Numbers 5 Commentary
The LORD God orders Moses to expel any individual who is ritually unclean from the community of God’s people. We fully understand the reason – it’s because the LORD God is present among the people. He detests this kind of sickness.
This LORD God here is different from the LORD God of the New Testament. He didn’t excommunicate the sick; He welcomed and healed them!
Skin diseases and deaths misrepresent the perfection of God’s creation. He never meant it this way!
These laws are a powerful teaching aid! Then you know what God’s world is like.
In this chapter, He expels sickness together with the carrier. He gets rid of sickness in the New Testament by healing the carrier. The New Testament is a time of favor! The sick should know this – all sicknesses, spiritual or emotional.
Of course, the expulsion of the leprous protects the entire community from infection. Sin must be expelled before the soul suffers!
The law on restitution underlines restoration. This law looks to the future. The LORD God would restore all things when He shows up in person.
Then we have some very strange instructions on testing a wife’s faithfulness or proving a wife’s unfaithfulness. While this law appears harsh, it really is very cool.
In a culture where women stood disadvantaged, a possibility existed for injustice against women, even on mere suspicion. This law wasn’t meant to suppress women, but rather, to protect them from unscrupulous males.
As a test for a wife’s faithfulness, this strange law protected women from unjustifiable ‘sending away with a certificate’, even on mere suspicion. As a test for unfaithfulness, it protected the sanctity of marriage.
Chapter 5 is strange indeed! Men and women with defiling skin diseases are expelled from the camp. Strange and rough. The Old Testament doesn’t have good words like self-isolation that we have today – with pandemics like Covid-19.
Expulsion here shouldn’t surprise us. In fact, it helps us understand the expulsion of man in Genesis 3 by the same God because of impurity. The God of the Old Testament expels while the God of the New Testament embraces and heals.
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