Leviticus 12:1-8 And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,… The theme of the chapter is the same as that of the one preceding and the one following. The subject is sin, portrayed by symbols. In the division of the animals into clean and unclean we had the nature of sin in its general character and outward manifestations. It is a brutalisation of humanity. It has its type in all sorts of savage, noxious, vile, annoying creatures. But this chapter presents another and still more affecting phase of man's corruption. Surveying those masses of sin and vileness which hang about our world, the question arises, Whence comes it? How are we to account for it? It is useless to attribute it to errors in the structure of society, for society itself is the mere aggregate of human life, feelings, opinions, intercourse, agreement, and doings. It is man that corrupts society, and not society that corrupts man. The one may react very powerfully upon the other, but the errors and corruptions in both must have a common source. What is that seat? Penetrating to the moral signification of this chapter, we have the true answer. Sin is not only a grovelling brutality assumed or taken upon a man from without. It is a manifestation which comes from within. It is a corruption which cleaves to the nature, mingles with the very transmissions of life, and taints the vital forces as they descend from parent to child, from generation to generation. We are unclean, not only practically and by contact with a bad world, but innately. We were conceived in sin; we were shapen in iniquity. And it is just this that forms the real subject of this chapter. It is the type of the source and seat of human vileness. The uncleanness here spoken of is no more a real uncleanness than that attributed to certain animals in the preceding chapter. The whole regulation is ceremonial, and not at all binding upon us. It is an arbitrary law, made only for the time then present, as a figure of spiritual truths. Its great significance lies in its typical nature. And a more vivid and impressive picture can hardly be conceived. It imposes a special legal disability upon woman, and so connects with the fact that "the woman being deceived was in the transgression" (1 Timothy 2:24). It is a vivid remembrancer of the occurrences in Eden. It tells us that we all have come of sinful mothers. It portrays defilement as the state in which we receive our being; for "who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one" (Job 14:4). You may plant a good seed, and surround it with all the conditions necessary to a goodly plant; but it may put forth so eccentrically, or meet with some mishap in the incipient stages of its development, in consequence of which all its subsequent growth will be marred, and all its fruits give evidence of the adversities that befell it in the beginning. You may open a pure fountain, giving forth nothing but pure, good water; yet the issuing stream may touch upon poison and take up turbid corn-mixtures at its first departure from its source, and so carry and show pollution whithersoever it goes. And so it has been with humanity. It was created pure and good, but by that power of free choice which necessarily belongs to a moral being some of its first movements were eccentric and detrimental to its original qualities. It absorbed vileness at its very beginning; and hence all its subsequent develop-merits have upon them the taint of that first mishap and contagion. It is worse in some lines than in others. The operations of Divine grace in the parent doubtless help to enfeeble it in the child. Now it is just to this universal taint of human nature, derived from the defection of Adam, that the whole outgrowth of this world's iniquity is to be traced. By virtue of our relation to an infected parentage we come into the world with more or less affinity for evil. The presentation of the objects to which this proclivity leans awakens those biases into activity. This awakening of the power of lust is what we call temptation. There is an innate taint or bias, the presentation to which of the objects of evil desire involuntarily excites lust; and from this has flown out the flood of evil which has deluged all the earth. (J. A. Seiss, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, |
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