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Your Problems are Greater Than You Can Solve

Last week we reflected on what God had to say to us through Leviticus 16.  It’s a rather tedious story with a lot of emphasis on ceremonial concerning what happened on the Day of Atonement.  Most notably, Leviticus 16 tells us that the scapegoat which took the sins of the people into the wilderness, never to return.  The story of the scapegoat points forward to the Ultimate Scapegoat, Jesus Christ.  This week, we’re turning forward a few pages to the fifth chapter of the Book of Numbers.

 

Numbers 5 is a strange passage. It talks a lot about physical impurities. It seems a little harsh at first.  If you have a physical impurity, you’re excluded from the camp.   It doesn’t seem fair. You’re part of God's chosen people. You’re part of God's covenant people. You’re a true blue-blood Israelite, and yet you are sent out of the camp. Sounds harsh, doesn't it?  But there’s another way to look at this ordinance.   One commentator suggests that this regulation may have given birth to the idea of a hospital, where all those who are afflicted with contagious disorders are put into particular wards where they receive medical treatment.

 

But there’s more to this passage than physical impurities and how you deal with them.  Numbers 5 delivers a message about defilement and how it excludes us from the enjoyment of communion with God and with His people. As you read these ceremonial defilements that are spoken about in Numbers 5, it’s easy to miss the great theological and Christological messages for us.  There is no greater message than this one—our salvation rests not upon human effort, but upon divine intervention.  Our problem is too severe, too thorny for us to solve for ourselves.

 

Then, when we come to the New Testament, we see Jesus dealing with this very sort of ceremonial impurity in a marvelous way. He turns the situation of a ceremonially impure person in need of healing into a picture of salvation. No leper could heal himself. His condition was hopeless. He was required to be separated from the rest of society for the rest of his life. But Jesus touched lepers and made them clean.

 

Then there was the woman with the issue of blood who had been to every doctor around, but none of them could help her. She too was ostracized from the community. She rendered everyone she came into contact with ceremonially impure.  And yet one touch of the Lord’s clothing and all of a sudden she was perfectly healthy.  Impurity brought separation—separation from God and separation from others.  But Jesus overcame those problems by purifying the person who was ceremonially unclean. He did what no one else could do. The entire system of ceremonial impurity and purification was designed to make this clear. Your problems are greater than you can solve. God must solve them for you. 

 

Here’s something we learn from reading about all of those seemingly irrelevant verses in the Bible about ceremonial laws.  Every one of us is impure.   But we are made clean by Jesus Christ.