So Many Numbers!
The book of Numbers in the Old Testament is not the easiest book to understand. There are places where it interesting…and places where it’s confusing. There are places where there are just so many numbers! So many instructions! So many different rituals! I’m not surprised that the people of Israel had trouble keeping it all straight…but perhaps that was the intent.
Is the law necessary?
When the Bible speaks of "the Law of Moses" I assume it means all the laws God gave Moses, not just what we now call the Ten Commandments. Those ten are a little easier to keep straight in my head. It is upon those ten laws that our modern laws of western civilization are resting. Think about it...things like murder, stealing, cheating on one's spouse. Whether we admit it or not, the ethics of our current legal system evolved out of the Old Testament laws. Perhaps you have heard the term "Judeo-Christian culture"? Much of what we know as western civilization is based upon the Judeo-Christian values derived from the Christian Bible.
People don’t like laws
The people of Israel found it impossible to keep all the laws…even when they were trying! There were also plenty of times where they just openly rebelled against it. As I observe our current culture, it would seem that little has changed in that regard. We still have trouble keeping laws, and often openly rebel. So if God knew we wouldn’t be able to keep the law, why did he give it to us?
There were other laws in addition to the Ten Commandments that God prescribed to the people of Israel while they crossed the desert from Egypt to Canaan. Many of these involved personal and communal hygiene principles more or less designed to keep the people alive. The fact that the penalty for breaking these laws in many cases was excommunication or death, might seem a little counter-intuitive, but that might be an issue to attempt to untangle in a separate post.
What about grace?
But wait! Aren’t we now in an age of grace? Doesn’t the event of Jesus birth, death and resurrection wipe out the Old Testament law? While it may appear that is the case, Jesus made a point of clarifying that this is not so. When speaking of the old law, he clearly said “I did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.” So perhaps what we really need to try to understand is what Jesus meant when he said he came to fulfill the law. If this age of grace Jesus came to usher in does not negate the Old Testament law, then how does that work?
How does the Bible explain it?
The Apostle Paul is one of the New Testament writers who explains the balance between law and grace most thoroughly. In the fifth chapter of the book of Romans he writes: 20 God’s law was given so that all people could see how sinful they were. But as people sinned more and more, God’s wonderful grace became more abundant. 21 So just as sin ruled over all people and brought them to death, now God’s wonderful grace rules instead, giving us right standing with God and resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. 1 The long and short of it, as I understand it, is that we have the law to us to make us aware of our brokenness, and to point us toward God's remedy for that brokenness. So all those rituals and sacrifices listed in the Old Testament actually point toward the final sacrifice God would offer.
When the law is fulfilled – grace is possible.
The Bible tells us that God took on human form in the person of Jesus Christ, who was both human and divine. In Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi in the New Testament, he explains that Jesus “gave up his divine privileges” in order to identify fully with us.
6 Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. 7 Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, 8 he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. 2
The death of Jesus on the cross was the final sacrifice that fulfilled all that the Old Testament sacrificial laws were pointing toward. It is through the death and resurrection of Jesus, that God is able to offer us his grace.