No. 1
From the Red Sea to the Jordan
The Old Testament abounds in types of the death of Christ. Adam was the figure of Him that was to come, and when God put him into a deep sleep and took from his side a rib to build for him a suitable companion, it was a figure of Christ entering into death to procure the church for Himself. When on earth the Lord called the attention of His hearers to Jonah, and told them that even as Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights, so would the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth. God’s provision of coats of skin for Adam and Eve after the fall, the offering of Abel, and call to Abraham to offer up Isaac, are among the very many types that God has given to instruct us about the death of Christ.
The Red Sea
Israel had been brought out of Egypt after God had inflicted His judgments on Pharaoh and his people, and after the people had been sheltered from the divine judgment by the blood of the Paschal lamb. Pharaoh, unrepentant, in spite of all that God had manifested of His great power, followed after the children of Israel to bring them back into bondage. His actions manifested the state of the human heart, and the blindness that can come upon those who, in self-will, set themselves in defiance of God and His will. But Pharaoh is also a type of the prince of this world who endeavoured to thwart God in His purpose to bring His people to Himself.
For Israel, their plight seemed hopeless, with the Red Sea before them, the hills on each side, and the enemy behind, or as Jehovah said to Moses, “Pharaoh will say of the children of Israel, They are entangled in the land, the wilderness has shut them in” (Ex. 14:3). Without God they would have been without hope, but with God in the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire watching over them there was no need to be afraid. God had determined to bless His people, and to make known His great power in the overthrow of His and their enemy, and all the movements of the enemy would but tend towards the accomplishment of God’s will.
Pharaoh’s determined pursuit of God’s people but led him and his hosts in to the place of judgment, to be completely vanquished and overwhelmed where they had hoped to lay hold on Israel. In the same way, Satan had led on his hosts, and the forces of this world too, both religious and political, to encompass the death of the Son of God; but that in which they had thought to triumph over the meek and lowly Jesus was the means of the overthrow of Satan and his hosts, and the judgment of the world that had taken him as its prince.
In Exodus 15, the redeemed and delivered people celebrate the mighty triumph of God, saying, “I will sing unto the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider has He cast into the sea” (verse 1). Looking back to the cross of Christ, we too can celebrate the great victory procured over every foe, for the power of death has been for ever set aside there, through Christ’s death and resurrection; and Satan’s power has been broken, for the Lord has not only annulled death, but also him that had the power of death with which he held in fear the people of God.
How great were the results of God’s triumph for Israel. They knew that God had redeemed them, and delivered them from the hand of the enemy; and they looked forward to being brought to God’s habitation, surrounding Him in the wilderness, with His tabernacle in their midst. We too know the blessings of a far greater redemption and deliverance, and what it is to have God dwelling among us, yea, what it is to be part of the “habitation of God through the Spirit.”
The effect produced on the powers of the world would also be great, “Sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina,” and later, Rahab told the spies, “We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea” (Joshua 2:10). The “dukes of Edom” would be amazed, and the mighty men of Moab would tremble, and the inhabitants of Canaan melt away. We have little idea of the great shaking that took place among the principalities and powers when the Lord Jesus went into death, and came out victorious, “having spoiled principalities and powers, He made a show of them openly, leading them in triumph” (Col. 2:15).
This great victory also anticipated the eternal reign of God, for Israel sang, “The Lord shall reign for ever and ever” (verse 18). The great resurrection chapter of the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 15 also takes us on to the eternal state, when “all things shall be subdued unto Him…that God may be all in all.” This is when the end comes, and “when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father“ (verse 24). The introduction of the eternal state, and all the blessing that God has for His people, when “they shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 22:5), is founded on the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, who entered into the place of judgment and sorrow to deliver His people from the waters of death.
The Waters of Marah
Although delivered from the fear of death, and from the hand of the enemy, God’s people have to meet the bitter circumstances of life, as had Israel after crossing the Red Sea and celebrating the power of their Deliverer. But the God whose resources met His people in Egypt in all their need, and at the Red Sea in their fear, provided for them when faced with the bitter waters of Marah. When Moses cried to the Lord because of the murmuring of the people, “The Lord showed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet” (Ex. 15:25).
For us too there is a tree, to which the Lord would direct us, that can make all the bitter waters of earth sweet to us. Let us bring the cross of Christ into all that tastes bitter down here, and we shall taste the sweetness that God provides for us. When we think of the Apostle Paul in prison, or in the distresses of a life of service to the Lord and His people, and think of how he could rejoice amidst all his trials, it is evident that he was sustained by power that did not belong to this world. It was the sense of “the love of Christ which passes knowledge” that sustained him, yea that “the Son of God loved me, and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
If bereaved of those we love in Christ there is the sorrow as having lost their affections and companionship, but “we sorrow not as others which have no hope.” The death of Christ has made all the difference to our sorrow, for we know the loved one is with Christ, which is far better, and His death has given us the hope of soon seeing our loved ones in Christ again, at His coming. Besides, we have the knowledge of Christ’s love in our sorrow, and the sympathy of Him who wept with Mary and Martha; and His companionship in the trial brings its own sweetness and gain.
When we learn that all our fairest prospects down here lie under the dark shadow of death, it brings bitterness into the soul. Indeed, every relationship that belongs to us in the realm of nature will sooner or later be terminated by death, if the Lord does not come to take us out of them. But when we consider that God has brought us into new and heavenly relationships that can never be dissolved, and has given to us hope in things that we can never lose, the bitterness is removed, and the heart is sweetly occupied with what is heavenly and eternal, things that have been procured for us through the death of Christ.
The loss of the world and its pleasures and prospects may at first bring bitterness into the soul of the young Christian, but when he sees the true character of the world in the cross of Christ, and in faithfulness to Him who loved him and died for him, refuses the allurements of the world, instead of bitterness there is sweetness, realising that this way of separation is pleasing to Him who has said to us, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15).
Although our circumstances in life may be bitter, there are joys that God provides in which there is not a trace of sorrow, even as it was with Israel on their leaving Marah, for “they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water, and threescore and ten palm trees: and they encamped there by the waters” (Ex. 15:27). This is where God would have us pitch our tents while journeying through the wilderness. Here is the refreshment of the wells His love provides, and the comfort from the shade of the palm trees. God is for His people a God of love, and the God of all comfort.
The Brazen Serpent
When King Arad the Canaanite took some of the Israelites prisoners, they vowed that they would utterly destroy their cities if God would deliver them into their hands, and this they were enabled of God to do. Yet in spite of this divine help, the people when discouraged because of the long journey round Edom towards the land of promise, “spake against God, and against Moses. Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loathes this light bread” (Num. 21:5).
If we had not the knowledge of the flesh within us we might marvel at the attitude of Israel. In spite of all that God had done for them, delivering them from Pharaoh and his bondage, providing them with food and drink for well nigh forty years in the wilderness, and watching over them so that their shoes and garments did not wear out, nor their foot swell; yet in base ingratitude they spoke against Him, and despised the manna He had so faithfully given them. Do we not see in this the incorrigible nature of the flesh? The murmuring that took place just after God’s deliverance at the Red Sea came from the same flesh that murmured after seeing all God’s gracious provision and unfailing care.
Was it any wonder that God sent fiery serpents among such an ungrateful people to convict them of their sin? No amount of divine grace can alter the nature of man; the flesh of sin that we have inherited from Adam has been proved in all God’s ways with man that it cannot be improved. Men may speak of bettering the environment of men, of educating them, of providing all needful for a happy life, but these things can never make the nature of man one whit better. God has tired man in every possible way, the closing test being in the presentation of His grace in Jesus, and men showed what they were by putting Him on a malefactor’s cross.
God could not mend the flesh, He could not improve it in any way, so He has finished with it for ever in the cross of Christ. God does not look for righteousness or holiness from the nature of man, He knows it too well, so has manifested His thoughts of it in condemning it in the cross. Of this we read in Romans 8:3, “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”
The Son of God did not come in sinful flesh, but in its likeness, being “holy, harmless, and undefiled, separate from sinners.” The brazen serpent was not a real serpent; it was in the likeness of a serpent; it had never bitten anyone. The righteous requirements of the law could never be fulfilled by the flesh, but God enables His own to meet them as walking in the power of an ungrieved Spirit. Only through the Spirit of God can we love the Lord our God, and our neighbour as ourselves.
But the brazen serpent was lifted up to give life to those who had come under divine judgment, and of this the Lord Jesus spoke in John 3:14, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” apart from the death of the Lord Jesus poor sinners, who have merited divine judgment, and who are under the sentence and power of death, could have no hope. Now, in wondrous love, God has provided the means in His Son crucified to impart to us a life that can never die, and to free us from the power of death and from His righteous judgment.
The Jordan
Barring Israel’s entry into the land of promise was the river Jordan, and in time of harvest, the time when Israel came to it, Jordan overflowed all its banks. The river of death stood between the people of God and the land that God had promised them: how were they to get across? The God who had provided for them all the way from Egypt was able to meet this fresh difficulty for them, and His resources for this were in the ark of His testimony, that earlier had sought them out a rest in the wilderness.
Whenever the feet of the priests, bearing the ark, dipped into Jordan, the waters were cut off, indeed, they “stood and rose up upon an heap very far from the city Adam, that is beside Zaretan: and those that came down toward the sea of the plain, even the salt sea, failed, and were cut off” (Joshua 3:16). The waters of death could not remain in the presence of Christ; the power of God in Him caused them to flee from His presence. Christ has entered into death that we might pass through its waters dry shod. Well did the Psalmist write in contemplating God’s ways with Israel, “What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou Jordan, that thou wast driven back?” (Psalm 114:5).
The ark stood alone in all its solitary dignity amidst the Jordan, its swelling tide driven back; and God’s people, maintaining their distance from it of two thousand cubits, passed safely over. Our being dead with Christ is prefigured here, even as it is taught in Colossians 2:20, “If ye be dead with Christ.” But our being raised with Him is also prefigured here, and taught in Colossians 3:1, “If ye then be risen with Christ.” These two great trusts are also seen in the twelve stones that lie in the Jordan, covered with its waters of death, and in the twelve stones taken from its bed and raised as a memorial upon its bank.
Many lessons are to be learned at Jordan, as in the crossing of Elijah and Elisha before the former was taken up to heaven, and in Elisha’s recrossing. David, in rejection, crossed the Jordan; and the Lord Jesus too was found there before entering upon His public ministry; Naaman the Syrian was cleansed from his leprosy by plunging into its waters; and Jeremiah has evidently something to bring home to Israel and to us when he writes, “How wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan” (Jer. 12:5).
R. 17.11.64
No. 2
The Passover and the Continual Burnt Offering
There are a great many types, shadows and prophecies in the Old Testament of the death of Christ, some of which also bring out the truth of His resurrection. This is not surprising, for all the purposes of God, whether for the blessing of the Old Testament saints or the new, depended on Christ’s death and resurrection for their fulfilment. Each presentation of Christ’s death has its own peculiar features, God teaching us through them His own thoughts of the great work that secured His glory in relation to every question that sin had raised in His universe. Sin was in the universe before man was created, but God took the occasion of its entry into the world to deal with it in its entirety in the death of His Son.
From the many sacrificial types of Christ’s death there are four that we shall consider, and seek to learn from them something of God’s thoughts of His Son and of the great work He carried out for His glory, and the great results for the blessing of men. The four sacrifices to be considered are, the Passover, the continual Burnt Offering, the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement, and the burning of the Red Heifer. Each of these has its own distinctive presentation of Christ’s death as we shall see.
The Passover
For God’s people Israel, His intervention to set them free from the bondage and oppression of Pharaoh was a very great event, and God would have them feel that their deliverance could only be accomplished through death. God’s righteous judgment was about to reach its height in Egypt in the death of the firstborn, and His people could only escape this judgment through the shedding and sprinkling of the blood of the Paschal lamb. Nor was the feeling of redemption by blood to pass with the event in Egypt; there was to be a memorial feast celebrated annually “by an ordinance for ever.” God would have this great truth to be constantly impressed upon His people, and to assure that this was done it is numbered among the “feasts of Jehovah” given by God to Moses, and recorded in Leviticus 23.
Although celebrating God’s deliverance of His people Israel, the passover indicated for a much wider circle the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus Christ, even as Paul wrote to the saints at Corinth, “For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:7-8). This shows that the teaching of the passover is for the Christian as well as the Jew, foreshadowing Christ’s death to bring blessing to both, and having a very practical bearing on our conduct today. Those who have found shelter from divine judgment through the precious blood of Christ, and who have received life by feeding on His death, are under obligation to walk apart from all that is inconsistent with the death of Christ.
No intelligent Christian will doubt that the Apostle Peter is alluding to the Paschal lamb, when he writes, “Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:18-19). The half shekel of silver that had to be paid when Israel were numbered, like the passover lamb, looked forward to redemption, through God’s grace, by the death of God’s own Son.
The passover lamb was to be taken in the tenth day of the first month, and killed between the two evenings on the fourteenth day; but the lamb foreshadowed was “foreordained before the foundation of the world, but manifest in these last times for you, who by Him do believe in God, that raised Him from the dead, and gave Him glory; that your faith and hope might be in God” (1 Peter 1:20-21). For four days the children of Israel were to contemplate God’s provision for them in the sacrificial lamb; but we are now privileged to contemplate at all times that from eternity, Christ, God’s own Son, was before Him as the One who would carry out the great sacrificial work of the cross to secure His glory, and to bring eternal blessing to His people.
A lamb “without blemish” portrays in type the spotless purity of Him who was absolutely holy in His nature and ways. As born of Mary He was “that holy thing,” for He did not inherit the sinful nature of Adam; and He lived a life of holy perfection, undefiled by all the sin and sinners with which He was surrounded; and at the beginning of His pathway the Holy Spirit, as a dove, descended from heaven, and abode upon Him. There was not another in this world upon whom God’s Spirit could rest, but Jesus.
We too have a memorial of Christ’s death, the death seen in the passover, and literally fulfilled on the night on which the Paschal lamb was to be offered; and instituted “on the night in which He was betrayed.” The Lord’s Supper enables us to partake together in the fellowship of His death to whom we owe every blessing that God has given us, to show forth His death in the scene where men rejected Him and where He is still refused, and to express to Him our responsive affection as remembering Him in the expression of His great love for us.
Moreover, we have the privilege of eating His flesh and drinking His blood; that is, we feed upon His death for the appropriation of divine life, and to sustain that life, as delighting in all the divine love made known in the death of the Son of God, the love of God who sent His Son to give us life and to put away our sins, and the personal love of the Lord Jesus who gave Himself for us. This is not the memorial feast, but at the memorial feast we can enter in a special way into the blessed reality of feeding upon the love made known in the death of Jesus. Feeding upon Christ’s death is an individual privilege at all times.
The Continual Burnt Offering
The main details of the burnt offering are given in Leviticus 1. Its outstanding distinctive feature is that it was wholly for Jehovah, all, except the skin was burned upon the altar, “an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.” From Leviticus 7 we learn that the skin of the offering was given to the offering priest, so that he might in his walk and ways manifest the beauty of the offering, surely telling that as a priestly company we should be marked individually, in all our ways, publicly and privately, by the beautiful features of Christ who gave Himself in death for the pleasure of God.
When an individual brought a burnt offering, he put his hand upon its head, the acceptance of the victim being, as it were, transferred to the offerer, which also made atonement for him, as it is written, “it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him” (Lev. 1:4).
Christ’s perfections are seen in “his inwards and his legs shall he wash with water;” the cleansed sacrifice expressing the intrinsic purity of the Son of God in all the inward springs of His holy nature, and in the holiness of His steps through this world. Every part of the spotless victim sets forth some feature of the Holy One whose life and death brought glory and pleasure to His God and Father.
The continual burnt offering, for which instructions are given in Exodus 29:38, was a peculiar burnt offering. There was no laying on of hands, no presentation of atonement for men; it was wholly for God in every way as giving us to know the unbroken delight of Christ’s sacrifice of Himself to God. The morning lamb, and the evening lamb, provided this constant sweet fragrance before God; and when the night for Israel is over, when the Sun of Righteousness arises with healing in His wings, there will be no need for the evening sacrifice, but only the morning sacrifice, as is instructed in Ezekiel 46:13, “Thou shalt daily prepare a burnt offering unto the Lord of a lamb of the first year without blemish: thou shalt prepare it every morning.”
We learn something of the true Burnt Offering in the words of Ephesians 5:2, “Christ also has loved us, and has given Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour”. The offering in which the love of Christ for us is set forth also tells of the sweetness of the fragrance there was for God in it.
God had been glorified in the life of His Son as He had never been glorified before, for Jesus lived before Him in a walk of perfect obedience in which His every thought, desire, word and action was for God’s pleasure; but God was glorified in a new way in the death of His Son, in His obedience even unto death, and in procuring for Him the glory of redemption. This is even now constantly before the Father, for the sweet fragrance of Christ’s death is in the Son before the Father’s face in His presence in heaven. God will have the perfections of Christ in death ever before His people. There is no need for the Father to be reminded of what His Son was in death, but we need to be constantly reminded, and this constant reminder is to be found in the continual burnt offering.
In John’s Gospel the burnt offering character of Christ’s death is presented to us. Regarding the voluntary aspect of this offering, the Son said of His life, “no man takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself;” then as manifesting the perfection of His obedience He adds, “This commandment have I received of my Father” (John 10:18). The perfection of His love and obedience is again found in John 14:31, “But that the world may know that I love the Father; and as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do, Arise let us go hence.”
John makes no mention of the agony of the Lord in the Garden; and when Peter uses his sword, the Son says, “Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father has given me, shall I not drink it?” Nor does John record the forsaken cry; but we hear Jesus saying “I thirst,” that the Scripture might be fulfilled; and, as He bows His head, He says in triumph, “It is finished.” This is clearly not the trespass offering of Matthew, or the sin offering of Luke, or yet the meat offering of Luke’s Gospel. The calm dignity of the Son’s obedience shines out everywhere in John’s Gospel; and at the end it is the offering up of the voluntary offering for the pleasure and the will of God.
With the continual burnt offering there was to be a meat offering, and a drink offering; and this was also the case with every burnt offering and peace offering (Numbers 15:1–12). Although the death of God’s Son in all its sweet savour for Him is never to be forgotten, inseparable from it is the perfection of the Son as born of the Virgin, and in His holy Manhood for God in this world.
R. 18.11.64
No. 3
The Day of Atonement and the Red Heifer
If the passover specially teaches that God shelters His people from judgment by the blood of the lamb in view of delivering them from the bondage and power of the enemy; and the continual burnt offering instructs us in the constant pleasure God has from His Son in offering Himself in the perfection of His obedience to secure His glory; the sin offerings of the Day of Atonement bring before us the great truths of propitiation and substitution. All the righteous claims of the throne of God have been met in the death of Jesus, His precious blood upon the mercy seat proclaiming that propitiation has been made, and on account of this God is able to forgive and justify guilty sinners who repent and believe the Gospel. Substitution tells us that Christ has died in our room and stead, and that all our sins were taken away when He bore them on the cross.
The feast of the day of atonement was not a celebration like the passover, but an annual event that signified how God could go on with His people who were sinners like other men. While it pointed forward to the great work that the Lord Jesus Christ would accomplish for God’s glory and the blessing of His people, it also showed that there was no access into God’s presence under the legal system. God could go on with Israel, dwelling among them on the ground of the sacrifices, and although they were not in the distance from God in the same sense as were the Gentiles, they were morally no better, and could not enter the immediate presence of God.
Failure in the house of Aaron, when two of his sons offered strange fire unto the Lord, and brought upon themselves the unsparing judgment of a righteous and holy God, prohibited Aaron’s approach at all times into God’s immediate presence, which contrasts significantly with the liberty and boldness of Christians, who can at all times come before God through the sacrificial work of the Lord Jesus. God’s presence in the tabernacle was manifest in the cloud which rested on the mercy-seat which was upon the ark; and any one who had attempted to enter the holiest would have found it a way of death.
Though excluded from the liberty of approach to God, Aaron is commanded through Moses to appear before Jehovah once a year, with his flesh washed in water, and clothed with the holy linen garments and the linen mitre. In these garments Aaron typified the Son of God in the holiness and practical righteousness that marked Him in carrying out for God the great work of atonement at the cross. This was priestly work, but not the normal function of God’s High Priest as clothed in his garments of glory and beauty. Such was the work of the Lord Jesus Christ when He offered Himself without spot to God; it was priestly work, but not His normal priestly functioning, which could not begin until He took His place on high as our Great High Priest. Christ was not a priest on earth, though He acted as offering priest when He offered Himself.
Two distinct companies are in view on the day of atonement, and this is indicated in the sin offerings. For himself and his house, Aaron was to bring a young bullock for a sin offering; but Israel’s sin offering consisted of two goats which were to be presented before Jehovah, one, upon which the lot fell, was to be a scapegoat, the other to be sacrificed as a sin offering. Aaron and his house represent the heavenly company of saints; Israel are an earthly people.
For the heavenly company there was only one animal, but the young bullock was much larger than the goat that was slain, which might indicate the larger appreciation of Christ’s death, and of all that it involved, by a heavenly company. The heavenly company is in a place of nearness to God, where there is opportunity for knowing the mind and thoughts of God in a clearer and more intimate way; yea, it is to this priestly company that God has made known the secrets of His counsels and the mystery of His will.
The church’s place is inside the veil with Christ and with God, but Israel’s place is outside on earth, hence the need for the scapegoat, to clear the scene where God will dwell with His earthly people from the effects of their sins. The Lamb of God came to take away not only Israel’s sin, but the sin of the world; and, as a sacrifice to take away sin from before the face of God (Heb. 9:26). In the millennium God’s temple in Jerusalem will be the shrine of His glory; but in the eternal state God will dwell with men in His heavenly tabernacle, the assembly.
Atonement was made for the people by the shedding of the blood of the goat on which the lot fell, but also by the confession on the head of the scapegoat of the sins of the people, and in its being sent away into the wilderness. While this has Israel specially in view in regard to a coming day, has it not also divine teaching for us in this day? Is it not a type of the substitution taught in the New Testament? Each true believer can say with Paul, “The Son of God loved me, and gave Himself for me;” and know the blessedness of what Peter wrote, “Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24).
When Aaron entered God’s presence it was in virtue of the shed blood, but he had to be hidden in the cloud of incense that covered the mercy-seat. He had to take burning coals from the altar of burnt offering, and put them on the golden censer, and upon the fire he put the fragrant incense beaten small to produce this fragrant cloud in which he was hidden while in the presence of God.
It is the cross of Christ, the burning coals from off the altar, that brings out for us the rich fragrance of Christ’s Person. We never could have known the moral excellence and sweet odour of all that is in Christ had He not come from God and died upon the cross. And it is only in God’s presence, where we, like Aaron, are hidden in the fragrant cloud that we can know the delight that God has in His Son, for this incense could only be offered to God, and only when it was being offered could the priests within smell its rich perfume.
The blood of the sin offerings was sprinkled once on the mercy-seat, and seven times before it. The cherubim look down on the blood sprinkled mercy-seat, witnessing that all the claims of God’s throne have been met in relation to sin; and this enables God to dwell among His people, for His glory in regard to sin has been secured by the death of His Son. In the antitype, the One who made propitiation sits on the throne of God, the evidence to the universe that God is completely satisfied with the work done by His Son; and sitting there “He is the propitiation for our sins,” and not for Israel’s only, “but also for the whole world” (1 John 2:2). He is our subsisting righteousness in the presence of God.
Before the throne, the mercy-seat, the seven times sprinkled blood gives us a perfect standing before God, and assures us that we have “boldness to enter the holiest by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19). Paul writing to the saints at Rome, tells them that God has set forth Christ Jesus “a mercy seat, through faith in His blood” (Rom. 3:25); and in 2 Corinthians 5:21 he wrote, “For He has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” Christ’s death brings us right home to God, even as Peter wrote, “Christ also has once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust to bring us to God;” and John in his First Epistle says, “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” How great for us are the results of Christ’s blood shedding!
In the Epistle to the Hebrews the sin offerings of the day of atonement are contrasted with the sacrifice of Christ. The blood of bulls and goats purified the flesh, but the blood of Christ purging the conscience enables us to serve the living God, for this divine sacrifice has “put away sin” (Heb. 9:13-14, 25). We are instructed in chapter 10 that “it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins,” but by the one offering of Christ, God “has perfected for ever them that are sanctified” by the blood of Jesus (Heb. 10:4–14).
The scope of the work of Christ is indicated to us in Leviticus 16:33, where we learn that atonement is made for “the holy sanctuary…the tabernacle…the altar…the priests, and for all the people of the congregation.” Here is a picture of the whole universe coming under the efficacy of the work of Christ. There will be a priestly company in God’s immediate presence, in the third heavens, the paradise of God; Israel will be blessed on earth; and the heavens, which “are not clean in His sight” (Job 15:15), will be purged; and in the eternal state God will be able to dwell with men. With the universe purged by the blood of Jesus, and men of different families brought into right relations with God, there will be the worship that God desires, a redeemed creation filled with the praises of God and His Son.
The Red Heifer
Numbers 19 gives directions for the preparation and the application of the “water of separation,” which was “a purification for sin” (verse 9). It was for those who became defiled through contact with death. Defilement might come from other causes, by impurity within or without, and cleansing was then effected by other means, sometimes by a sacrifice of blood, or by the washing of the flesh or of clothing; but contact with death required the application of the water of separation.
A male normally depicted the position of the offerer, but a female had to do with his state. The bullock of the day of atonement was for the maintenance of Israel’s place with Jehovah, but the Red Heifer dealt with their state of defilement. Red signifies divine judgment, and the heifer without spot or blemish, and upon which yoke had never come, points to the sinless and spotless perfection of Jesus who was never under the yoke of sin or Satan as all others in this world had been.
The burning of the heifer clearly tells us of the divine judgment that the holy Son of God sustained to provide the means for the moral cleansing of His people. Into the burning went cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet, that we might learn that the world and all its glory has come into judgment in the cross of Christ, even as the Lord said in contemplating His death, “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out” (John 12:31).
Those who touched the dead body of a man were defiled, but if only a bone or a grave were touched there was still the defilement that required the sprinkling of the water of separation. This would seem to indicate the defilement produced by associating with those in this world who are dead in trespasses and sins, or by being associated with anything that belongs to a world that lies in moral death. While insisting on separation from the world and its associations, we have to see that our interpretation of these things is from the Word of God and not the legal traditions of Judaism, which had to be corrected in Simon Peter by the lesson of the great sheet let down from heaven.
There were to be two sprinklings, the first on the third day, and the second on the seventh day; the days between giving the defiled person time to contemplate the seriousness of defilement, and the value of the divine provision for its removal. A clean person sprinkled the water of separation, which teaches us that only those who are in communion with God are fit to undertake this work. In such cases of defilement the service of another is necessary, as when Paul wrote, “If a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in a spirit of meekness” (Gal. 6:1).
The priest and the man who gathered the ashes had to wash their clothes and bathe their flesh, and were unclean until the even; and so also it was with the man to be cleansed on the seventh day. Anyone touching the water of separation “shall be unclean until even.” Does not this show that we cannot have to do with sin in any way, even in seeking to restore others, without becoming defiled in some way or other. Our garments, our habits have to be kept continually clean; and our bodies, all our members morally, have to come constantly under the cleansing and refreshing efficacy of God’s holy word.
R. 19.11.64