Faith Presbyterian Church (PCA, Tacoma, WA) Sermon Texts

The Great Surprise

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Mark Series
referring to: Mark 16:1-8

This morning we come to the 55th and last of our sermons on the Gospel of Mark. We are taking only the first eight verses of chapter 16 as our text but you see that your Bibles indicate that the remainder of the chapter is very doubtfully original to Mark’s Gospel. The two oldest and most important early manuscripts of the Bible, both from the 4th century, omit 16:9-20, as do several early translations of the Greek NT into other languages, such as the Old Latin (think of the Old Latin as the KJV of the Latin speaking early church) and the Syriac. Other old manuscripts also finish Mark 16 at v. 8. What is more, neither Clement of Alexandria nor Origen seem to know of the additional material beyond v. 8 and both Eusebius and Jerome confirm that vv. 9-20 were missing from most of the Greek manuscripts known to them. An ingenious system of cross-referencing parallel passages in the Gospels that was devised by Ammonius in the second century and adopted by Eusebius in the fourth century – today known as the Eusebian canons, a system of cross-reference that is found in the margin of the Greek New Testaments that are printed nowadays – does not include the longer ending of Mark. The evidence goes on and on. Many manuscripts that do contain vv. 9-20 have scribal notations indicating that the longer ending was doubted to be original. What is more, within the longer ending itself there are a number of substantial variations among the manuscripts that contain it also indicating the text’s uncertain past. Mark’s signature stylistic features are absent from the longer ending of the Gospel of Mark. Further, what we do have in the longer ending is quite obviously a patchwork of post-resurrection appearances taken from the other Gospels together with some material taken from the book of Acts. The splice between the two sections, between v. 8 and v. 9, is awkward even in our English translations. Therefore, we will end our studies in the Gospel where the Gospel that Mark wrote actually ends – at least so far as we have it – rather abruptly, at verse 8. Before we begin our reading, two questions: Why do people cry when they hear wonderful news; why do they weep as if it were bad news? And, also, why do people shake and tremble after the danger is past?

Text Comment

v.1

That is, on Sunday, the first day of the week. The significance of Sunday for Christians, as the day of the Lord’s resurrection, is noted by later Jewish rabbis who called Sunday “the day of the Christians.” [Str.-B, I, 1052]

For the third time Mark lists by name these women who were present at the crucifixion (v. 40), at the Lord’s burial (v. 47), and at the tomb on Sunday morning. The importance of this is to accredit their eyewitness testimony. They saw him die, they saw him buried, they were witnesses of the empty tomb. The place of women as eyewitnesses of the resurrection has long been noted as a powerful argument for historicity of the Gospel’s accounts, for no one in that age inventing such a story and wanting it to be taken seriously would rest its credibility on the testimony of women. Two centuries later Celsus, an early pagan critic of Christianity, would argue that the resurrection was “the gossip of women,” and in the 19th century the French critic Renan mocked the claim that Jesus had risen from the dead as the testimony of a hysterical female. Judaism did not accept the testimony of women in court and so the early church would scarcely have placed them at the tomb unless their presence was a brute fact of history!

By the way, in 15:40 and 16:1 we have Mary the mother of James the younger and in 15:47 Mary the mother of Joses. Almost certainly it is the same Mary in both instances, she being the mother of two sons, both known to the church, and by designating her relationship now to the one son and now to the other her identity is indicated. In any case, so little were these women expecting the resurrection that they went to the tomb to anoint his body.

v.3

They realized they had forgotten something important and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” An eyewitness detail and a wonderfully down-to-earth touch. Nobody thought about that when they left for the tomb. [Cf. France, 678] How many times have you and I done something similar!

v.5

Clearly this individual was an angel, which indicates the alarm on the part of the women, an identification made even more explicit in the other Gospels. The fact that he was sitting on the right side is another eyewitness touch.

v.6

As in every resurrection account, there is no hint of some sort of spiritual or numinous experience or encounter with Jesus. It is in every case a physical event. They are invited to see where Jesus had lain. The body is no longer there! [Edwards, 494]

v.7

As so typically, the Lord did meet his disciples in Galilee – the main focus of his three-year ministry – but he was better than his word, meeting them first that very night in Jerusalem as we know from the other Gospels.

Like it or not, this is a strange way for the Gospel to end, even stranger in Mark’s Greek. The last word of the Gospel, if verse 8 is indeed the last sentence of the Gospel, is the conjunction gar, meaning “for.” as in “for they were afraid;” in Greek the conjunction comes after the participle. “For they were afraid” is just two words in Mark’s Greek and “for” is the last of the two. While not impossible it would have certainly been unusual to end a sentence, much less a book with the conjunction gar. We expect that, the angelic announcement having been made to the women, it would be now confirmed by an account of the Lord’s appearance to them or to his disciples, as it was in the other Gospels. The Apostle Paul includes the resurrection appearances as part of the grand story of his resurrection in 1 Cor. 15 in his summary of the Gospel. These appearances were a central feature of the argument for the historicity of the resurrection, of the apologetic for the resurrection in apostolic Christianity. But all of that is missing here.

The fact that the resurrection is simply asserted by the angel and not confirmed by the Lord’s appearance, the fact that the women are said to have run from the tomb afraid to speak to anyone about what they had heard and seen – even though we know from the other Gospels that they did eventually report what they had witnessed to the disciples –, the fact that in a Gospel written for people who knew the rest of the story none of that story has been told has bewildered commentators through the years. Perhaps Mark never finished the Gospel; perhaps he wrote a longer ending that was somehow lost from his original manuscript. To be sure, some modern scholars have argued that the abrupt ending was a stroke of genius on Mark’s part, proved him a literary master. It forces us to conclude the story in our minds, to tell the story to ourselves, to consider its meaning for ourselves. But this is not a fully satisfactory explanation as it appeals more to modern than ancient literary practice and taste. Obviously it is the sudden and unexpected ending of the Gospel that accounts for the longer ending, our vv. 9-20, that was known as early as Tatian and Irenaeus in the later 2nd century. The early readers of the Gospel felt that there should have been more. The longer ending is a pastiche of elements taken from the other Gospels and Acts [France, 685] and seems to be an almost inevitable effort to fix what was felt to be an inadequate ending of the Gospel at v. 8.

No one can say for sure what happened or why the Gospel has come down to us in its present form, ending so abruptly at verse 8. But ending as the Gospel does now – whether intentionally or unintentionally – it does enable us to see what we might otherwise miss, for no one doubts that Mark did write verse 8. And what verse 8 underscores, with its account of the women’s bewilderment and fear, is the mystery, the dreadful, the awe-inspiring, the complacency-destroying, and the mind-shattering character of this historical event, the resurrection of Jesus. It is a warning to us not to sentimentalize this mighty event or to imagine that we really grasp the mighty power of God that brought it to pass. [Cf. Cranfield, 470] It is a warning not glibly and mindlessly to incorporate the resurrection into an otherwise predictable and ordinary view of life, which, of course, is precisely what so many people do who with little thought and less personal commitment to Christ assume that life shall follow death as surely as tonight will be followed by tomorrow’s sunrise. Blaise Pascal in his Pensées famously observed:

“It is not natural that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their being and the perils of everlasting suffering. With everything else they are quite different: they fear the most trifling things, they foresee them; they feel them. And this same man who spends so many days and nights in rage and despair [over some loss] is the very one who knows he is going to lose everything through death, but he feels neither anxiety nor emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest. It is an incomprehensible enchantment, a supernatural torpor that points to a supernatural power as its cause.” [194]

That supernatural power that binds man to this indifference to death, says Pascal, is the mysterious bondage of the human heart to sin, to an anti-God state of mind. How else can we explain such a strange indifference to man’s greatest enemy, death itself? You know it is so of yourself too much of the time; you have seen it in many others. It is as if death did not exist so much of the time. People think, speak, and live as if they would never die when the fact that they will die is the most certain fact of their existence. They take no real care to investigate the question of what happens at death; they find tiresome, even offensive the suggestion that they should consider with the greatest care whether there are conditions to be met in this life in order that one’s death would deliver him or her to true and wonderful life beyond the grave. This were a conclusion, one would think, this would be the one conclusion for which they would require the most exacting argument and the most persuasive evidence, so much being at stake. But it is not so. Pascal was right. This widespread indifference to the question is very remarkable.

How is it that people can be so careless of the great question of human existence: viz. death and what happens to us when we die? Death, Camus said, is philosophy’s only problem; but even among the philosophers there are few who consider the question carefully, deeply or personally. Most religions and philosophies that pose an answer to the question of death discover that few among their followers take the matter very seriously. Whether Muslims or Buddhists, secularists or Christians, the number of those who take the question with the seriousness that it deserves is invariably a small percentage of the whole. Why? When one’s self-interest is so profoundly at stake, why is there not more concern, more careful thinking, and more serious investigation? And why, if one purports to believe a certain thing about death and life after death, does even he so often not seem to take his beliefs seriously? Why are you and I not talking about this all the time?

The largest reason for that, the Bible says is man’s fear of death. In Hebrews we read that man lives his life in bondage to the fear of death. It is for men, we read in Job 18:14, “the king of terrors.” Some of its fear is the fear of the pain that goes with dying; some of the personal loss that is its inevitable effect, some is the fear of the unknown, but certainly most of it is for everyone is the fear of God and of his judgment. A well known humanist, not a Christian, not even a religious person in the ordinary sense of the term, Marghanita Laski, admitted on a BBC radio show that the most important issues that people had to face in life were that “We are lonely, we are guilty, and we are going to die.” No person is without inklings of judgment. [J. Blanchard, Where Do We Go From Here, 7] Woody Allen may jokingly say, “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” But that is just his way of admitting that he is afraid of death like everyone else. Nothing explains man’s outward indifference to death, his unwillingness to consider a question you might think he would be considering all the time so much as his fear of death. It is absolutely typical of human beings to ignore what they fear the most. And what helps them to ignore death is the routine of life. They can forget about death, bury its reality deep in the mind with the help of the dulling effect of the uniformity, the sameness, and the conventional character of daily human life. Life goes on day after day, the world today is as it was yesterday, we expect it to be the same tomorrow and find that it is; new matters crowd out the old, and the present takes up all our attention. We cannot see the future and since it is out of sight, we are glad to let it slip from the mind. Only now and then does a shudder pass through our souls, the thought that we must die somehow forces itself upon our consciousness, but the impression quickly passes and, relieved, we go back to life again. Why is there so much unhappiness in the world? Well, here is one reason. Professor Armad Nicolai of the Harvard Medical School tells us that the acceptance of the inevitability of death has been shown to be crucial to a well-adjusted, happy personality, and there are a great many people who have never really accepted the inevitability of death. They suppress its reality; refuse to accept it. A small fraction of Americans have wills. Why is that? Because in order to prepare a will you must think about your death and people don’t like to do that. We fear death but rarely are conscious of that fear.

It is here, I think, that we find the importance of the women’s fear at the tomb. Why were they so afraid? Well, Matthew tells us that these same women, whose testimony lies behind both Gospel accounts, Matthew and Mark, left the tomb afraid yet filled with joy. They were not unaware that they had encountered a great turning point in their lives and the life of the world. They got it. They understood. They knew that Jesus was indeed the Son of God when they realized that he was no longer in the tomb and that he had risen again to life. They knew he was the Messiah and the Savior of the world. Up to that point they had somehow been able to incorporate all of the Lord’s miracles – those fabulous works of supernatural power by which the sick were healed, the weather was controlled, and the laws of nature brought to heal, some of which they had witnessed with their own eyes, they had been able to incorporate all of that with his death. I suppose they had heard something from Peter, James, or John about the Lord’s transfiguration on the mountain in Galilee a year before. They knew he was a great man, a man sent from God. But life goes on. Great man that Jesus was, it was all over; he was dead like every other man eventually will be; another loved one now lay in a tomb; and now they must go and anoint the body which they hadn’t time to do the previous Friday afternoon. Life goes on. The daily round continues as it always has. Let this idea settle in the mind and soon the daily round is all there is. And we are happy for it to be all that it is. It occupies one’s entire attention until it ends. Nothing changes.

But something had changed and these women had discovered that the routine of human life had been transcended absolutely and forever. They had come face to face with the infinite, the eternal, the numinous, the unseen world, with the power of God himself and all of that shattered their easy acceptance of their routine and conventional lives and their predictable experience.

The fear came from getting so near to the eternal and the holy. We imagine encountering an angel would be exciting and interesting. We’d want to interview him and take a picture. But, of course, that is because we have never seen an angel! But there is something else, I think, in this fear, this bewilderment, this confusion. As every other human being, these women longed to live, to live forever, and here, suddenly and utterly unexpectedly, was the reality of such a deathless life right before their eyes. An empty tomb that had not been empty the previous Friday afternoon. Our greatest fear is that there may be no such life; our deepest hope and longing is that such a life is really there, really to be had. And suddenly the greatest fear and the greatest longing of their souls were poured directly into their hearts. It shattered all of the barriers we keep up in order to keep those fears at bay. Could it be true? Is it possibly still not true? The questions about death that human beings so furiously suppress all their lives in that moment came unrestrained and unhindered through all the barriers set up in the mind to keep them out. That was the unleashing of man’s deepest fear at the very moment that the possibility of the fulfillment of his deepest longing was being revealed. To be afraid at the empty tomb is akin to weeping when something wonderful has happened. It is at that moment that you feel for the first time finally and completely what it would have been like had the good thing never been given and never come; it is akin to a man shaking and trembling after he has escaped a great danger. It is at that moment one feels how terrible the peril actually was. The heart has been opened to feel and to see what otherwise has been kept at bay.

I think, myself, that one reason why we are never long without catastrophes in this world is that they force men and women to consider death when otherwise they would not. They are the Lord’s megaphone to force us to hear a message we do not want to hear. If it were not for shattering interruptions of our daily routine, men and women would never face death at all. Human beings – these impossibly great creatures with such immeasurably remarkable powers capable of contributing and creating and accomplishing so much – left to themselves will spend all of their time and energy simply making a living and having a good time, devoting all their thoughts to this world as if this life would go on forever. We know it will not, but we find ourselves able to live as if it will.

Were it not for hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, flood, fire, terrorist attack, and the concentrated casualties of war human beings might become completely impervious to any summons to consider the higher issues of human existence. Why are we here? Where are we going? What is the meaning of our life? Were it not for the sudden discovery, in a doctor’s office or hospital, that some lethal disease has taken hold of one’s body, were it not for the occasional sudden and tragic death of someone known to us, individuals in the ordinary run of life would scarcely ever consider what one would think could not help but be considered virtually every day: death is approaching and cannot be stopped. But when death is forced upon our consciousness, when sudden death interrupts our routine, when we are terrified by lethal powers so much greater than ourselves, then, and often only then, we are forced to face the great and terrible realities that otherwise we are past masters at ignoring. This was the point of W.H. Auden’s verse:

The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
[“September 1, 1939”]

A copy of David McCullough’s history of the Johnstown flood recently came into my hands. The Johnstown flood of May 31, 1889 is still today one of the greatest natural disasters of American history. After days of torrential rain, with the two rivers that met at Johnstown, Pennsylvania already overflowing their banks and with the water rising in the town to unprecedented levels, it would have been the most serious flood the city had ever experienced anyway, and then a poorly maintained earthen dam in the mountains, fourteen miles above Johnstown, broke sending 20 million tons of water in a concentrated wave roaring down the mountain valley, sweeping entire villages off the face of the ground before falling on Johnstown it has been calculated with the force of Niagara Falls. In a few minutes homes, churches, factories, stores, trees, animals, locomotives and railway cars were swept away by the racing wall of water. Children were swept away in front of their parents and vice versa; husbands torn from the arms of their wives. In a typical paragraph, we read:

“How the two women, each with a child, ever got to the third floor as fast as they did was something she was never quite able to figure out. Once there, they went to the front window, opened it, and looked down into the street. Gertrude described the scene as looking ‘like the Day of Judgment I had seen as a little girl in Bible histories,’ with crowds of people running, screaming, dragging children, struggling to keep their feet in the water.

Her father, meanwhile had reached dry land on the hill, and turning around saw no signs of the rest of his family among the faces pushing past him [the two women and Gertrude]. He grabbed hold of a big butcher boy named Kurtz, gave him [the baby], told him to watch out for the other two girls, and started back to the house.

But he had gone only a short way when he saw the wave, almost on top of him, demolishing everything, and he knew he could never make it. There was a split second of indecision, then he turned back to the hill, running with all his might as the water surged along the street after him. In a few seconds, fighting the current around him that kept getting deeper and faster every second, he reached the hillside just as the wave pounded by below.

Looking behind he saw his house rock back and forth, then lunge sideways, topple over, and disappear. [The Johnstown Flood, 161]

In a moment the daily round was shattered and thousands of people, all at once, came face to face with the terrifying reality of death. More than 2,200 died, many thousands more carried the terror of that afternoon and night with them for the rest of their lives. The reality of life and death, of the incalculable value of life, of the tragedy of death, of the hunger to live that burns, often unrecognized and undefined, in the human heart, all of this was discovered of a sudden at Johnstown that day and the very same things, the very same things, were realized with terrible power at the tomb that wonderful Sunday morning. It is always so whenever the realities of death and life are finally forced upon the consciousness. One weeps even at the greatest conceivable news and one trembles and shakes at what might have been.

What the resurrection of the Son of God means is that the meaning of life is not found in the daily round, that the great issue of human existence is precisely what we always should have known it to be, viz. the reality of death and the possibility of life beyond the grave. We know that, but we do not admit it to ourselves because we are so afraid. We must die and we can’t bear the thought, so we don’t think about it. But the reality is not altered by our refusing to face it. We will die. Whether suddenly in a terrible flash flood or in our beds of some wasting disease in the last analysis does not matter. We must all die. But we do not want to die. The fact that we hardly ever think about death and our own death – certain as it is – is the best evidence of just how much we do not want to die. We want to live!

Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Hath ever truly longed for death;
‘Tis life, not death, for which we pant,
More life, and fuller, that I want.
[Tennyson]

Can we escape death? Is it possible to surmount death? Is there a way to live on after death? These are the great questions of human existence and the fact that men think so little about them is the index of how profoundly they trouble and disturb him. He has no answer so he will not ask the question.

The women at Jesus’ grave Easter morning were the first human beings actually to see the reality of eternal life break upon the world and it shattered them; it terrified them. Eventually of course it filled them with an unspeakable and inexpressible joy. But first it confused them and frightened them; they ran away from the tomb because they were so afraid of what they had encountered. Something so tremendous, something erupting into our life from another world, something so powerful as to conquer our greatest enemy, all of this was more than they could manage at the moment. Could it be true? They were afraid even to hope. All the fears of death they had ever felt deep within themselves, all the fears they had so manfully kept at bay all their lives finally, unbidden, rushing into their hearts.

Whatever you do, however you think about these things, you are not to domesticate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Life breaking into the history of this world of death is the greatest thing that has ever happened and you hardly begin to understand what it is. It answers the great question of human existence in the most dramatic and decisive way possible. Death is so terrifying a thing we can hardly bear to think about it. The conquest of death is something of such terrible power that we cannot really take it in. But the resurrection of Jesus Christ is as much a fact as is our soon coming death and that is far and away the most important thing any human being can know. You must face death to learn of the conquest of death and so many miss the latter because they are unwilling to face the former. Screw up your courage and look death and your death in the eye and then turn and look at the Lord Jesus Christ who conquered death to give you life.

“I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus once said, “he who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and the one who lives and believes in me, truth be told, will never die.”

Studies in Numbers No. 6

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Numbers Series
referring to: Numbers 5:11-31

In this chapter of Numbers the people are being prepared for their journey to the Promised Land. Because the Lord is among them, they must be holy and steps are being taken to ensure that holiness. The chapter began with a selective or representative set of laws ensuring the ceremonial and moral holiness of the people of Israel. We considered those last Lord’s Day evening. We come now to a much more elaborate regulation governing cases of suspected but unconfirmed sexual sin. And there is no getting around the fact that what we are reading tonight is one of the strangest texts in all of the Law and, in fact, all of the Bible.

Lig Duncan, a PCA pastor from Mississippi, once told me that he had heard Palmer Robertson, longtime American seminary professor nowadays of the African Bible College in Uganda and widely read author on Old Testament themes, tell his seminary class that he had yet to figure out how to preach a sermon on the law of the jealous husband but he was working on it. In other words, Dr. Robertson was suggesting this might be the very last text in the Bible that a thoughtful preacher could understand well enough to preach and teach. Well, Dr. Robertson would have made that confession some years ago; I hope that the possibilities of interpretation are better now than then, because it is time for me to preach a sermon on the law of the jealous husband!

Prof. Jack Collins was here for worship last Lord’s Day evening so I cornered him after the service to ask him about his understanding of this text. Many of you know Jack as a friend and so may not attribute to him the full stature that he has gained among the professional caste of Old Testament scholars. He is among the very best. I expected that he would, in a few deft strokes, outline for me the best approach to the text. Instead he allowed that he might have seen some valuable notes on the passage recently but couldn’t remember where it was he saw them. Big help!

Text Comment

As we begin it is important to recognize that we are talking about the same thing in these following verses as was spoken about in the first ten verses of the chapter, viz. the purity of the people. It is the possibility of the wife’s impurity, as we will read in vv. 13-14, 19-20, and 28 that is the whole point; and her impurity consisted in her having broken faith with her husband. The same term for this breaking faith is used in v. 12 as was used in v. 6. We are still concerned with the need for the people of Israel to be holy as God is holy and to ensure his continued presence with her by not transgressing that holiness.

v.14

The entire regulation concerns what is to be done to a wife who is suspected to be unfaithful. Remember, however, in the Law of Moses regulations cut both ways most all of the time. This is not said to be sure, but in my view we may safely assume that the same thing would be done if the wife had suspicions about her husband but could not prove them. The fact that the laws applied equally to men and women, to husbands and wives, is often enough stated directly in the law to lead us to believe that any regulation stated solely in respect to one sex applies with equal force to the other. Relative to this particular sin it is interesting to remember that the death penalty for adultery in the Law of Moses, for example, was to be enforced on men and women, husbands and wives alike.

v.15

The man must take his suspicions to the priest. This is no longer a private matter and if a man wishes to have his suspicions confirmed or to act on them or the wife wishes to have her virtue vindicated the matter must be taken to the priest, which is to say, to the Lord. We are well aware that one of the first casualties in an unhappy home is trust. We know all too well how suspicions and real or perceived offenses accumulate. The matter must be brought out of the home and out of that toxic atmosphere of mistrust and into the light of day and must be placed under the oversight of a disinterested man, a godly man, a priest. Only then can the outcome be trusted.

What is more the man must bring an offering of barley flour. This is the same offering, or nearly so, that is described as the poor man’s sin offering in Lev. 5:11. The point is that we are talking about sin, not simply about marital harmony. We are talking about right and wrong before a holy God. The cheap barley flour makes this, in fact, the lowliest sacrifice in the Bible. The oil and incense are symbolic of joy so their omission is clearly deliberate. There is no joy at this moment. [Milgrom, 38; Wenham, 83]

Since the woman is under suspicion of being a brazen, unrepentant sinner, she can’t bring the sin offering so the husband brings it instead. Indeed, if she brought the offering it would be tantamount to her admission of guilt. [Milgrom, 38]

v.16

Notice the all important before the Lord. It will be the Lord who determines guilt or innocence and it is the holiness of the Lord that is at issue here. Israel must be holy because God is holy.

v.17

Some water from the supply consecrated for use in the tabernacle was to be mixed with dust from the floor of the sanctuary. It is not entirely clear whether we are talking about the actual sanctuary floor, the holy place, or the dust of the floor outside. In any case, what is holy, consecrated for the use of God, is going to encounter in the woman either holiness or unholiness.

v.18

The loosened hair was symbolic either of disgrace or uncleanness. The offering was brought by the husband but it was her offering and it was for her sake that it was given; so she must give it to the priest herself.

v.22

There are parallels to this practice of “trial by ordeal,” even to the requirement to drink a prepared liquid, in other older ANE cultures prior to this time in the 15th century B.C. These ordeals were also used in the case of suspected adultery. Here are two stipulations from the Code of Hammurabi (pars. 131-132). You will easily appreciate the similarity.

“If a man’s wife was accused by her husband, but she was not caught while lying with another man, she shall make an oath by the god and return home. If a finger has been pointed at a man’s wife because of another man, but she has not been caught lying with that other man, she shall leap into the River for the sake of her husband.”

A typical form of trial by ordeal in the ANE was for the accused to be thrown into a river. If the gods caused the accused to drown, then she obviously was guilty. If she survived, the gods obviously had acquitted the accused. That is, the ordeal provided the punishment directly. Here the punishment has nothing directly to do with the ordeal itself. [Milgrom, 346; Waltke, Theology, 517] Of course a person’s ability to swim had a great deal to do with how likely it was that he or she would survive being thrown into a river. But to be thrown into a river was inherently dangerous. But the water required to be drunk here in this ritual wouldn’t hurt anyone by itself. There was no danger from the water by itself.

By means of these ordeals the gods were supposed to reveal the guilt or innocence of an individual who had been accused of a crime for which there was no evidence of wrongdoing. What we have in other words, here in Numbers 5, is a practice familiar to ANE peoples that is here given a new moral and theological setting and is tweaked in a very significant way. That kind of cultural transposition is common to biblical ritual as you know. Whether circumcision or sacrifice, feast or sanctuary, there is little in Israelite practice that is unique in its outward form. It is the new liturgical setting and the new theological rationale that is unique and changes everything. Those changes, to be sure, often bring with them some fundamental changes in the practice as well. Circumcision was common in the ANE but not as a ritual for newborns and so on.

You’ll notice that the woman is required to make a vow. What we have in this ritual, when stripped down to its essentials, is a dramaticized vow. And it is made in the immediate presence of Yahweh.

And the punishment perfectly fits the crime. As the ancient Jewish commentators put it: “In the member she sinned with she will be punished.” [Mishnah, Sotah 1.7] Her genital area will distend and she will not be able to conceive. [Milgrom, 37] Thigh is probably a euphemism for the genitals, the procreative organs; the belly a euphemism for the womb.

v.24

Notice carefully once again that this form of test was not like others in which harm was inevitable absent virtually a miracle to prevent the harm. No one had to be thrown into a river, to plunge a hand into boiling water, or grasp a red-hot piece of metal. Those were other forms of trial by ordeal in the ANE. There is nothing toxic in the water that must be drunk. If there is to be some horrible effect it will not come from the water, it will come from the Lord judging the woman for her sin. So the ordeal by itself would not detect guilt or innocence. In fact, it is not really accurate to call this an ordeal at all, because in the ANE ordeal involved surviving something inherently harmful. One was guilty unless one survived. Not here. The water itself was not dangerous. One problem with torture, of course, as we have learned often enough in our modern world, is that it can produce false positives. The innocent will confess simply to make the pain stop. There is nothing like that here. The woman has absolutely nothing to fear from the water she drinks. If nothing happens, if Yahweh does not intervene to disclose her guilt, she will be seen to be innocent.

Here the burden of the situation is that the woman has vowed her innocence. If she was guilty she would literally have to eat her words: the curses that she had asked to be visited upon her and that had been washed into the water that she drank.

v.26

The priest’s having offered the sacrifice before the woman was required to drink the potion was another way of invoking the Lord’s presence and judgment. The place of the sacrifice in the ritual also made clear that we are not talking about any magic effect here. [Ashley, 134] We are talking about something the Lord will do, a response he will make.

v.27

It is interesting that the guilty wife is not condemned to death, the punishment ordered for adulterers caught red-handed (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22). But she will remain childless, a far greater catastrophe in the ancient world than even in our world today.

v.28

The system was designed as much to protect the innocent as to convict the guilty. The husband had to know that he might be exposed for a fool if he brought his accusations and they proved to be unfounded. God can make the bitter water sweet, as he did for Israel at Marah, but one of the curses of the covenant is barrenness and he has promised to enforce that curse when his people are unfaithful.

v.31

In other words, the husband is not to be discouraged from acting on his suspicions by the prospect of punishment for himself if he should prove to be in error in suspecting his wife of infidelity. This is not a system of jurisprudence in which the principle of “loser pays” applies.

Now the simple fact that separates our text this evening from all others in the Bible is that this is the only case in biblical law where a judicial decision depended upon a miracle. [Milgrom, 348] The biblical law laid down extensive rules for determining the weight to give to particular sorts of testimony, the number of witnesses necessary to bring in a guilty verdict, and so on. The law clearly anticipated the possibility that the guilty might go free for lack of evidence to convict. Only here do we have a procedure in which the Lord intervenes directly and supernaturally in the outcome of what is in effect a case at bar.

One thing that is very important for modern readers to notice is the protection that this ritual provided for women. It was not enough for a husband to suspect his wife. Only the Lord could reveal her guilt and if he did not she was vindicated. Without evidence he could not bring her to court and his suspicions could not be acted upon unless demonstrated to be valid. This was a way to ensure that a woman was not unjustly condemned for a crime she had not committed in a culture in which women were even less powerful and more vulnerable than they are in our modern world. Modern folk, likely to be very critical of an institution like this ritual of the jealous husband, should remember who was primarily protected by it: the weak and the vulnerable.

What is more, while the modern reader of Numbers 5 is likely to detect superstition here there is nothing explicitly or implicitly magical in the ritual itself. The water would not harm unless Yahweh himself uncovered the woman’s guilt by this means. This ritual wouldn’t have accomplished anything if the Lord did not, in fact, choose to make use of it. Certainly it accomplished nothing intrinsically, by itself, ex opere operato, by the performance of the ritual in and of itself. It worked only as God made it work. Indeed, if he did not make it work, the woman was ipso facto vindicated whether or not she was guilty.

We have a much harder time appreciating ritual than did ancient Near Eastern people and, indeed, a great many people in the world today. We tend to be suspicious of ritual, even though we still practice rituals of every kind, whether when inaugurating a president, graduating a college student, or marrying a bride and groom. Rituals express the importance that a society attaches to events or institutions. But they are not a machine. The ritual itself no more guarantees a particular outcome than does a prayer. It is the act of God that counts as the phrase “before the Lord” in v. 16 is intended to remind us. [Wenham, TOTC, 82-83] This entire ritual is, in fact, an act of faith in God, almost an enacted prayer. The matter was left entirely in the Lord’s hands and the husband and the wife both waited upon his verdict. This is remarkable really. The Lord alone could adjudicate the matter because there was no evidence of guilt. And the people were commanded to leave it in his hands. He has the greatest concern for his own holiness and he will act according to his interests. He will reveal the matter if he pleases. If he does not, the woman is found innocent.

Like it or not there are others in the Bible who are punished directly by the Lord for their breach of his purity and holiness. Nadab and Abihu violated the Lord’s holiness by offering incense that was improperly burned and were struck dead for their sin. At the time of the attack on Jericho Achan violated the purity of Israel’s camp by stealing some articles from the conquered city that had been devoted to destruction on account of the unholiness of the Canaanite people. The Lord uncovered Achan’s sin and he was executed with his family. Uzzah was struck dead because he touched the ark when it was being transported to the sanctuary in Jerusalem in David’s day. The king of Judah, Uzziah, also known as Azariah, burned incense in the temple, an act to be performed by priests only, and was given leprosy as a punishment for his violation of the holiness of Yahweh’s sanctuary. In the New Testament, Ananias and Sapphira were executed for lying in regard to a gift they purported to give to God and King Herod, as we read in Acts 12, was executed by the Lord for blasphemy. God has and will sometimes intervene directly in matters of crime and punishment when his own holiness is at stake. He certainly does not always do so – that is clear in the Bible – but he has and no doubt in many more cases than are explicitly mentioned in Holy Scripture. It is interesting, for example, that in the case law regarding sexual sin in Leviticus 20 (vv. 20-21) we also read that certain sexual sinners will be punished by being rendered infertile. This is clearly a generalization. Not all such sinners became infertile then as not all of them do now. But it is a threat of punishment for such sin and a threat that the punishment will fit the crime. There is perhaps a principle of generalization at work here as well, as later in Numbers 32:23 where we read that our sins will find us out. Surely they do not always find us out in this life – though they will at the Last Judgment – but it is a fair warning. The Lord can and does often find out our sins and expose us to the disgrace of them.

It is important to remember that we do not know how long this particular ritual was practiced in Israel’s history with God’s blessing. At a later time in Jewish history when it continued to be practiced under the supervision of the rabbis the practice was actually suspended, it seems as at least one rabbi says because adultery was so openly practiced at that time among the Jews that there was no need for a ritual that was designed to punish secret adulterers. [Milgrom, 348] In any case, it couldn’t be practiced hypocritically or unjustly because only God could give the guilty verdict. That is, no one could be falsely condemned by means of this ritual, though, to be sure, if God chose not to honor the ritual because of the general sinfulness of his people – as he did, for example, in the case of other of their rituals, such as sacrifice and prayer – the result would be only that the guilty escaped punishment, not that the innocent were convicted and punished.

What the ritual further served to do was underline the warning, given in several different ways in Numbers, that the sins of God’s people will be found out. It is, of course, possible to get away with a great deal of wrong because no one sees you do it. But God sees and knows. And he assures us in his Word that our sins will find us out. God can uncover guilt whenever and however he chooses. A people being put on notice that they must be and remain holy because God is holy need to realize that God will know of their unholiness whether or not other men do.

But finally, and perhaps most importantly, the ritual drives home the point of the importance of sexual and marital faithfulness to holiness of life and to the blessing of God. In the ANE adultery was a great sin. There is plenty of evidence of that in the archaeological materials. It is evidence of the fact that people know instinctively that a society cannot survive the corruption and eventual destruction of the institution of marriage. Too much of human life depends upon that institution and its sanctity as the modern West is now finding to its dismay. Of one thing any pundit can be certain: when the history of the West and the end of its civilization comes to be written, the sexual revolution will be seen to have played a far greater role in its death than political or military or economic factors.

But in the Old Testament adultery was a still greater sin than it was regarded to be in the rest of the ANE. Its place in the Ten Commandments – the covenant document itself that bound Israel to Yahweh – and its use as a figure for spiritual infidelity, for Israel’s worship for other gods highlight the especially egregious character of this particular sin. Marriage, in other words, had a divine dimension and adultery was therefore directly a sin against God and against his grace in bringing Israel into covenant with himself. [Ashley, 125-126] Israel’s fall was the result of her adultery, both maritally and spiritually as the prophets of the Old Testament made a point of emphasizing. [Milgrom, 349] Yahweh often represented himself to Israel as the jealous and the offended husband! But lest we mistake the point, adultery is described in the New Testament as fully as virulent and vicious a sin as ever it was in the Old Testament. Unfaithfulness in marriage – while a sin that can be forgiven – is incompatible with life in the kingdom of God. Adulterers must be driven out of the church (1 Cor. 5) and there will be no fornicators in heaven (Rev. 21:8; 22:15).

What is interesting is that in several places in the prophets the wrath of God is likened to a cup that Israel must drink. And in some of those places where that image is employed it is Israel’s spiritual adultery that is particularly in view. In Ezekiel 23, for example, we read of Judah’s lewdness and her prostitution, her lusting after the nations and defiling herself with their idols. Then we hear that for that she will have to drink the cup of ruin and desolation.

There is a wonderful side to all of this, of course. The drinking of the cup links this divine judgment with the Lord Jesus’ bearing of divine punishment in our place. Remember Jesus spoke of drinking the cup of the Lord’s wrath and meant by it his suffering in our place for our sin. So the image we have first here in Numbers 5 of a cup being drunk that brings the judgment and punishment of God – his curse against a person because of her sin – becomes eventually the image of our Savior’s suffering and death in our place, bearing the punishment due us for our sins. Imagine a husband in that scene painted for us there at the sanctuary in Numbers 5. You can imagine a short story written along these lines or a movie made of this particular anecdote. The wife stands there in disgrace, her hair undone, accused of sin. What is more, she is guilty. Perhaps the husband knows it even though he cannot prove it. But he loves his wife. Her sin notwithstanding he loves her so. He wonders why he ever brought her here, why he insisted on this. But, of course, he remembers it was the Law of God that instructed him to do this. But when the priest demands that she drink the cup with the water and the dust and the curses mixed together in it, he grabs it from her hand and downs it himself. It is not a perfect illustration, but every Christian gets the point. We were guilty and sure to be condemned and made to suffer for our sin, but Jesus drank the cup for us.

Still let’s be clear about this. The point of Numbers 5:11-31 is not first Christ’s drinking the cup for us; it is the unholiness of adultery, the ruin that such a sin brings upon a person and a people, the certainty that that sin will be found out, and the incompatibility of that sin with the presence and the blessing of the living God. We are in a passage dealing with the absolute necessity of the holiness of God’s people, the holiness of their lives.

I saw on the television the other day an ad for a movie soon to be released, a comedy, the premise of which is that on a young woman’s wedding day three men show up, each of whom might be her father. This is what passes for comedy in Hollywood these days. We have so mainstreamed sexual promiscuity and the inevitability of multiple sexual liaisons that we are now untroubled by laughing over the consequences: a child who doesn’t know who her father is; men who have fathered children to whom they have paid no attention through all the years of their childhood; women and men who have to suffer the complications of meeting again the sexual partners of their past. There is, in fact, nothing remotely funny about any of this. It is not amusing to grow up not knowing who your father is and to have a father who has paid no attention to you throughout your life. It is utterly dehumanizing to treat men and women as sexual animals whose physical desire has been disconnected from everything fine, noble, lovely, and permanent in human life.

What has this disconnection produced in our culture: misery of every kind. There are estimated to be some 65 million people living in America today with a viral STD. One in four American teens will contract an STD in any given year. Billions are spent on the medical treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. Some STDs, as we know, have permanent and incurable effects. More than half of Americans will have an STD at some point in their life. And it is estimated that eventually 80% of American women will have acquired the HPV infection. Some estimates place the number of Americans living with genital herpes at 25%. In the language of Numbers 5 in the NIV, we have become a people with swollen abdomens and wasting thighs. In the member with which we sinned we have received the punishment.

Divorce rates are, of course, at unprecedented levels, and the emotional and spiritual harm to children and ruin that they will carry into their adulthood is revealed with dismal regularity as one study after another confirms the obvious: children are not better off when their world is torn apart. Fewer young adults are marrying for fear of repeating their parents’ failure and the pain that went with it. More are co-habiting though the trend is old enough for us to know now as a society that co-habitation is a sure way to guarantee the precise fate one is attempting thereby to avoid: unstable relationships that cause unbearable pain for both the individuals and their children.

And, just as we might suspect from Numbers 5:27-28, we are in the West becoming as a result of our sexual infidelity an infertile people who are in the process of surrendering the world to nations and peoples who are still capable of having children. The Lord prosper them; we do not deserve to prosper.

You and I, and you young people, live in a world that has mainstreamed sexual infidelity. Sexual activity outside of a committed marriage is now so commonplace as to be utterly uncontroversial in our culture and I fear the young people listening to me have no idea how rapidly this situation has come to pass. When I was in high school you were confronted with a solid wall of opposition to sexual promiscuity. Your teacher was against it, your parents were against it, the television sitcom was against it but now, a single generation later, no one is speaking against the practice of sex outside of marriage. But human life was not designed to work this way and, far more important, it will not work this way because God will not let it work this way. He remains as offended by and as angry with sexual sin today as he was in the days of Moses. It was essential for Israel in the wilderness to know whether an adulteress or adulterer was in her midst because God knew and cared so much.

Americans, and Christians among them, worry about the impact of $4 gasoline or Islamic radicalism on their national power and greatness. If they had a clue they would worry far more about our society’s sexual ethics and the divine wrath promised against sexual sinners.

The Burial of Jesus

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Mark Series
referring to: Mark 15:42-47

Text Comment

v.43

For the sake of his Gentile readers, Mark, as was his custom in the Gospel, explains the Jewish idiom of Preparation Day. It was also the Jewish custom, based on Deut. 21:23, to grant even to criminals a decent burial and to bury them before evening and all the more the evening of the Sabbath. They were not always able to do that because it was the policy of the Romans, as a warning to others, to leave corpses on their crosses until their bodies began to decay. But Pilate didn’t care in this case, or perhaps, knowing as he did that Jesus had not deserved to die and still annoyed at the Jews who had forced his hand, perhaps took some pleasure in granting Joseph’s request knowing that the Sanhedrin would probably be unhappy to learn that he had allowed Jesus’ body to be so quickly removed from the cross and so decently buried.

Joseph was a prominent member of the Sanhedrin and was a faithful man, a disciple of Jesus, as the phrase “who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God” is intended to indicate. A similar thing is said, if you remember, about the godly Simeon who encountered the Lord Jesus as a baby in the temple in Luke 2. We are reminded here that there were more faithful people among the Jews at that time than we might have imagined reading the Gospels.

v.45

The word the NIV translates “body” is a word that particularly refers to a dead body, a corpse.

v.46

John tells us that Joseph enjoyed the help of another member of the Sanhedrin in doing all of this, the same Nicodemus who had come to Jesus by night according to John 3 and he supplied some 75 pounds of spices to anoint the Lord’s body for burial.

It was clearly Joseph’s own tomb and that in itself meant that Joseph was a man of means. It took a lot of money to cut a tomb out of the rock. Nearly a thousand such tombs have been discovered in and around Jerusalem. [Edwards, 490]

v.47

That is, they knew where the Lord had been buried. That is an important detail, of course, because of what would happen next.

Theologians speak of the work of Jesus Christ as being performed in two states or conditions: the state of humiliation and the state of exaltation. The state of humiliation consists of the Son of God taking to himself a human nature, his entering the world as a man, having been conceived in the womb of his virgin mother, his living in the world subject to all the miseries of life, his rejection by men, his suffering, and his death on the cross. In other words, the state of humiliation is all the Son of God endured for our salvation. His state of exaltation then begins with his resurrection from the dead, his ascension to the Right Hand of God, his session, that is his sitting at the Right Hand of God the Father ruling over all things for the church, his coming again, and his judging of the world. In other words, the state of exaltation is all he does as our Savior after his suffering has been concluded.

But what of his burial after his death? What of this link between his death and his resurrection? What is that? What does this mean? Why was he buried and why did he remain dead for a time? Why did he not rise immediately from the cross at the moment of his death? This is not an incidental feature of the history of our redemption. We actually just confessed Christ’s burial, if you remember, as we sang the Nicene Creed. We said that Jesus “suffered and was buried.” And that statement in the creed is based upon the explicit teaching of the Bible. In 1 Cor. 15:3-4, Paul reminding the Corinthian Christians of those things that are of first importance, mentions that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised again on the third day, and so on. Paul in Romans 6 treats it as a matter of great importance that Jesus Christ was buried for us and that when he was buried we were buried with him because what he was doing he was doing in our stead.

So the burial of the Lord, following his death on the cross, is no mere historical detail. It is taught in the Scripture and has been confessed through the ages by the church that the Lord's burial was an important part of what the Savior did for our salvation.

There can be no doubt that the Lord’s burial belongs with his humiliation and is the final stage, the final chapter, however brief, of that humiliation. There is a sense, of course, in which his great work of redemption was finished on the cross. We read, in fact, in the Gospel of John, that Jesus himself cried out “It is finished!” just before he died. He meant that the work he had come in the world to do, the work his Father had given him to perform was now complete. The ransom had been paid. The veil of the temple was torn in two; the way back to God and so to heaven for sinners had been opened.

But all of this notwithstanding, when Christ Jesus lay dead on the cross the full work of his suffering for sin, his redeeming work, was not entirely completed; the last dregs of the cup of divine wrath had not been drunk. He had yet to be buried.

Burial was necessary because that is the way of death for us and to conquer death he had to suffer death in our place as we suffer it and vanquish the very death that we must die. The law demanded death for sin and that death is such a death as ends in the grave. Burial is the fullness of death for us and so it had to be for him as well. As a great preacher put it, “The grave is an amen which the human being knows he must utter when death comes.” [Schilder, iii, 554] Burial is the finality of death and, as we all know who have stood beside graves as loved ones have been lowered into the ground: there, supremely there, life is not only finished, but it disappears from view. We walk away, the separation complete. Our father or mother, sister or brother, our son or daughter, our friend is gone to be seen no more. Burial is the proof, the demonstration of death. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it in one of its shortest questions and answers (41):

Why was he “buried”? His burial testifies that he really died.

It is because burial expresses the nature and finality of our death so profoundly that Abraham Kuyper could say: "Christ would not be a complete savior for us if he had not descended into the grave." [In Berkouwer, Work of Christ, p. 169]

And, in one other respect, the Lord’s burial was the capstone of his humiliation. His burial was in an important way the most dramatic evidence possible of his failure in the eyes of men. Never had Christ’s true glory as the Son of God and the Savior of the world been so completely hidden as when his body – now slack-jawed, pale, and cold, absent any sign of vitality whatsoever – was laid in that tomb and the stone rolled against the entrance. Could anyone not see that his ministry was finished, that the great movement that had begun in his powerful preaching and dramatic works of supernatural power had been crushed and come to nothing? The Sanhedrin may have gnashed their teeth that one of their own had done him such a kind service, but his burial at least reminded them that they had had their way with Jesus of Nazareth and he would pose no further problems. He now lay in a tomb: no more crowds to cheer his arrival, no more large congregations to hang on his every word, no more long lines of sick and needy people awaiting his help and leaving him leaping and dancing for joy. Buried as he was, he would soon be forgotten by all but a few of his closest friends. His burial is the whimpering end of the once so promising life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Even his own disciples could not surmount the brute fact of his burial. They knew he was dead; they did not expect his resurrection. They may very well have continued to wait for the kingdom of God but they did not now think that that kingdom had come in Jesus of Nazareth. “We hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel,” one of his disciples would later say, but laying him in the tomb that afternoon or hearing that he had been so buried, none of them thought so any longer. They were not burying Jesus as part of the history of redemption; they were burying him as a part of everyday events. It was just one more instance of the sadness and disappointment of the death of a loved one such as all human beings experience from time to time. We learn in the other Gospels that some of the women made plans to return on Sunday morning to complete his embalming. Perhaps the true Christ had never been so completely hidden from friend and foe alike as when his sad and faithful friends left him in that tomb that Friday afternoon to return in sadness to their homes. Such is the finality of burial; such is the finality of death as it is expressed in burial. His burial was the end of the hope that had been placed in Jesus of Nazareth and this, therefore, was the last thing he had to do to purchase for us freedom from sin and death. This was the final poverty he endured that we might become rich.

But just as surely as the Lord’s burial was the last stage, step or chapter of his humiliation, so it was a bridge to, even the first step of his glorification and his exaltation. There are clear indications of this as well. As Isaiah had long before prophesied, the Lord died the death of a common criminal; he was numbered with the transgressors. But he was most definitely not buried as a common criminal! He was not thrown into a common grave, a pauper’s grave as most criminals would have been. He was buried instead in a rich man’s tomb; indeed, as we learn in John’s Gospel, he was buried in a new tomb, one that had never been used. He was not, as would ordinarily have been the case even for the wealthy, placed in a tomb among a number of other dead bodies or the skeletons of those long since been buried, or skeletons broken up so as to be placed in ossuaries or bone boxes to make room for more burials in that same tomb. He lay by himself in a brand new tomb like a king. As Isaiah long before had predicted, “he was assigned a grave with the rich in his death.”

And then consider Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph was a disciple of Jesus. We would have known that even had John not told us that he had been a secret disciple for some time; secret for fear of the Jews. But what a lion of a man he had become in the moment of crisis! What a time to come out into the open with his loyalty to Jesus. The Sanhedrin, of which Joseph was a member, had condemned Jesus as a blasphemer. What would they do to Joseph for this act of reverence for their enemy? What is more, it was hard to know what Pilate would think of the man making such a request as Joseph made. He might not think too kindly of a Jew who wanted to pay respects to a man who had been executed as a revolutionary, a subversive. And yet we read that Joseph went boldly to Pilate. He threw caution to the wind and did what he knew was right.

Many of the other disciples had fled for their lives, but Joseph stood up and was counted a follower of Jesus at the most inopportune of all conceivable moments to do so. He may have thought him only a great prophet, murdered like other of God’s prophets had been, he may not have had any inkling of the coming resurrection, but he stood by God’s man in the hour of crisis and placed his reputation and his life in jeopardy in order to do so.

And he placed him in his family tomb, perhaps just recently purchased or cut out of the rock. According to the Mishnah those who died ignominious deaths were not to be buried in family tombs. [Edwards, 489] But if that were a regulation in Joseph’s time, he bravely ignored it and placed Jesus in that new tomb that was to become the place of the triumph of life over death. What a lion of a man Jesus had made of Joseph of Arimathea! What rule Jesus was exercising still, though dead, over the hearts of men. What greatness of human life resulted from following Jesus Christ. These men may have been inexcusably ignorant as they lay him in the grave, but he had already planted the seeds not only of living faith but of a triumphant godliness in their hearts. Even in death he was exercising his sovereign power over the hearts of men. Badly misunderstood as he was, even by his friends, all now lies ready for the dawning of a new day. However unrecognized by the Lord’s disciples at the time, the circumstances of the Lord’s burial held promise of men and women who would turn the world upside down. They would ignore any and all conventions to advance the kingdom of Jesus Christ. All of that is indication that while the Lord’s burial was the last chapter of his humiliation, it was as well the harbinger of his exaltation. It is both the finality of death and the beginning of a new life for the world!

And so there is something else here I want to consider with you this morning. Something to be observed of our Lord’s burial and of the faithful discipleship of those who buried him. One more thing that made his grave, his death, the beginning of his triumph. Mark, remember, has been interested in both subjects from the beginning of his Gospel: how Jesus would bring in the kingdom of God and what it would mean for men to follow him.

I want to draw your attention to the fact that Joseph of Arimathea, here clearly set before us as a model disciple, buried Jesus. You have heard me on this before, but as the culture moves still more rapidly away from Christian practice it is imperative that at least the followers of Jesus Christ understand their faith and make their decisions accordingly, especially their public and most public decisions. And a very great many Christians are not doing so in one supremely important respect. I do not blame them for this; I blame the Christian ministry which has not made an issue of this, has not spoken clearly or emphatically, largely, alas, I think out of ignorance. At a key moment and with respect to a key index of the abandonment of a Christian base in our culture the Christian ministry has remained largely silent. I am determined not to share in that silence and I am determined that you shall be thoroughly discipled in respect to this part of our theology and ethics as the followers of Jesus Christ.

There is an important detail in the translation of v. 46. The NIV, very unfortunately, hides, obscures, virtually denies the detail in its translation. Twice in the verse Mark refers to the Lord’s body with a masculine pronoun, even though both of the nouns which are the antecedents of that pronoun are neuter in gender. That makes the choice of pronoun intentional on Mark’s part. The Greek word soma, which means body, and the Greek word ptoma, which means corpse, are both neuters and ordinarily the pronouns that refer back to those nouns would be found therefore in the neuter gender, as pronouns ordinarily agree with their antecedents in gender and number. But Mark refers to the Lord’s body explicitly not as an “it” as we have it in the NIV, but as “him.” The ESV, which I know a number of you are reading, is much better, accurately rendering the masculine pronouns. The ESV reads:

“Joseph bought a linen shroud and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb…”

There is a world of theology, of meaning, and of obligation in that masculine pronoun him. They laid him in the tomb. They did not lay a body that used to be a person in the tomb. They laid the person himself in the tomb. All of these disciples, however confused they may have been at that moment as to the true identity of Jesus Christ and however unexpecting they may have been of the events to come, all understood that the dead would rise at the last day. Remember Mary, Lazarus’ sister, making that confession to Jesus at her brother’s grave. They knew that death in this world was not the end of human existence. They knew that the righteous would rise to live forever. Every believer knew that. And Joseph of Arimathea knew that when he buried Jesus.

He buried the Lord in the full expectation that he would rise and live again. Not on the following Sunday and not as the Lord of life and salvation, but as any other believer in God would rise and live again. And in that understanding of death and burial Mark properly and in keeping with the witness of the entire Bible refers to the dead and buried Jesus with personal pronouns. He took him, he wrapped him in the linen shroud, and laid him in a tomb.

The personhood of the dead body is fundamental to the Bible’s entire doctrine of salvation as the deliverance, the redemption of the entire human person, body and soul together, from sin and death. The body is laid in the grave as the human person, in the full and certain hope of the resurrection of that self-same body to eternal life at the last day. That Christ’s resurrection is the first fruits of the resurrection of all the believing dead is everywhere taught to be its meaning in the New Testament. Jesus rose from the dead and we shall as he did because we were in him when he was buried and rose again. But the conviction of this, the power and force of this truth, is fading in the church because it is almost entirely eclipsed in the culture. We have become so much a people of the world, of the present, that the future, especially the distant future, the ultimate future, bears down on us scarcely at all. And so, in American culture today, the dead body, the corpse has become an it, it is not longer a him or a her, a he or a she.

The simple proof of this is the rapidly growing popularity of cremation as an acceptable method of disposing of a human body after death. As of 2005 at least ten states reported that more than 50% of dead human bodies had been cremated. The State of Washington was third, with 64% percent of deaths followed by cremation. What is revealing is that cremation is most popular nationwide in those parts of our country where the Christian church is weakest. Most Christians apparently have received so little teaching on this subject that they remain unaware that this turn in the treatment of the dead body represents an absolutely unparalleled return to paganism and a rejection of biblical practice that is unprecedented in the entire history of the believing church in the world. God’s people have never cremated their dead until this very moment in human history! But they are doing so today; even in our Presbyterian Church in America!

We got a Christmas letter from some friends of ours in Great Britain who were describing the death of an elderly family member and the celebration of her life that the family enjoyed after they had returned from the crematorium. So matter-of-fact. So normal! A Christian family gathering after the service at the crematorium. No one realizes that no one, no one would have said such a thing in Israel in biblical times – no matter that Israel was surrounded by peoples that practiced cremation – no matter that no one would have said such a thing in the long history of the Christian faith in the Gentile world until this very moment of ours. It was part of the practice of the Christian faith to bury or entomb her dead precisely because they were and remained persons. You don’t burn up a person. You may burn up an it; you may not burn up and destroy by fire a him or her. Can you imagine saying of scattered ashes what the Bible says of the dead: they rest in their graves until the resurrection; they sleep awaiting the last trumpet? Ashes don’t rest; they don’t sleep; bodies do; persons do.

And what are the arguments for cremation we hear nowadays. Some, of course, are the nakedly materialistic arguments we expect of our culture. It’s cheaper. It doesn’t burden the living with the expense. Woody Allen was absolutely right to say that “To be an American is to take God and carpet with equal seriousness.” When burial can cost a fraction of a cheap new car, to consider saving money by avoiding the burial of a human being is a grotesquely naked instance of a rampant materialism. By all means let the world save its money; but not the Christian church! Let the world burn up their dead; but not the followers of Christ who will soon rise to welcome the returning king.

The other arguments you hear for cremation are of an environmental sort: no longer enough room for cemeteries, it takes too much water to keep the grass green, gasoline to keep the cemetery mowed, and so on. To put such considerations – at once ridiculous and profoundly untrue – ahead of the meaning and sanctity of human life is to cease altogether to think as a Christian. Have we reached the place where golf courses mean more to us than human beings and the second coming of Jesus Christ? But there is more. Many now, even in our supposedly secular land, are arguing for cremation in a way that mimics the great religions that practice cremation as an article of faith. If in Hinduism the body is burned so as to return the soul to the world of the spirit, in modern America, for as little as $4,500 one can have the ashes of your loved one placed beside a tree; a tree with room for as many as fifteen family members. As the urn decomposes, the body becomes one with the tree, one with nature. The concept of a family tree takes on a whole new meaning! Earth has become our mother instead of the church of God.

It is very interesting and worrying to me that the arguments for cremation are so similar to the arguments for abortion. The attack on the personhood of human beings has been made first as we might have expected at the extremes of human life: the pre-born and the dead. Only from there does it move toward the center: next the handicapped child and the elderly who are sick and infirm, and onward it moves. But it began with abortion and cremation, and those two practices very much belong together in logic and in fact. They are a denial of the personhood of a human being.

It is, of course, inconceivable that Jesus Christ might have been cremated. And that is not because God could not have restored his body for the resurrection. The Christian burial of the dead has never had anything to do with the notion that the body needs to be preserved in order for it to rise on the last day. Decomposition occurs. When the sea gives up its dead at the return of Christ bodies will be raised that long ago ceased to exist. The martyrs who were burned at the stake and their ashes scattered on a river will have their bodies restored to them as the Scripture says. And that is why you needn’t grieve without hope if loved ones of yours have been cremated. Just don’t do the same thing yourself! Decomposition is not cremation in precisely the same way a miscarriage is not an abortion. We are to practice our faith as Joseph of Arimathea practiced his. We are to affirm by our actions both the personhood of the body and our conviction that that self-same body will live again as did Jesus’ body. When Paul speaks of these things he assumes both that the dead body in the grave is a human being a person himself or herself – he too uses personal pronouns to speak of buried bodies, “they who are in their graves” – and he also assumes that Christians will have buried their dead as they did in apostolic times and ever thereafter until our own lifetime.

Jesus Christ sanctified the grave for us, not the crematorium! He sanctified a reverent procedure in which the person is laid to a rest, a rest from which we know he or she will soon awake. No one can confess and embody that faith by cremating a human body, a human being!

Here are ethics that arise directly from our text and from this sacred history of our redemption. Some day, for some of us much sooner than later, and for all of us sooner than we think, you and I will be carried into a cemetery. Words will be spoken over us, our loved ones comforted in their loss, and our bodies, encased in a casket, will be lowered into the cold ground and covered with darkness. Gradually the circle of folk will scatter to get on with their lives and we will be left behind in our solitary grave.

Our death will be sealed with burial just as our Savior's was. No one will mistake the fact that the end has overtaken us. That is a hard thought. Our culture is loath to think of it. I am sure that unwillingness has a great deal to do with its preference for cremation: out of sight, out of mind. There is a woman who exercises at my gym whose vanity license plate reads “FOREVR29.” But, of course, it is a pipedream. 29 is a distant memory for her. She is much nearer to the end of her life than to its beginning. But Christians will be buried when they die precisely because it is the key confession of their lives that their existence will not end with their death, that they will rest in their graves until the resurrection, and that then they shall live again and live as they have never lived before. Because of Christ’s conquest of death, burial for us as well is both the image of the finality of death and a rest from which we will soon awake!

G.K. Chesterton mocked the practice of cremation in a so-called Christian country, a practice that was getting up a head of steam even in his day, by reminding us that in the great Eastern religions at least they practiced cremation with a flair; they practiced cremation because they believed in it. At least it meant something; it was part of their theology. It may not be something that a Christian believes, but they believed it and practiced accordingly. So Chesterton mocked Christians using this practice that belonged to other people’s faith:

If I were a heathen, I’d build my pyre on high
And in a great red whirlwind go roaring to the sky.
But Higgins is a heathen and a richer man than I,
And they put him in an oven just as if he were a pie.

If the dead body were an it, you could by all means burn it up to save money. But it is not an it; it is a he or she. You cannot burn up God’s people! Much better is another Chesterton verse.

People, if you have any prayers,
Say prayers for me:
And lay me under a Christian stone
In that lost land I thought my own,
To wait till the holy horn is blown,
And all poor men are free.

Studies in Numbers No. 5

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Numbers Series
referring to: Numbers 5:1-10

Remember, in this section of Numbers, which continues until 10:10, preparations are being made for Israel’s departure from the foot of Mt. Sinai, where the nation had remained for more than a year, and for her march to the Promised Land. So far a census of the nation has been taken to assess Israel’s fighting strength. The camp was organized for movement and rest and the special responsibilities of the Levites who would move the sanctuary were assigned.

We now turn to the purity of the people themselves. Israel is to be a holy people, holy because Yahweh is holy. Her camp where the sanctuary of God is located must be pure because he is there and so efforts are made to address that need, both ceremonially and morally, in the next paragraphs, two of which we will consider this evening.

Text Comment

The first paragraph, vv. 1-4 concerns what is to be done with people who contract ceremonial impurity by means of a skin disease, or involuntary discharges, or by contact with a dead body, all matters first addressed in Leviticus, if you remember.

v.2

The particular forms of ritual impurity mentioned here are apparently the more severe forms of ceremonial defilement that took longer to remove. The skin diseases required separation from the community for a time and the removal of the impurity required a ritual. There were single discharges from the sexual organs that produced a ritual impurity that was simple to remove and rendered the person unclean for only a few hours. The ones intended here are probably the longer term discharges that produced impurity until they stopped (perhaps the discharges associated with gonorrhea), were in some cases also contagious, and required a sacrifice to cleanse the affected person. Finally, contact with dead animals rendered a person unclean for a day, but contact with a dead human being rendered him or her unclean for a week. It is the latter that is meant here.

v.3

The reason why impure people had to be removed from the camp is explicitly stated: it was because God was dwelling in the midst of them. It is important to remember, in reading these stipulations that strike modern readers as strange and almost cruel, that it is perfectly obvious that these were regulations meant to emphasize holiness before God. Most forms of ceremonial impurity were easy to remove and did not require any separation from the community. The forms of impurity mentioned here were rarer, were the more severe ones and represented an enacted and public demonstration of that purity that was to be the commitment of the entire people. It is a fact that must be faced by all of us that a few people in the church are made to be a public demonstration of the spiritual principles of the kingdom of God in ways that most Christians never are. It is not because they are worse sinners necessarily, but because their particular sin happens to expose them to public notice and because the consequences of their sin are such as everyone can see. We have all seen this and have all thought at the time – if we have Christian blood in our veins at all – “there but for the grace of God go I.” Well, so it was in the ancient church and its system of ritual purity. Only some people, probably only a few, had to suffer more public exposure and their impurity and purification was an enacted lesson for the entire people. Hard as it may be to accept, c’est la vie. So it is even in our day.

It is not entirely clear to modern scholarship what the rationale for impurity was. Why did certain things render a person unclean? Much modern study has been devoted to this question and advances in understanding have been made, but it is definitely not the case that the entire subject is now fully understood. It seems clear that death and life are opposing principles here (menstrual blood or semen are both forces of life, the corpse obviously the embodiment of death). That which belongs to death is inappropriate in the presence of the living God. [Cf. Milgrom, 345-346] It has been argued by some, especially evangelicals, that the principle in these cases is the health of the camp, that people are banished because they may be carriers of disease. STDs such as cause discharges are contagious at least to sexual partners and even contact with a dead body may inadvertently spread disease and, therefore, the one who had touched it needed to remain outside the camp until he was known to be healthy. [Brown, 41] I think that health is very doubtfully the primary principle here. The problem is that, however understood, there is clearly an arbitrariness to these commandments, as there is a certain artificiality in the distinction between clean and unclean foods. That the distinction is arbitrary or artificial suggests that its great point is illustrative rather than intrinsic. For example, the ANE and Israel herself knew a great many other diseases beside skin diseases, diseases that caused the afflicted to look deathly ill and finally proved fatal. But only the skin diseases are a cause of ritual impurity. In the same way there were other conditions that were known to be contagious, but these other diseases did not require quarantine. Or consider the touching of a dead body that any loved one must do in order to prepare a father or mother for burial. Why should such acts of devotion and respect render a person unclean? The fact is what we have here is a selective list that serves a larger, overarching purpose, a purpose that could have served by a list of other conditions just as well. What this means, of course, is that the Hebrews did not think superstitiously about these things, as if touching a dead body gave you cooties or touching human blood somehow invoked some primitive taboo or deleterious magical effect. They knew better. This was a vast symbolic system meant to enforce the seriousness of personal and ecclesiastical holiness. It is interesting, by the way, that the OT never says that any of this ceremonial impurity kept anyone from communion with God in prayer, from the forgiveness of sins, or the blessings of the covenant. This is ceremonial impurity and purity, not the condition of a heart or a life before God.

We have the same thing, by the way, in the New Testament but only in the deeper moral sense of which the OT system was an illustration. In the NT too we read of people being banished from the camp because of the impurity of their lives. We call it church discipline, a practice they observed in the ancient epoch as well, as you know. But we do not any longer embody the principle of purity in these liturgical ways as we no longer have a physical sanctuary of the Lord in our midst. The principle is clear: the Lord’s condescension in choosing to dwell among his people must be matched by their determination to remain a pure people.

By the way, notice the fact that these commandments are not gender specific. They applied to males and females equally. The church should be the one institution in the world in which there is no double standard. The laws of righteousness apply as well to the one sex as to the other.

v.4

Notice the three-fold emphasis on Israel’s obedience. The fact is, Israel could attend immediately to the instructions regarding the banishment of unclean persons and she did. The assumption is, of course, that she would continue to treat the unclean this way as they appeared in the community from time to time. It is interesting also that the performance of these regulations required the cooperation of the people. How would anyone know that some of these things had occurred (a repeated discharge or even the touching of a body) unless those involved had acknowledged the same?

v.6

The particular offense is specifically that of coming by someone else’s property fraudulently, by whatever means, and often, when accused, denying the offense, even under oath. This passage mirrors the one in Leviticus 6:1-5. Reading Leviticus and other passages in the OT one can come and some scholars have come to the conclusion that the law provided forgiveness only for inadvertent sins, sins committed accidentally and unintentionally and that there was no atonement for intentional sins. Passages like this one, however, make it clear that that was never the idea. Intentional sins, or as they are also called, high-handed or defiant sins, are the sins of apostates. There is no atonement for those sins. Such sins are what the NT calls the sin against the Holy Spirit or the sin unto death. But for the ordinary sins of human frailty, the sins of which Paul speaks in Rom. 7:14-24, the sins that believers are committing all the time to their dismay, there was always forgiveness if there were repentance and faith.

Take note of the point made emphatically here that sins against one’s fellow man are sins against the Lord. All our sins against one another are first and foremost sins against God whose will it is that we should love our neighbor. It is this fact that explains David’s statement to God in Psalm 51, after committing adultery and murder, “against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” He had certainly sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah, but in so sinning he had offended the Almighty. In typical Hebrew hyperbole, the greater sin is spoken of as if it were the only sin.

v.7

The sin must be confessed, no doubt at the time the offender made his sacrifice and as he was laying his hands on the head of the animal; no secret restitution to protect one’s reputation is allowed. And there must be actual restitution. The penitent must pay the amount and more that he stole from his brother. The wrong must be put right: it is not enough to say that one is sorry.

There is a Baptist evangelist in England who at his evangelistic campaigns provides bins in which people in his congregations can return stolen goods so that the campaign staff, wherever possible, can return them to their rightful owners. And they collect a lot of stuff! [Brown, 44] The emphasis here, however, is on the thief doing it himself or herself and paying restitution personally. It is not enough simply to give the goods back. The owner has also had stolen their use for some time. He is entitled to more. You defrauded him; you must now, as it were, defraud yourself, suffer loss yourself, to make the matter right. Among the penalties are an added amount that has to be returned and the public acknowledgement that you were the thief.

v.9

A new wrinkle in addition to what we have in Leviticus is that if the offended person, the defrauded man is dead when the offender comes to repentance and wants to make restitution, and if the man has no living relatives, the restitution must still be made, but in this case to the priest.

I wonder if in reading these two short paragraphs you realized what a comprehensive picture they paint both of the human condition and of the nature of God’s provision for our salvation.

First, you have the double perspective on sin that you find everywhere in the Bible and in the observation of human life.

Ceremonial impurity was impossible to avoid. It happened to everyone. Its causes were the ordinary actions of human life: sexual activity, menstruation, childbirth, the death of loved ones, illness, and so on. But it was nevertheless impurity, uncleanness that attached to a person as a result of these things and this was the great lesson of this entire system of ceremonial purity. There is, in other words, something structural, inevitable, and inescapable about impurity and uncleanness. That is what all of this demonstrated to the thoughtful Israelite again and again. He was unavoidably dirty. There is an impurity that attaches to human life and there is nothing that anyone can do about that by his or her own efforts. This is, we might say, SIN, sin with a capital “S.” This is sin conceived of as an inescapable feature of human life; sin as a principle within us, part of us and of our lives. We are not talking here about sinful deeds but about the impurity that inexorably attaches to fallen human life.

On the other hand, actual transgressions are considered in vv. 5-10, violations of God’s law that are voluntary, intentional, and entirely avoidable. If the first class of violations consists of ceremonial and unavoidable impurity, this second class consists of the sort of sins that human beings and Christians among them are committing every day: violations of God’s law in thought, word, and deed. These are the sort of sins Christians can and do decide not to commit.

Every thoughtful Christian knows that both dimensions of sin are found in his or her life all the time, the structural kind and the behavioral kind: the systemic impurity of life on the one hand – that something wrong, foul, unclean lies deep within him or her – and ethical failure, specific moral transgressions on the other. Our problem is two-fold: SIN and sins! Both are of great consequence. Indeed, what the modern readers of the OT would be likely to treat as of little consequence – the ceremonial impurity – is actually representative of the most important form of sinfulness, because all the specific moral failures come from the structural impurity of life and are an expression of it. We commit sins because our lives are shot through with SIN. We do impure things because we are impure in our very nature, our lives are impure.

Modern people tend to think that these laws of ritual purity were silly: the primitive thinking of an ancient people. What do such outward, physical things such as skin diseases or bodily discharges have to do with good and evil? Purity is doing good things, impurity is doing bad things. But, of course, it is our culture’s view of purity that is superficial. Our problem is much deeper than the sum of our evil acts, most of which, in any case, go largely unnoticed even by ourselves. The Bible is always reminding us of this. Our problem with sin goes down to the bottom of our hearts. We are sinners by nature. Our hearts are unclean and that is why we do so much that is wrong and fail to do so much that is right and that is why no one in all these thousands of years have been able to eradicate sin from his life no matter how much effort he devotes to the attempt. The leopard cannot change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin. This is what the system of ceremonial impurity was devised to teach the Israelites and impress upon their consciences.

Elder Skrivan was telling me the other day of a conversation he had with a man on an airplane. He happened to have been instrumental in bringing the Dalai Lama to Seattle recently (Elder Skrivan flies so much he is often bumped up to first class; you might ask him why he doesn’t regularly volunteer to exchange his seat with some needy person in coach!). They fell to talking about religion and once he realized Tim was a Christian he said that while he agreed with him about many things, he did not agree about original sin. The man was perceptive enough to realize that it is here where lies the vast gulf that divides biblical Christianity not only from all other forms of Christianity but from all other religions. It is the Bible’s teaching that man is structurally impure and sinful by nature, inescapably so as a result of the Fall, and that because of this structural impurity man is incapable of saving himself. This is what distinguishes the Christian faith as an account of human life and the hope of salvation. Its diagnosis of man’s problem is much more pessimistic than you find in other religions and philosophies. As Isaiah memorably put it:

“We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” [64:6]

And because that is man’s moral condition before God the Bible rests salvation, and must rest it, upon divine intervention rather than human effort. Man’s problem is too severe, too intractable for him to solve himself.

It is striking, when we come to the New Testament, as we often recently saw in our studies in Mark’s Gospel, to see Jesus dealing with this very sort of ceremonial impurity in a sovereign and absolutely decisive way and to turn it into a picture of man in sin and his 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. The woman with the issue of blood had been to every doctor she could but none of them had helped 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 she was suddenly and perfectly healthy. The separation from God and man that impurity causes Jesus overcame by purifying the person. He did what the benighted person could not. 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. But, in order to enjoy God’s presence you must be pure. That brings us to our second point.

Second, you have in these regulations a straightforward emphasis on the principle of holiness.

In order to be in fellowship with God, in order to enjoy his nearness, one must be holy. That is clearly the principle being served by this elaborate system of impurity and purification, sin and atonement. It is the specific rationale reported in v. 3. Moral offense lies at the bottom of man’s problem and that is because God is holy. Those two facts go a long way to explain everything else we read in the Bible. They are the fundamental explanation of human history. These facts explain why divine judgment rests upon this world and why so much misery is constantly being visited upon human beings: the world rings with the divine judgment of man’s unholiness of life. These same facts – the holiness of God and the unholiness of man – explain why salvation is first and foremost in the Bible a matter of the forgiveness of sins. There is that in man that must be done away with before he can be reconciled to God. It is why we are told that the difference between earth and heaven is that in heaven “nothing unclean shall enter.” [Rev. 21:27] It is why Paul tells us that God chose us before the foundation of the world to be holy. Or that we were predestined to be conformed to the image of Jesus. It is to make us pure and holy so that we might live with God that salvation takes the precise form that it does in the Bible: justification and sanctification together, forgiveness and renewal. It is why we are told that those who are in Christ shall no longer sin, by which the Apostle John means that the presence of God’s Spirit in a human heart must and will make holiness, not sin the fundamental, the operative principle of life. It is why, along the way, we are reminded that our relationship with God will wax and wane according to the purity of our lives. As we read in Psalm 66:18: “If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me.”

As anyone can see, our culture, including much of the church, no longer sees holiness as the first and decisive principle of reality. Man’s problems are legion but a lack of holiness does not seem to be among those of first importance. The concern expressed publicly is certainly not man’s estrangement from a holy God whose eyes are too pure to behold iniquity and who is angry with the wicked every day. I know we know this, but do we appreciate how completely holiness has disappeared from the modern Western view of reality?

It is very interesting, for example, that our culture still cares very much about purity and also expresses that concern in outward ways: not skin diseases and bodily discharges as in Israel, but in outward ways nonetheless. We care a great deal as a culture about bodily cleanliness. We spend billions on soaps and shampoos and deodorants. We are the cleanest people who have ever lived! More than that, we care a great deal as a people about pure and clean water and pure and clean air. We are offended at pollution and we are frightened by it. We have advanced these issues with religious zeal. We want polluters drummed out of the community. We want our drugs to be pure down to the parts per million or else. But a culture that has mainstreamed pornography and sexual infidelity obviously is not terribly concerned about purity of heart or purity of life in the sense in which God defines it. We are much, much more concerned about the purity of the earth than about the purity of the human heart, as if impure human hearts are ever going to create a pure world! Alex Rodriquez was recently seen wearing the white clothes that are the uniform of the Kabbalah, the Jewish sect of secret wisdom. The white stands for purity. But the Yankees baseball star has been cheating on his wife and paying little to no attention to his children. Wearing white is purity only in the most superficial and hypocritical sense. A culture that has also mainstreamed impure speech is obviously not concerned about purity as a matter of heart and life before a personal God of holiness. God, in fact, has nothing to do with our concern for purity. Our purity is a political not a theological idea. In Israel God and the presence of God had everything to do with its understanding of impurity and purification. But not in the modern West. There is something genuinely grotesque about the impersonalization and desacralization and detheologizing of purity in modern culture. We can nowadays be zealous for purity without ever actually considering either God or the unholy heart of a human being. We have transferred our concern for purity away from the self, away from the heart, and away from God and his judgment of our lives, to matters of public policy. We have lost touch with the principle that the system of public purity in Israel was intended to teach, enforce, and recommend. God is holy and so if we would live with God we must be holy too. Man cannot escape his nature. Modern man cannot stop being concerned about purity. He will never stop making moral judgments. But he’ll be damned before he will think of purity in reference to God or to his own relationship with God!

Every culture must express its concern for purity in outward ways. One cannot see the heart. But our outward ways of expression no longer even concern the individual human life. No one any longer talks to young people in school about purity. No one in our public culture is concerned about purity as a virtue of the inner life, about being clean in one’s attitudes and thoughts, as well as words and deeds. The structural sins of fallen humanity are hardly ever thought of or mentioned in public.

Young people, let me speak to you about this for a moment. You know how attractive to you is pure, clean water and pure, clean air. You have been camping and have seen a mountain stream and breathed that crisp, fresh air. That is wonderful. But there is something much more wonderful and that is a heart that is pure before God and man. Nothing should matter to you more, nothing holds greater promise for your own happiness and the goodness and fruitfulness of your life than that you be pure within and that you live your life intending to keep your heart pure. Only by walking with God is this possible, but it is possible and it is surpassingly wonderful to have a pure heart. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!”

Third, and finally, we have here atonement at the center of salvation.

Like it or not, the impure and the sinful get right with God by atonement and only by atonement. The sinner must confess his sin and he must make restitution. But neither are enough to clear his debt before God. For that the guilt offering must be brought to the temple: the “ram with which atonement is made for him.” Now any Christian, of course, understands what those offerings of atonement pointed to: the death of Jesus who, as John puts it (1 Jn 2:2) is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. The blood of bulls and goats could not take away sin; the OT believer knew that, but they pointed to the sacrifice that could: the blood of the Son of God. There is no forgiveness without atonement. That too is demonstrated here. The sin must be paid for. Justice must be served. The man’s own restitution is not that payment. It is simply the form of his repentance and the love of his brother. The offense against God, however, must be satisfied and that is the purpose of the sacrifice of a substitute.

The very requirement of restitution here, that the loss must be repaid by the thief and with added value attached, is an indication that justice is the principle of this system of reconciliation with God. God is just: that is the reason why both the sinner must make restitution and why man can be forgiven only through the sacrifice of the Son of God. We tend to forget how comprehensively justice lies at the bottom of God’s dealings with us. He is a God of love, to be sure, and that is why he saves us; but his justice is such that even his love must bow to its demands.

So perfect is God’s justice, for example, that you and I will pay restitution for the sins we have committed. This is what Paul means when he says that at the judgment you and I will receive what is due us for the things done in the body, whether good or evil. There will be a perfect apportionment of reward even among forgiven sinners: some will have more and some less in heaven. We should not forget this for many reasons, but we should certainly not forget it because it is another demonstration of how demanding is divine justice and how perfect it will always be. Even down to the weighing of the details of life, even in the case of Christians whose sins have been forgiven, still divine justice is making its demands!

But that same justice had still more comprehensively to be served when sins are forgiven and sinners made right with God. The English Congregationalist of the first half of the 20th century, P.T. Forsyth reports the story of a guerrilla leader by the name of Shamel, fighting against the Czarist regime in 1870s Russia.

His was a guerilla group, including not only the fighting men but also their families and their livestock. His organization was his own little universe, with laws fundamental to its own existence. Then one day stealing broke out in his camp and his organization began to fall apart in mutual suspicion. So Shamel laid down the law and announced the penalty. ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and the penalty was one hundred lashes. Before long the thief was caught. But it was Shamel’s own mother! Now he had the problem of law and love. For the sake of his universe the law must stand; in no society can stealing be treated with indifference. At the same time he loved his mother and could not face the requirements of his own law that she should bear the one hundred lashes. Who could see his own mother bear such a beating? Shamel shut himself in his own tent for three days trying to find his solution and finally came out with his mind made up; his mother, for the sake of the law and for the sake of the whole society, must receive the lashes. How many societies have failed because at this very point they could not hold to the law! But before three blows had fallen Shamel had his real and final solution, his revelation. He removed his mother from her penalty and required that they lay on his own back the full measure of every blow. The price had to be paid in full, but the price was paid by him. His law stood; his love stood. The only possible solution was to receive the punishment in his own person.” [Addison Leitch, Interpreting Basic Theology, cited in D.R. Davis, The House that Jesus Built, 57]

It is an imperfect illustration. God’s justice is not required to be served simply because society would fall apart if it weren’t. There is something intrinsically and eternally right about it. It is part of reality as surely as love is; it is a part of God’s very nature to be just and so to require the punishment of sin. Nevertheless, the point is beautifully made: we had violated the law and deserved punishment; God’s love desired our deliverance from that punishment; but only by the satisfaction of God’s justice could that deliverance occur. So he bore the punishment to secure our forgiveness. No forgiveness without atonement; no salvation without the punishment of sin; and no punishment without a substitute. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! The Christian faith in its utter distinctiveness in Numbers 5:1-10.