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.
The problem: death
Death does not belong here. Christ’s resurrection removed the sting of death, but death is by no means part of a circle of life. We mustn’t get used to death. Death is an interloper. The Law of Moses nudged Israel all day long, saying: ‘Death has no place among the living.’
If a gecko dies in your kettle, it will ruin your day; the semblance of death on your mildewed walls or blemished skin will ruin your week; the law of cities of refuge means that accidental homicide ruins your life. These laws refuse to let you forget that one day death will end your life.
Christ’s death
There is a strange twist in Numbers 35: whenever the High Priest dies, you are free to leave. An accident locked me up and an accident sets me free. Why should the death of someone unconnected to me secure my freedom? This is another nudge, which goes with other nudges: the High Priest’s death is more than the one-for-one swap of Genesis 22. If one High Priest dies, then all who are under city arrest go free.
Such laws train our consciences not to think: ‘Someone unconnected to me died.’ Rather, his is a representative death as well as a substitutionary one. The High Priest contains within himself the fate of the people whom he serves. Nudge: ‘expect a High Priest who will not just swap places with one of us, but whose death will be effective for all His people’.
When we proclaim Christ dying in the place of sinners, we are sometimes told that this is unjust; that righteousness can’t float across a courtroom like a gas. These alleged injustices are always parodies of the cross. The cities of refuge teach us, instead, the justice of a representative death: the head stands for the whole body. Our great High Priest can die in my place, and in your place, and in the place of as many as come to Him, because He is the head of the whole church.
Life in Christ
The cities of refuge will not let us think that death is OK in any sense at all. Wasps, viruses and laverbread might, perhaps, be redeemed on the last day and have some glorified eternity. There will be no redeemed version of death. Laws like Numbers 35 are the shadow side of passages that nudge us to see that God is the source of life. God values human life so highly that when someone dies, even when there is no guilt, there are consequences.
When He who has life in Himself returns in person, the very notion of death will be nonsense. The obituary columns will not be blank; they will be inconceivable. Until then, laws like Numbers 35 teach us to pine for the giver of life.
