Numbers 35 has one of those laws that was jarring to me when I first read the Bible.
It deals with someone dying by accident. You push him out of the way of a falling piano, and he is run over by a bus; you throw a boulder from your roof into the skip below, where someone was looking for his contact lens. You’re innocent, so you go free. Right? Wrong. Run for your life to one of the ‘cities of refuge’. If you’re innocent, it’s life-long ‘city arrest’. Why?
Nudge, nudge
Moses sometimes points to Christ through an accumulation of details that at first seem unrelated. As we read and re-read the word of God, our need for Christ is shaped by a thousand small ‘nudges’ (as well as the large unmissable types and the towering themes). The cities of refuge are one ‘nudge’ about one problem which the gospel answers; they show why Christ is the one to answer it; they clarify our hope.
