The Seminal Covenant
Leviticus 15:4-5
“Every bed on which the one with the discharge lies shall be unclean, and everything on which he sits shall be unclean. And anyone who touches his bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening.”
Deciding precisely which verses to reflect on from Leviticus 15 was difficult in that the entire chapter deals with the awkward and not quite devotional-appropriate topic of sexual discharge; yet, strange as this chapter has been to read through, the Spirit once again meets me through the letter by leading me to ponder the contrast between God’s standard for moral purity and our current generation’s lack thereof.
By way of reminder, we spoke previously of what ceremonial uncleanliness in relation to a woman’s ovulation period doesn’t imply, in that it isn’t a divine condemnation of a woman’s natural, biological process that consummates in the generation of children, and the same is true for the man’s procreative role. Go back to God’s original design for husbands and wives at the beginning of time in Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Then remember His command to Jewish exiles in Jeremiah 29:5: “Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sins and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters.” Then connect these commissions to Hebrews 13: “keep the marriage bed undefiled.” See, friend, marriage between a husband and a wife is the first covenant God created for man’s blessing! The intimacy God designed for the special marital covenant is profoundly wondrous. So God is not demeaning His created union here in Leviticus 15. Rather, like all other laws pertaining to ‘cleanliness,’ He’s symbolizing our inability to come before Him on our own merit. Effectively, even with the purest intentions, even when living out human desires in precisely the way God prescribes, man’s righteousness is still as filthy rags compared to His. Monogamy is pure and good, but it isn’t the virtue that brings us beyond the veil. It isn’t the seminal covenant that merits our atonement. We need divine discharge for that:
The redeeming blood of the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world!