christ has died for you. He has borne the judgment of God for you. And this very sin that you found pleasure in drew from His soul that agonising cry, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" And He works in my soul the deep sense of what a wretch I am, for I have been finding pleasure in what cost Him pain.

It was not permitted to purify oneself on the first day. Am I wrong in thinking that we might have assumed beforehand that this haste was much the best course? Why not at once? God ordered it not for the first day but the third. Defilement can settle on the spirit. When anything succeeds in interrupting communion with God, it is of deep moral importance that we fully realise our offence... The Israelite had to remain until the third day under a sense of his sin. A hasty expression of sorrow does not prove genuine repentance for sin.

The man who thinks he has done everything by confessing his sin the moment he was defiled is usually more or less superficial. The man who puts off humbling himself tends to let the delay deaden his conscience. Satan persuades him that the fault is not so serious, that many others have acted as badly; and so the soul gets sleepy, and forgets how grave the sin is.

The first application on the third day did not restore the Israelite. Nor does the believer's first grasp of the sacrifice of Christ, which the Holy Spirit presses home on his conscience, restore the soul to communion. That first grasp gives the sense that the sin has been put away by the sacrifice of Christ. The second application is the full restoration of the soul to God, with the sense of His grace triumphing over the sin.

The third day is emphasised as the resurrection day: "if he does not cleanse himself on the third day and on the seventh day, he will not become clean." The "living water" pictures, as always, the Spirit of God. He brings the soul to understand its association with Christ in resurrection, and so makes the death of the cross effective in purifying us from the world. Still, the man is not clean until the evening of the seventh day — ready for the eighth, which begins a new week and the entrance into new creation.