Chapter 15

Instructions about bodily discharges.  These are very detailed.  Not only is the person unclean but what he or she wears, their bedclothes, chairs they sit in and so on.  Anyone who touches a person unclean for reasons of discharge is unclean until evening and must wash.  Offerings must be brought to the priest and a sin and a burnt offering given after the discharge has stopped to restore the one with the discharge. 

2023 - This verse:

14 And on the eighth day he shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons and come before the LORD to the entrance of the tent of meeting and give them to the priest. [Lev 15:14 ESV]

We have seen this before for cleansing/purification.  Seven full days, and then action on the eighth.  Obviously corresponds to the age of males at circumcision.  Why this time frame?  Why on the eighth? Because it took six to create the world, and then one day to rest, and on the eighth day God has done his work and we begin moving ahead with man involved?  Seems pretty far out there...but again, there is a reason.

2023 - Here is another mystery - at least it is mysterious to me...where did they get all this water for the constant washing they had to do to restore cleanness?  Washing everything someone unclean had touched, washing clothing, beds, washing themselves.  That's a lot of water.  Did they have common bathtubs set up for everyone to use such that everyone knew when you went in there that you were unclean for the rest of the day?  Is that how it worked?

All this seems to go on and on and on, but there is finally an explanation for it at the end of chapter 15:

31 "Thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, lest they die in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst." [Lev 15:31 ESV]

2023 - Nothing unholy, nothing unclean, can make us clean.  Here is another principle I had never seen, incorporated into these OT rituals, sometimes in the strangest places, as here.  Unclean people had to be kept out of the Tabernacle, because if they came in, they would make the clean unclean, and so the tabernacle would no longer be the "conduit" to remove sin from the people.  No one could be made clean as long as the tabernacle stayed unclean.  We are all born unclean, unholy.  Only what is clean and holy can change that.  The gospel is clean.  Just as the tabernacle, when commissioned, had to be purified with blood, and as Aaron and the priests had to be washed before serving, our bodies must be purified and cleaned up for service to God.  We must be washed in the blood.  We are temples and priests of the New Covenant.  Repent and be baptized, Acts 2:38. Possible FB post from Lev 15, on discharges.

All these rituals and  inspections and re-inspections were designed to insure the safety of those coming to the tabernacle.  God simply won't tolerate what is unclean.  It cannot be allowed, and there are absolutely no exceptions.  If the unclean approach God, they die.  So these rituals were to make them clean, to be sure they were clean, lest their uncleanness also be the cause of their death. 

The typology is to sinners, lost in sin, corrupt and unclean before God.  Like lepers, and those with discharges, such sinners cannot approach God at all without being cleansed by a priest.  In this case, the priest is Jesus, the sacrifice was on the cross, and it is Jesus' blood that reinstates us, cleanses and ritually purifies us, so that we can enter into fellowship with God.  We can approach him. 

Another thought...not only is the one with the discharge unclean, but any and all who touch him, or touch what he has touched, is also unclean.  Is this also typology in that close association with sinners brings some of the guilt of that sin on us also?  Even though it is not our sin.  If you hang with bank robbers, though you never participate in the robbery, won't you be guilty by association and an accomplice under the law?  Yet I know we are only condemned for our own sin.