Page 83 - Pentateuch - Student Textbook

10.5 Let’s Personalize this Lesson…

We might miss the background of sin in which we live if we skip the chapters on clean and
unclean. They speak of our normal life. We know of nothing different. In these laws we get a
glimpse of what might have been and of what one day will be. Perhaps we come closer in
understanding through the words of a woman paralyzed from a young age.

I sense this whenever I see smog, a junkyard, and dead raccoons in the road. When I
drive the coastal mountains just a stone’s throw from where I live and marvel at the
jutted, jagged rocks and canyons, I’m vividly aware I’m in the middle of earthquake
country. Mud slides and fires happen all the time around here. These hills are restless.
They’re also scarred by the improbable palaces of movie stars who litter the landscape
with satellite dishes. My heart breaks for these mountains and trees (and movie stars!)
to be liberated from their bondage… Can you feel the heavy silence in the mountains?
Can you sense the restless longing in the sea? Can you see it in the woeful eyes of an
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animal? Something’s coming…something better.”

We can also see part of the application of this section in the practical
changes made in spiritual life after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Peter
had a vision of a large sheet let down to earth holding all kinds of animals,
including reptiles. He was told to eat. He protested, “I have never eaten
anything impure or unclean (Acts 10:14).” The voice said, “Do not call
anything impure that God has made clean (10:15).” In obedience Peter went
to the house of Cornelius, a Gentile and shared the gospel. Cornelius
believed, received the Holy Spirit, and was baptized (10:47, 48). The event is
emphasized as Peter repeats his explanation for the leaders in Jerusalem
Fig. 57: Leproy (11:1-18). The link to our chapters is obvious in the use of “unclean” and
“clean.”

Something has happened. What had been unclean for centuries, even going back to the days before the
flood (Gen. 7:2), is now clean. The contamination spread from one person to the next, keeping them
from God’s presence, is gone. Even more, the concept of clean and unclean is shifted from the
relationship between humans and God to the relationship between person and person. “I am convinced,
being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something
as unclean, then for that person it is unclean (Rom. 14:14).” The coming of Christ has changed clean and
unclean.

Sin, the same sin, still persists. The physical world remains tainted. “Moral imperfections and impurities
– that is the sinful activities that rendered a person unclean in the Old Testament – are still sinful in the
new covenant and still require repentance and confession and forgiveness in order to comply with God’s
standard of holiness. It is folly – it is dishonest – to argue that because the purification regulations of Old
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Testament Israel were fulfilled by the death of Christ, the sins listed in Leviticus are no longer sins.” Yet

89 J. E. Tada, Heaven: Your Real Home (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), p. 68.
90 Ross, Holiness, 247.

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