Numbers 5:1-4--Unclean People

Unclean People
5 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Command the people of Israel that they put out of the camp everyone who is leprous or has a discharge and everyone who is unclean through contact with the dead. 3 You shall put out both male and female, putting them outside the camp, that they may not defile their camp, in the midst of which I dwell.” 4 And the people of Israel did so, and put them outside the camp; as the Lord said to Moses, so the people of Israel did.

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A much shorter passage today, but an important one.  God's requirements of holiness for His people meant that they could not cone in contact with anyone or anything that was "unclean."  If someone or something "unclean" was allowed in the camp, it could pollute anyone and everything that it came into contact with.  Whether they realized it or not, God was giving them an image of how sin works.  There is no such thing as a personal sin that affects no one other than you.  All sin reaches out and affects everything around you so that if you continue to let sin live in the midst of the righteous, it will try to corrupt them so that they are "disqualified" from the race which God has set before them.  (See 1 Corinthians 9:27 and 2 Timothy 3:8).

These commands are also important to the physical health of the entire camp--they were not simply about a spiritual application, but they were put in place to protect the people of God from diseases that were unknown and unseen by human standards, but that God knew about, could see, and He knew the best way to command His people to deal with them--avoid them.  In the days of modern medicine we think that everything should have a treatment or a medication to help at least control the symptoms if not heal someone to make them get better, but God knew that anytime that anyone was experiencing a discharge of any kind of bodily fluid, they had an infection that caused a seeping or oozing wound, they had a rash that was spreading, they had touched anyone or anything dead, or they had contact with anyone or anything "unclean" (including unclean animals that we know today harbor many diseases), the people were to remain in quarantine outside the camp so that they could not pollute the camp and especially not pollute the Tabernacle.  Yes, there were specific rules saying not to go to church if you were sick with anything that was contagious.  We already read about these rules in Leviticus for how it was to be determined by the priests when someone's infection was cured to the point where they could return and what the required sacrifice of purification was.  That's why this whole passage is so short, because these instructions to the people are brief.  All they need to know is when they become unclean that they need to go outside the camp and separate from the people.  God does not leave them behind completed because they are still to follow at a distance, but they are not to make contact with the clean people or enter the camp so as to make the camp or its inhabitants unclean.

We see here the idea of how uncleanliness (sinfulness) is like an infectious disease that has a large R-factor--a term used to talk about how contagious or infectious a disease is.  An R-factor of 1 would mean that for each person that gets sick, they make 1 other person get sick.  An R-factor of 2 means for each person that gets sick, they make 2 other people sick.  The only way to make an infectious disease die out is to make the R-factor less than 1 (as close to zero as possible).  One of the ways to do that is to distance yourself from others so that they can't catch your disease--but we know sin has already corrupted everything in the universe after the Fall.  It has already infected everyone and everything.  There is no  place we can go in this universe to get away from the presence of sin.  We then would look to some sort of treatments to lessen the time someone is contagious, vaccines to help healthy people not get sick, and other preventative measures like washing hands and covering our faces when we are sick.  While the first two things on that list are relatively new, hand washing and covering your face when you're contagious actually also come right out of God's Law in Leviticus.  We've already studied those passages.  So, God's Law is consistent with what we know today about infectious diseases and the best way that was available at the time.  Some diseases are not treatable and the only thing you can do is minimize the exposure that others have to the disease.  At this time, that's sort of what sin was like, though we'll see next time that God actually does give the people a "therapy" of sorts for dealing with sin--confession, restitution, atonement, reconciliation, and forgiveness.

We'll pick up there next time as we talk about God's desire for all people to be reconciled to one another and to Himself, but how it comes at a cost.  It's really not meant to be as simple as saying, "I'm sorry" and "I forgive you."