Aids to purity.
We shall first consider—
I. WHAT WAS THE PRIMARY PURPORT OF THIS TRIPLE LAW. We need not be surprised if we find here another aid to purity of heart and life, another fence thrown up against immorality. Idolatry and immorality, both of the very worst description, had covered and dishonoured the land of Canaan. It was of the last importance that the people of God should be guarded in every possible way against infection and guilt. Therefore the wise and holy Lawgiver instituted various measures by which his people should be perpetually reminded that they must be absolutely free from these heinous crimes. And therefore precepts which intimated the will of Jehovah in this matter were bound up with their daily callings and their domestic life. Our text is an illustration. In the management of their cattle, in the cultivation of their fields, in the making and wearing of their clothes, God was whispering in their ear, "Be pure of heart and life." Everything impressed upon their minds—these precise injunctions among other statutes—that there must be no joining together of that which God had put asunder, no mingling of those who should keep apart, no "defilement" (see Deuteronomy 22:9), no "confusion" (Leviticus 20:12). By laws which had such continually recurring illustration they would have inwrought into the very texture of their minds the idea that, if they wished to retain their place as the people of God, they must be pure of heart and life.
II. SECONDARY TRUTHS WHICH THIS LAW SUGGESTS.
1. It suggests simplicity in worship; there may be such an admixture of the divinely appointed and the humanly imported, of the spiritual and the artistic, of the heavenly and the worldly, that the excellency and the acceptableness will be lost and gone.
2. It suggests sincerity in service; in the service of the sanctuary or the sabbath school, or in any sphere of sacred usefulness, there may be such a mingling of the higher and the lower motives, of the generous and the selfish, of the nobler and the meaner, that the "wood, hay, and stubble" weigh more than the "gold, silver, and precious stones" in the balances of heaven, and then the workman will "lose his reward."
3. It suggests also the wisdom of taking special securities against specially strong temptations. God gave his people very many and (what seem to us) even singular securities against the rampant and deadly evil which had ruined their predecessors and might reach and slay them also. The circumstances and conditions of the time demanded them. Exceptional and imperious necessity not only justifies but demands unusual securities. Let those who are tempted by powerful and masterful allurements to
take those special measures, lay upon themselves those exceptional restraints which others do not need, but without which they themselves would he in danger of transgression.—C.