Leviticus 4:3

But that is impossible! Yet how graciously the matter is suggested! What a wondrous providence is revealed in mitigations,—remote, gracious suggestions and definitions. What wonderful ifs in the speech of God!—as if his great heart were glad of some word that merely hinted at an impossible possibility, at something which might occur but could not; a voice such as was heard in Eden when the suggestion was made concerning a certain tree. It never could have entered into the divine thought that any accountable and loving creature would touch a tree that had been forbidden. But in this case we read of an officer—a priest—a priest anointed, so that there can be no mistake about his identity. The descriptive clause is perfect and complete in simplicity. Yet how wondrous a thing in all the wondrousness of love is this door that opens the verse,—this great astounding If! How can a priest sin? The oil is upon him; the holy touch has left its holy impress upon him. Great names should be equal in moral arithmetic to great characters. Great offices are not empty forms, mere sounding words, titles to live upon. Great names are great offices, and great offices imply great character: for character alone is strength in the sanctuary,—not brilliance, not genius, not power of amazing other intellects by lights that look like revelations; but solid, genuine, noble character,—indiscretions may lie upon it a thousand thick, but right down in the core of it there is genuine sincerity, unuttered and unutterable desire for God. That is what character really is and always ought to be and must be. No man can do the Church so much harm as the priest, the professor, the minister, the person who is inside the Church. We sometimes talk about unbelievers. Where are they? How seldom we realise the fact that a man cannot be an unbeliever outside! The unbelievers are inside. Do you see that? Do you feel that? Only he can unbelieve who has professed to believe. There is a merely etymological sense in which a man who is outside may be an unbeliever; but in the deep, moral, tragical sense of the term the unbelievers are in the pulpit and in the pew. The unbelievers are not the men who to-day are lecturing against God and Christ and Revelation: the unbelievers are the anointed priests who have slipped out of the enthusiasm of their piety, who are uttering formal sentences without having a corresponding burning in the heart, who are living upon paper which is unsupported by the solid bullion. This is the truth now urging itself upon us every one, because it is so easy to deceive one's self and talk about unbelievers, as if they were the persons who never went to church, who took no part in religious movements, and who rather turned a deaf ear to all religious appeals. They cannot unbelieve,—we can; the priest that is anointed can; the Christian that is baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost can. The man who sings religious hymns and folds his hands and closes his eyes in religious attitude can unbelieve. Judgment must begin at the house of God. Do not suppose that we are Christians because we are theologians, or that we know anything about divine pity because we are skilled in the controversy of words. Christianity is a state of the heart, a condition of the soul before God, a continual penitence, a continual faith, a continual service. Change your views, if you please, about persons who are called unbelievers. There is no greater unbeliever than the man who preaches a Gospel he does not feel; there is no greater unbeliever than the Church which having a form of godliness denies the power thereof. This thought would close many a ministry, would shut up many a mission to the outsiders called unbelievers; this would burn us, yet by the grace and mercy of God would make new men of us. The world will die and mock the efforts of the Church unless the Church itself shall take up its old faith and live in its rightful and natural force. Still there is some comfort in this subjunctive form and way of putting the case. "If the priest that is anointed do sin,"—if professing men do fall below their profession; if Christian aspirants fall below the level of their own prayer,—if venerable men should turn aside for one moment to dally with the foe,—if—if—; it is God's if. It is the way of mercy. Search into every command of God, and you will find mercy at the heart of it.

Read on: "If the whole congregation of Israel sin." Can a whole congregation sin? Yes. We must not individualise too much. Humanity is not a set of unrelated individuals: humanity is a larger term than the one word "individual," or "man," or "person." It is easy for a whole congregation to sin and for each man in that congregation to declare that he is not responsible for the sin of the whole. But he is. If that man has not stood up in the middle of the church, and cried out in a tone of agony against the evil that is being done, he is guilty of every sin which the Almighty charges upon the congregation as a whole. Men may be cowards in congregations who are brave men in their own individuality. Nothing tries a man's quality much more than making him a member of a crowd. Men will do things in crowds they would never dream of doing in their individual capacity and under their own sign-manual. Responsibility becomes diffused, the moral sense becomes scattered and distracted; and men, therefore, will do in committees, on boards, in congregations, in vestries, in churches what they would not do in their own simple, measurable personality. Wondrous is the insight into human nature in such an if as we have in the thirteenth verse. "If the whole congregation sin." There is a corporate life as well as a personal existence. We live in many relations towards one another and towards God. We are individuals,—we are also families, we are also citizens, we are also members of a congregation. We cannot tell where our relations cease,—how they shrink into comparatively small dimensions and then broaden out into imperial magnitudes. Life is a mystery involved in great complexity, and revealing itself very startlingly to every careful student of its expression and action. We cannot come together as a congregation without having congregational relations to God; Could we teach this truth as it ought to be taught we should all be new men. When we are sitting at boards of direction, when we are dividing with others the responsibility of corporate decisions we should not play the coward by hiding behind some bigger man than ourselves. The safety of every corporation, congregation, imperial or ecclesiastical body, is in the development of the individual conscience. The nation will never be right until the individual is right How much mischief has been done by bodies of men! and yet not one member of the several bodies will accept the responsibility of the action or the issue. But every man in a congregation is responsible for the Church, for the treatment of all the institutions of the Church, for a response to every appeal of the Church. He cannot say "the congregation" has done this or that, except in so far as we fix the responsibility upon the individual members. And this tells on both sides. We hear of congregations doing wonderful things in the way of benevolence; but coming to analysis we find the whole has been done by some half-dozen men. The congregation has no right to assume in its sum total capacity the virtues and the sacrifices of half-a-dozen heroic souls.

Read again: "If any one of the common people sin." How searching is the criticism of God! "Common people" may sin as certainly as priests and rulers. We have left the congregation in its corporate capacity for one moment, and we are now dealing with—not the common people, but "any one of the common people." God will not have any man permitted to sin with impunity. He does not release a priest from the obligations which he imposes upon the common people, nor will he excuse the common people because they are not priests. We are all God's little ones. Every man is of importance to God. "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." The same rule applies to moral criticism or to spiritual investigation of conduct. We must not excuse ourselves on the ground that we belong to the commonalty, and therefore may do what we please. God's judgment, like God's commandment, is "exceeding broad."

Thus we have,—If a priest do sin,—If a ruler sin,—If the whole congregation sin,—If any one of the common people sin. Is there any loophole in that circle? Perhaps there may be. You cannot anticipate Omniscience. We read in the very beginning of this chapter,—"If a soul shall sin." Now there is no loophole. The very first line of the next chapter reads: "And if a soul sin." Now how will you escape? You are not "priest," nor "ruler," nor part of a "congregation," nor "one of the common people"; but can you disclaim the next title,—"soul"? "If a soul sin,"—yes, it is the soul that sins. That is a doctrine full of graciousness, but full of mystery, and requires to be stated with such delicacy of expression, as perhaps but really few can follow, in all its solemnity and significance. We have been unkind to the body, we have been mean to the body; we knew we had it for only a few years—just a handful of days—and we have abused it as we would abuse an unvalued dog. We have charged the body with everything. It is mean, it is false; it is the soul that sins. The body can never, as the younger son, go far from the soul. We sin when we sin with the consent of our whole nature,—when the soul likes the tree, when the soul loves the golden goblet full of poison, when the soul says, "Give me more! this is a hunger of immortality." Poor body! what it has had to bear! The soul is a coward. There is no divinely-intended schism between the body and the soul, and we must not be permitted to ride off upon the miserable excuse that the flesh is weak. God leaves no ground upon which any man can stand, saying,—"He has not mentioned me; I am no priest, nor do I belong to the congregation, nor am I one of the common people; I am something else: I have not been named; I may sin seven days a week and do as I list." Hear the word of the Lord: "If a soul shall sin"; and again: "If a soul sin"; and yet again, in the following chapter: "If a soul sin." There is no escape. Let us be just to ourselves. God has been coming to the soul all the time; but He must be so critical and, as it were, analytical as not to leave any man, woman or child with the appearance of an excuse.

Look at the whole of these Ifs and mark their pathos and overlook not their divine courtesy,—as if by this time, in the world's history, we had wrought ourselves up so high in moral culture and solidity of character, as to make it a bare possibility that we might sin. This is the divine generosity; this is the divine encouragement. There is a time when you change your tone towards your own child When your son is eighteen years of age you change your tone a little; you begin to assume his dignity, his moral pride and ambition. You would not suggest to him that he could now repeat his childish follies; and you wisely make what statements of a cautionary kind you have to make with moderated expression, with the cunning graduation of tone which only love can inspire and sustain. "By this time," you say, "another tone will be needed," and you adopt that tone, and if the young soul knew the meaning of it, he would see more of your real love in that changed tone than in the first commandment given with so frank a simplicity, and with so direct an emphasis.

Then after all those hypothetical cases we find God devising ways of escape. The Book of Leviticus is full of doors opening back upon the Father's heart. "If the priest that is anointed do sin" tell him what to do,—how he shall bring his "young bullock without blemish," and how he shall bring it "unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation before the Lord, and shall lay his hand upon the bullock's head, and kill the bullock before the Lord," and "take of the bullock's blood" and "dip his finger in the blood, and sprinkle the blood seven times before the Lord, before the rail of the sanctuary," and "put some of the blood upon the horns of the altar of sweet incense before the Lord, which is in the tabernacle of the congregation; and shall pour all the blood of the bullock at the bottom of the altar of the burnt offering." Tell him what to do. The record might have gone in the contrary direction: "If a priest that is anointed do sin, report it to me, and all the tabernacles of thunder shall be shaken, and not one bolt of lightning hidden in all the treasury of heavens shall be spared; the criminal shall be shot through and through with lightning and buried amid the indignation of angels!" No; the Book of Leviticus shows the very genius of Deity in finding ways whereby offences may be sponged out and offenders made as if they had not fallen. But there is no trifling with sin. Read all the provisions made after each if, and you will find that repentance is always costly; read the detail of the sacrifices, and you will find how exacting is God. A man cannot sin in an off-handed manner and God say, "Let bygones be bygones, and begin again to-morrow as if life had had no yesterday." It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. If the priest has sinned, he is not regarded as a priest, but as a sinner. So with every member of the sinning tribe, repentance is costly, return is marked by exactions of the most minute and critical kind. You cannot get back to God but through the medium of sacrifice, blood, propitiation, atonement.

Now what says the New Testament about priest, ruler, congregation, common people, soul?—"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." "The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth us from all sin." It is still the way of blood. Do not vulgarise that term; do not narrow your conceptions of it and try to make it some vulgar excuse for not accepting the awful term. Blood means life, reality, divine agony, an outpouring of the soul. Sin has not changed its character, nor can the method of sin's redemption be changed as to its highest expression and meaning. "Without shedding of blood is no remission." It is so between ourselves. If we understood the compact aright, all forgiveness expresses blood-shedding, or we may return to our old alienation. So the great Christian Gospel is heard amongst us this day, saying so solemnly, so sweetly, with all the trumpets of heaven, "The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth us from all sin." Come priest, ruler, congregation, common people, every soul,—come, for there is yet room,—"Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world."

Sins of Ignorance

Leviticus 4

The expression, "If a soul shall sin through ignorance," opens a very wide region of thought. One would wonder whether it is possible that sin can be committed in ignorance—that is to say, whether the ignorance does not do away with the sinful character of the deed. Is not sin a wilful action? Is not its wilfulness the very essence of its guilt? So we would think; yet again and again in the ritual we find that ignorance is never made into a sufficient excuse for sin. The sense of mystery which we may feel in regard to this matter can only be relieved by looking for analogous instances in the field of nature. This I would lay down as an excellent law of Biblical interpretation. Thus, given instances of mystery which afflict the soul with a sense of burdensomeness, or even of injustice, to find out how far such circumstances are illuminated or explained by actions within the province of observation and reason take, for example, sins of ignorance in a strictly physical department of life. Suppose it to be possible for anyone not to know the nature of fire, and in that state of ignorance to expose himself to its action, would the fire cease to operate because the man is ignorant? would nature suspend her operations in pity, saying, This man does not understand the nature of heat, and therefore he shall not feel the effects of its excessive use or application? Nothing of the kind occurs in nature. Nature is full of healing and kindness and compassion, always seeking to comfort the wounded and to staunch the fountains of blood, and yet nature makes no note of the persons who misunderstand or misapply her laws. Suppose a man should exclude the living air from his habitation, will nature say that the man, not understanding the utility of the atmosphere, must be excused because of his ignorance? Nature, like her Lord, teaches through suffering. There is no law written on all the dominion of nature with a broader and clearer hand than that all sin is followed by penalty. Exclude the air, and you exclude vitality; shut out the light, and you impoverish the life; doom yourself to solitude, and you doom yourself by the same fiat to extinction. It is in vain to plead that we did not know the nature of air, or the utility of light, or the influence of high things upon things that are low; we must be taught the depth of our ignorance and its guilt by the intensity and continuance of our personal suffering. Leaving the region of nature and coming into the region of civilisation, we find that even in legal affairs violations of law are not excused on the ground of ignorance. The judge upon the bench does not hesitate to inform the trespasser that he ought to have known the law of which he pleaded ignorance. Again and again this has been known to be the case. That some modification may be allowed, or some concession, is perfectly possible; but it is distinctly made as a concession, and in no sense as a right. The law has been violated, by neglect, or through ignorance, or wantonly; and whether in the one way or the other, there it stands in an offended attitude, and nothing can cause it to consent to change its posture. It insists upon the amendment of recognition and the compensation of suffering on the part of the offender. Turning from purely legal criticism of this kind, we find the same law in operation in social affairs. A man is not excused from the consequences of ill-behaviour on the ground that he did not know the customs of society or the technicalities of etiquette. He may be pitied, he may be held in a kind of mild contempt, his name may be used to point a moral; but at the root of all this criticism lies the law that the man is a trespasser, and that ignorance cannot be pleaded as a complete excuse. This canon of judgment has a very wide bearing upon human affairs. Were it to be justly and completely applied, it would alter many arrangements and relations of life. There are many things which we ought to know, and which we ought to be; and instead of excusing ourselves by our ignorance, we should be stimulated by its effects to keener inquiry and more diligent culture. That sense of ignorance will possibly show us in what critical conditions our life is being spent. Life is not a broad surface which any eye can read, and which any capacity can comprehend. Life is a mystery, a complication, a series of causes and effects, a most complex organism which requires continual study and vigilance We know not upon what we may be launched by the very shortest journey we can take. He is living the life of a fool who imagines that life is a simple affair lying between four visible and measurable points. There is a superficial existence which can be measured as it were by the foot-rule, and weighed in common scales; but life, as inspired and directed by the Holy Ghost, is a sublime mystery. It admits of distinctions, and of classifications absolutely infinite in number. It is the part of Christianity so to operate upon human life as to show the greatness of that life to itself. As the Bible is a progressive revelation, so life is a progressive Apocalypse. To be told in plain and frank terms that man is made in the image and likeness of God is simply to startle the mind with a bold and possibly incredible proposition. That proposition does lie at the very base of Biblical revelation, but its full explanation is only to be realised as the centuries come and go, and after a breadth of education stretching through the experience of many generations. The first thing that a man was told is the last thing which man can understand. Thus we come to the beginning from the end, and only by doubling life back upon itself do we begin to take in the profoundest meanings of the very first statements which were addressed to the reason and the imagination. It is only in the Apocalypse that we begin to understand the Pentateuch. Yet even in such expressions as "If a soul sin through ignorance" we begin to see the meaning of the mystery of the divine nature of man. What watchfulness is imposed upon us by the fact that it is possible to sin through ignorance! If sin were a mere act of violence, we could easily become aware of it, and with comparatively little difficulty we might avoid its repetition. But it is more and other than this. It is committed when we little think of its commission; we inflict wounds when we think our hands are free of all weapons and instruments; we dishonour God when we suppose we are merely silent about him. The voice of nature and of experience, as well as of revelation, is—"The place whereon thou standest is holy ground." The sin may be in a look, in a far-off suggestion, in a tempting tone, in attitudes that have no names, and in breathings that are inarticulate. Neglect may be sin as well as violence. There is a negative criminality as well as a positive blasphemy. All this makes life most critical and most profoundly solemn. The commandment of God is exceeding broad. Being a divine commandment it comes of continual and minute exactions covering all life with the spirit and obligation of discipline. Not a moment is our own; not a single atom of all the stupendous universe comes within our proprietorship; to-day or to-morrow we may be translated into other spheres of existence; we cannot make a law of any kind that is not local and temporary—a mere convenience for a moment; all the great laws were written before the universe was formed, and they will continue to exist through all changes and developments and processes of being; by their very nature they are eternal, and being eternal they cannot be affected by the conditions which are continually changing the attitude and complexion of our earthly life. Let us be just to the Biblical revelation in all such matters as these sins of ignorance; let us remind ourselves again that we recognise such sins in nature, in law, in social etiquette, in all the various relations of life, and that when we come upon them in the Bible we ought to approach them with a familiarity which itself amounts to an exposition and a vindication. There is nothing arbitrary in these enactments and demands. The God of Providence is the God of the Bible. Providence is the Bible in action, and the Bible is Providence in exposition and contemplation.

The mercy is shown that a special offering was provided for the sin of ignorance. It was recognised as a specialty, and provided for as such. Our business should never be to find the excuse, but rather to confess the sin. The great and gracious law applies here as elsewhere: "If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." It is not our place to provide sacrifices. Even the Jews had no sacrifices to provide in the sense of inventing them. The part which the Jew had to act was simply a response to a divine enactment, and in reality that is exactly what we have to do. It is not our business to say how a way can be found out of this sin or that, or what argument can be set up in palliation of the crime which has been committed; the provision has been made, and that provision we must accept unless we are prepared to fall under a penalty which never fails to follow in the wake of evil-doing. The sin of ignorance never goes alone. Imagine a life so well lived that nothing can be charged upon it but sin due to ignorance! Such a life is an impossibility. It is also impossible for life to be marked only by what are called little or minor sins. There are no such sins, and in proportion as the mind leans to the thought that such sins are possible, is the mind the victim of a most mischievous, and may be fatal, sophism. Life cannot be reduced to a mere negation. We know not what the conditions of life may be in other worlds, but in the region which is described by time, life itself would seem to be steeped in sin, and sin may be regarded, in some sense, as a necessity of life; not a necessity as involving the sovereignty of God, but as revealing the mystery of human nature, under local and probationary conditions, to itself. If one righteous man could have been found upon the earth, the atonement of Christ would have been unnecessary. Atonement does not relate to numbers, or to individuals, or to exceptional instances, as if Christ should have said, "I will die for those who are tainted, for the few or the many who have apostatised"; in that case his death would have been the mere romance of philanthropy, or the fanaticism of perverted divinity; Jesus Christ found no righteous man, and therefore he tasted death for every man; he died for a world lying in the wicked one, and not for certain populations who had been less fortunate than other portions of mankind. Human nature is one. Human sin is one. Divine atonement is one. We disintegrate the universe and turn into trifling the sublime purpose of God when we individualise, and specialise, and make exceptions on behalf of the virtue of this class or that class. The solemn and appalling truth is that there is none righteous, no not one; and however the sin may be critically described, it is simply for the purpose of showing that the sacrifice provided is equal to the refinement and mystery of any new definition that may startle the imagination by its delicacy or unsuspected operation. Take this view of the sacrifices, and it will be shown that the divine mind has anticipated every possible form of human evil and offence. Happily, therefore, the mind can never be surprised into despair by having forced upon it the conviction that some new sin has been invented, or some new conditions have so surrounded a sin as to take the offence out of the catalogue of the crimes for which divine provision has been made. The specification of sins is not intended to show the keenness and breadth of the divine criticism, but to supply an answer to temptations that might assail the soul and drag it towards the darkness of despair. Let every soul, then, boldly say, as if in solemn monologue, Whatever my sin may be, it is provided for in the great Offering established as the way of access to the Father; I will invent no excuses; I will seek for no new methods of payment or compensation; I will bring no price in my hand, no excuse on my tongue, nor will I hide even in the depths of my consciousness any hope that I can vindicate my position before God; I will simply fall into the hands of the Living One, and look upon the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. In that spirit I will go forward to judgment, and in that spirit I will encounter the mysteries of destiny.

Note

It was in the sprinkling of the blood, the proper sacrament of sacrifice, that the distinction between the guilt offering and the expiatory offering, in the narrow sense, came most clearly to the front; and it is easy to understand why it would reveal itself most plainly here. As it was right that the blood of an expiatory offering for public transgressions should be made far more conspicuous to eyes and sense, so it was sprinkled on an elevated place, or even on one which was extraordinarily sacred. The way, too, in which this was done was marked by three stages. If the atonement was made for an ordinary man, or for a prince, the priest sprinkled the blood against the high towering horns of the outer altar, and poured the remainder, as usual, out at its base; if it was made for the community, or for the high-priest, some of the blood was seven times sprinkled against the veil of the Holy of Holies, then some more against the horns of the inner altar, and only what was then left was poured out, as usual, at the base of the outer altar. The third, and highest stage of expiation was adopted on the yearly day of atonement. On the other hand, in the case of the guilt offering, no reason existed for adopting any unusual mode of sprinkling the blood. It was sprinkled, just as in other cases, round the sides and foot of the outer altar. As soon as this most sacred ceremony of the sprinkling was completed, then, according to the ancient belief, the impurity and guilt were already shaken off from the object to which they had clung.

—Ewald.