Week 39

This Weeks Passage: Numbers 19:1 – 22:1

This week God provides some direction for us when dealing with the pain of death.  There is a sub-plot that occurs in chapter twenty that is not mentioned, but we’re supposed to know it has occurred.  Thirty-eight years has passed since chapter 18 and all of the generation has died and now the transition into the land begins and the transition starts with Miriam dying.  Right after she dies there is no water again.  Miriam was the conduit for all that had occurred.  She started the whole process when Moses was a baby and she has been by his side the entire time.  It is said that there was a well that provided the water for Israel during those years and as Mariam died the well stop giving water.  It was a moment for God to allow the important role she played to be understood with the stopping of the water.  It provided a picture of the flow of death and mourning as we see Moses and Aaron no doubt mourning over the loss of their sister.

Not only this but we can see this like a symbol of what occurs in death as the flow of water stops it is not permanent but helps us to see life through the lens of the community.  Life must go on and the flow of water also was to go on but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop to recognize and mourn the life that has passed.  As a community, its important to understand that no one generation will complete the goal of the community.  It will pass to the next generation and then the next and with each one taking the community further and deeper than the previous one.

The Jews have a saying that God provides the remedy before the problem and we see the remedy in chapter 19 with a strange law concerning the red heifer.  It’s a purification ritual for if you come in contact with the dead and then wanted to come into the Sanctuary or presence of God.  What makes it difficult to understand is that it purifies the unclean but also makes the clean impure.  There is no other law like it and really one that no one can fully comprehend.  We’ve already talked about the importance of coming into the presence of God in an impure state.  This is not sin, this is contamination from the world.  Death cannot stand in the presence of God so if one came in contact with the dead in any way they had to be purified or they could not come into the temple.  God gave them this purification process that the priest performed that could only be done with the red heifer.  It’s a pure red cow that doesn’t have any adjacent black hairs.  A person had to be purified this way and we see numerous times in the New Testament of people being purified through this process.  (John 11:55, Acts 21:6) and even in the writer of Hebrews is referring to it in Hebrews 9:13-14.

Death is not just contact with a corpse.  There are several things that bring us into contact with death.  The biggest being a women’s menstruation process.  She is purging out an egg which could have been a life that in essence has died and that is why women had to separate themselves during that process.  Different types of sicknesses like leprosy is the death of the flesh and required purification once healed.  Sexual diseases or different types of discharges all have a death process that had to be avoided.  Why is this important?  Because death is the last enemy to be defeated and we often fail to fully understand its affect on humanity and our ability to stand before God without a purification process.

The process that the priests took to prepare the red heifer for purification of others made the priest unclean and in need of purification.  So what purifies the impure makes those who are pure impure and in need of purification.  Even Solomon with all of his wisdom confesses in Ecclesiastes 7:23 that he couldn’t comprehend it.  The red heifer sacrifice occurred outside of the sanctuary on the Mount of Olives.  The red heifer was led from the temple to outside the city where the sacrifice was made.