A Clean Camp for a Holy God Text: Numbers 5:1-4
Introduction: The Grammar of Holiness
We live in an age that despises distinctions. Our culture is laboring with all its might to erase every line God has drawn. They want to blur good and evil, male and female, holy and profane, clean and unclean. This is not some new, sophisticated rebellion; it is the ancient impulse of chaos, the desire to return the world to the formless and void state we read about in Genesis, before God started separating things. But Christianity is a religion of distinctions. Our God is a God who separates. He separates light from darkness, land from sea, and His people from the world. If we are to understand God, ourselves, and the world He has made, we must learn to think His thoughts after Him, and that means learning to make distinctions.
The book of Numbers can seem like a dusty attic to modern evangelicals. We find censuses, obscure laws, and tales of wilderness wandering. But it is in these very details that God teaches us the grammar of holiness. These laws are not arbitrary. They are not primitive hygiene regulations, although they certainly had a salutary effect on public health. No, these laws were a massive, divinely-ordained object lesson. They were, as I've said before, a gigantic audio/visual aid designed to teach Israel a fundamental truth: a holy God cannot dwell in the midst of an unholy people. Sin and death are contagious, and they defile. They are incompatible with the presence of the living God.
The instructions here in Numbers 5 are given right after the detailed arrangement of the camp around the Tabernacle in the previous chapters. This is not accidental. First, God establishes the order of the camp with Himself at the very center. Now, He establishes the purity of the camp. Order and purity go together. You cannot have one without the other. This passage is about spiritual quarantine. It is about protecting the glorious, terrifying, life-giving presence of God from the defilement of death and disease, which are the wages of sin.
And before you are tempted to dismiss this as irrelevant Old Testament stuff, you must understand that the principle is eternal. The church is the new temple, the new camp of God. God dwells in our midst by His Spirit. And the same requirement of holiness applies, not through ritual cleansing, but through the cleansing blood of Christ and the sanctifying work of the Spirit. These verses teach us what it means to take the holiness of God seriously.
The Text
Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, "Command the sons of Israel that they send away from the camp every leper and everyone having a discharge and everyone who is unclean because of a dead person. You shall send away both male and female; you shall send them outside the camp so that they will not defile their camp where I dwell in their midst." And the sons of Israel did so and sent them outside the camp; just as Yahweh had spoken to Moses, thus the sons of Israel did.
(Numbers 5:1-4 LSB)
The Divine Command (v. 1-2)
The instruction begins with its source, which establishes its absolute authority.
"Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, 'Command the sons of Israel that they send away from the camp every leper and everyone having a discharge and everyone who is unclean because of a dead person.'" (Numbers 5:1-2)
This is not a suggestion from the health department. This is a direct command from Yahweh, the covenant Lord. The responsibility for enforcing this command is given to the people themselves: "Command the sons of Israel that they send away..." Corporate holiness is a corporate responsibility. It is not just the job of the priests to keep the Tabernacle holy; it is the job of the entire congregation to keep the camp holy.
Three categories of uncleanness are specified. First is the "leper." In the Bible, leprosy is a terrifying picture of sin. It is a living death. It starts small, but it spreads, corrupts, and isolates. It makes the one afflicted hideous and repulsive. The leper was the ultimate outcast, a walking, breathing symbol of the corrosive nature of sin.
Second is "everyone having a discharge." This refers to the bodily emissions detailed in Leviticus 15. These things, whether natural or the result of disease, rendered a person ceremonially unclean. Why? Because they are reminders of our fallenness, our creatureliness, and our mortality. They represent life ebbing away, a loss of wholeness. They are a picture of the way sin drains us of spiritual vitality.
Third is anyone "unclean because of a dead person." Contact with death was the most potent source of ritual impurity. Death is the final enemy. It is the ultimate consequence of sin entering the world. To touch death was to be contaminated by the result of Adam's rebellion. The God of Israel is the God of life, the great I AM. His holy presence cannot abide the stench of death.
Notice that these are not, in themselves, moral failings. A person did not sin by contracting leprosy or by touching the body of a deceased loved one. These were ceremonial impurities, not ethical ones. But they were designed to teach us about ethical realities. They were physical symbols of spiritual truths. Sin, like leprosy, isolates and corrupts. Sin, like a discharge, drains us of life. And sin, ultimately, brings death. These external states were meant to make the invisible reality of sin visible, tangible, and unavoidable.
The Reason for Separation (v. 3)
Verse 3 gives the rationale behind this seemingly harsh command, and it is the theological center of the entire passage.
"You shall send away both male and female; you shall send them outside the camp so that they will not defile their camp where I dwell in their midst." (Numbers 5:3 LSB)
The law applies equally to men and women. Uncleanness is an equal opportunity condition. But the key phrase is the last one: "where I dwell in their midst." This is everything. The issue is not primarily hygiene. The issue is not social stigma. The issue is the manifest presence of God. The camp of Israel was not like any other camp on earth. It was the place where heaven and earth met. The glorious, holy, consuming fire of God's presence was pitched right in the middle of them.
This is a staggering privilege, but it is also a profound danger. A holy God cannot co-exist with defilement. His holiness would consume it, just as a blast furnace would consume a stray piece of paper. The separation was not just for God's sake; it was for their sake. It was an act of mercy. To allow defilement in the camp was to invite judgment. By putting the unclean outside the camp, they were preserving the camp from destruction and preserving the unclean person from being consumed.
This principle, "outside the camp," becomes a major theological theme throughout Scripture. The sin offering was to be burned "outside the camp" (Lev. 4:12). The bodies of the sacrificial animals on the Day of Atonement were carried "outside the camp" (Lev. 16:27). This is where the refuse, the sin, and the curse were taken. To be put outside the camp was to be put in the place of the curse.
And this is precisely where Jesus went for us. The author of Hebrews makes the connection explicit: "For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured" (Hebrews 13:11-13). Jesus became the ultimate leper. He became unclean for us. He was cast out, bearing our sin and our curse, so that we, the truly unclean, might be brought into the camp, into the very presence of God.
Covenantal Obedience (v. 4)
The passage concludes with a simple, powerful statement of obedience.
"And the sons of Israel did so and sent them outside the camp; just as Yahweh had spoken to Moses, thus the sons of Israel did." (Numbers 5:4 LSB)
There is no record of argument or debate. There is no committee formed to discuss the emotional impact on those being sent away. They simply did what God commanded. The text emphasizes it twice: "the sons of Israel did so," and "thus the sons of Israel did." This is the nature of true faith. It hears the Word of the Lord and it obeys.
This would have been hard. This meant sending away a father, a wife, a child. It meant disrupting families and relationships. But their loyalty to Yahweh and their reverence for His presence had to take precedence over their natural affections. They understood that the greatest threat to their community was not the sadness of separation, but the presence of defilement that could provoke the wrath of a holy God.
This is a lesson our sentimental, therapeutic age desperately needs to learn. We have elevated emotional comfort above holiness. We are terrified of excluding anyone for any reason. We have convinced ourselves that the most loving thing we can do is to blur every line and tolerate every defilement. But in doing so, we are not being loving; we are being foolish. We are treating the presence of God as if it were a trivial thing. We are inviting judgment. A church that refuses to practice meaningful church discipline, that refuses to distinguish between the holy and the profane, is a church that is desecrating the camp of God. It is telling God that His presence doesn't matter as much as our desire to avoid awkward conversations.
The Gospel Outside the Camp
So what does this mean for us, the people of the New Covenant? We are no longer bound by these ceremonial laws. Christ is the fulfillment of them all. But the principles they teach are eternal. The church is the camp of God, the place where He dwells by His Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16).
The leprosy of sin, the discharge of our fallen nature, and the stench of spiritual death still defile. But the remedy is not to be cast out. The remedy is to be cleansed. And that cleansing was accomplished by the one who was cast out for us. Jesus touched the leper and, instead of becoming unclean, He made the leper clean (Mark 1:41). He touched the corpse and, instead of being defiled by death, He raised the dead to life (Luke 7:14-15). He took all our uncleanness upon Himself and carried it "outside the camp" to the cross.
Because He was cast out, we can be brought in. Because He was made unclean, we can be made holy. Our standing in the camp is not based on our own ritual purity, but on His substitutionary death. We are now a "holy priesthood," called to "proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2:5, 9).
But this grace does not abolish the demand for holiness; it establishes it. We are now responsible for maintaining the purity of the camp through repentance and faith. When sin appears in the church, we are not to ignore it. We are to deal with it according to the patterns laid out in the New Testament (Matt. 18:15-20; 1 Cor. 5:1-13). The goal of church discipline is not to be punitive and cruel, but to be restorative. It is to call the erring brother back from the place of defilement. And if he refuses, he must be put "outside the camp" of the church's fellowship, not to be hated, but so that he might feel the weight of his sin, repent, and be restored. It is a profoundly loving act, because it takes the holiness of God, the purity of His bride, and the soul of the sinner with the utmost seriousness.
God dwells in our midst. This is our highest privilege and our most solemn responsibility. Let us therefore be a people who love His presence enough to hate the defilement of sin, and who love one another enough to call each other to the cleansing that is found only in the blood of the one who suffered for us, outside the camp.