NUMBERS 5

BAMIDBAR

IN THE WILDERNESS

Yahoshua suffered without the gate

- Heb 13; Num 5: 2.

If there was one injunction of the law more strenuous than another, it was that contact with death in any form, however remote or indirect, was defiling. Even to touch a bone made a man unclean: or to be touched by a man unclean from such a cause had the same effect.

We have the perfect antitype in the Lord born of a death-bound woman, and therefore made subject to death: it was

"that he, by the grace of God, might taste death for every man";

but he was the first to taste, in the process of redemption from it.

He was a "body prepared" for the work: prepared as to its power to evolve sinlessness of character, but prepared also as to subjection to that death which it was designed to abolish (2 Tim. 1:10). In him were combined the antitypical "holy things" requiring atonement,

"because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel and because of their transgressions in all their sins."

The reverence for Christ commands respect which leads some men to consider him immaculate in all senses and in no need to offer for himself, but it is not "according to knowledge". It is not consistent with the Divine objects in God

"sending forth his son in the likeness of sinful flesh".

All these objects blend together, but they are separable.

One of them was to "condemn sin in the flesh", as Paul says (Rom. 8:8). The stumblings that have taken place over this expression are doubtless due to that other truth, that Christ did no sin, and in this sense was the

"Lamb of God without spot".

But the stumblings do not get rid of the expression as affirming a truth. Some would explain it as meaning the moral condemnation of sin by Christ during his life. This cannot be the meaning in view of the statement with which it is conjoined that what was done was

"what the law could not do".

The law condemned sin so thoroughly in the moral sense that it is called "the ministration of condemnation".

Then some have suggested that it means the flesh of the sacrificial animals. This is precluded by the intimation that Christ was sent "in the likeness of sinful flesh" for the accomplishment of the work in question--the condemnation of sin in the flesh. This is, in fact, the reliable clue to the meaning. That he was sent "in the likeness of sinful flesh" for the accomplishment of the work shows that it was a work to be done in him.

Some try to get away from this conclusion (and this is the popular habit) by seizing on the word "likeness" and contending that this means not the same, but only like. This contention is precluded by the use of the same term as to his manhood:

"he was made in the likeness of men".

He was really a man, in being in the likeness of men: and he was really sinful flesh, in being in "the likeness of sinful flesh".

Paul, in Heb. 2:14-17, declares the likeness to have been in the sense of sameness:

"Forasmuch as the children were partakers of flesh and blood, it became him likewise to take part of the same".

The statement remains in its undiminished force that

"God sent his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for (as an offering for) sin condemned sin in the flesh".

It is, in fact, a complete and coherent statement of what was accomplished in the death of Christ, and a perfect explanation of the reason why he first came in the flesh, and of the reason why John the apostle insisted so strenuously on the maintenance of the doctrine that he had so come in the flesh.

Possessing sinful flesh was no sin to him, who kept it under perfect control, and

"did always those things that pleased the Father".

At the same time, being the sinful flesh derived from the condemned transgressors of Eden, it admitted of sin being publicly condemned in him, without any collision with the claims of his personal righteousness, which were to be met by an immediate and glorious resurrection.

Law of Moses Ch 18.