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The law of Moses was a yoke which neither the fathers of the nation nor their descendants were able to bear. It would be difficult to name any part of the law in regard to which Peter's saying was more applicable than it is to the regulations here laid down regarding defilement by the dead. They must have been not only irksome in a high degree, but trying to some of the purest and most tender of the natural affections.

I. For WHAT ARE THE PROVISIONS OF THE LAW?

1. Contact with a dead body rendered the person unclean, and so disabled him from enjoying the privileges of the sanctuary. Many an Israelite would, like Jacob, desire that a beloved son should be with him when he died, to hear his last words and put his hand upon his eyes. Many a Joseph would covet the honour of paying this last tribute of filial affection. Yet the son who closed his father's eyes found himself branded by the law as unclean, so that if it happened to be the passover time, he could not keep the feast. The same unwelcome disability befell any one who, walking in the field, came upon a dead body and did his duty by it as a good citizen. When a company of neighbours assembled to comfort some Martha or Mary whose brother had died, and to bear the mortal remains to the burial-place, this act of neighbourly kindness rendered every one of them unclean. Our Lord, when he entered the chamber of death in Jairus' house, and when he touched the bier at the gate of Nain, thereby took upon himself legal defilement and its consequences. Not only so; if a man happened to touch a grave or a human bone, he contracted defilement, and would have been chargeable with presumptuous sin, as a defiler of the sanctuary, if he had ventured thereafter to set foot within the house of the Lord.

2. The defilement consequent on contact with the dead was defilement of the graver sort. Many forms of defilement only disabled till sunset, and were removed by simply washing the person with water. Defilement by the dead lasted a whole week, and could be removed only by the sprinkling of the water of purification on the third and the seventh days: an irksome rule.

3. Hence all specially devoted persons in Israel were forbidden to pay the last offices of kindness to deceased friends. A priest might not defile himself for any except his nearest blood relations: his father, or mother, or brother, or unmarried sister. As for the high priest, he was forbidden to defile himself even for these. And the same stringent prohibition applied to the Nazarite also.

II. WHAT WAS THE REASON OF THIS REMARKABLE LAW? AND WHAT DOES IT TEACH US?

1. According to some it was simply a sanitary regulation. The suggestion is not to be wholly set aside. So long as this law was in force extramural interment must have been the rule. No city in Israel contained a crowded burial-ground, diffusing pestilence within its walls, nor was any synagogue made a place of interment. Much less did the Israelites ever revert to the Egyptian custom of giving a place within their houses to the embalmed; bodies of deceased friends. In these respects the provisions of the Mosaic law anticipated by 3000 years the teaching of our modern sanitary science. However, this intention of the law was certainly not the principal one.

2. Another view of it is suggested by Hebrews 9:14: "The blood of Christ shall purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God." Dead works are works which have in them no breath of spiritual life. Transgressions of God's law are dead works; so also are "duties" not animated with a loving regard for the glory of God. Such works are dead, and, being dead, defile the conscience, so that it needs to be purified by the blood of Christ.

3. But the chief reason of the law is, without doubt, to be sought in the principle that death is the wages of sin. This principle, taught so plainly in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, was not unknown to the Old Testament Church. It is taught in the story of the Fall, and is implied in Psalm 90, "the prayer of Moses." The habit of making light of death - as if it were no evil at all, but rather the welcome riddance of the soul from a burdensome and unfit companion - was not learned from the word of God. The Bible teaches us to regard the body as the fitting dwelling-place of the soul, and necessary to the completeness of our nature. That separation of body and soul which takes place in death, it teaches us to regard as penal. Death, accordingly, is the awful effect and memorial of sin, and contact with the dead causes defilement. Blessed be God, the gospel invites us to look on a brighter scene. If the law admonished men that the wages of sin is death, the gospel bears witness that God in Christ offers to us a gift of eternal life. To say this is not to disparage the law. Bright objects show best on a dark ground. The gospel is appreciated rightly by those only who have laid to heart the teachings of the law. Still it is not the dark ground that we are invited to gaze upon so much as the bright object to whose beauty it serves for a foil. The relation between the law we have been considering and the grace of Christ is strikingly seen in the story of the raising of Jairus's daughter, and of the widow's son at Nain. In both instances Christ was careful to touch the dead body; and in both instances the effect immediately wrought proclaimed the intention of the act. From the dead there went out no real defiling influence on the Lord. On the contrary, from him there went forth power to raise the dead. In Christ grace reigns through righteousness unto life; he is the Conqueror of death. - B.

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KJV: He that toucheth the dead body of any man shall be unclean seven days.

WEB: "He who touches the dead body of any man shall be unclean seven days: