Fly, Free Bird

Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, "This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing. Now he shall be brought to the priest, and the priest shall go out to the outside of the camp. Thus the priest shall look, and if the infection of leprosy has been healed in the leper, then the priest shall give orders to take two live clean birds and cedar wood and a scarlet string and hyssop for the one who is to be cleansed. The priest shall also give orders to slay the one bird in an earthenware vessel over running water. As for the live bird, he shall take it together with the cedar wood and the scarlet string and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the live bird in the blood of the bird that was slain over the running water. He shall then sprinkle seven times the one who is to be cleansed from the leprosy and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the live bird go free over the open field.” ~ Leviticus 14:1-7

It’s my habit to read in the Scriptures nearly every morning (and some evenings), so I intend to use this journal to jot down notes from my readings, but I’ve gotten so far behind in my notes I don’t know what to do. For one thing, I can’t read the Bible if a laptop is humming and shining at me from across the table: it’s too distracting and I want to punch its cycloptic face in. So I’ve been putting notes in a composition book thinking I’ll type them out later, but then I never seem to have time. I suck.

Anyway, it’s Saturday morning and I’m currently in that penultimate page-turner, Leviticus, the third book of the Torah. And like all of God’s Word, it is alive, it is fire, it is food for the hungry. The above text jumped out at me as such an evocative picture of God’s mysterious plan of redemption.

The priest is God’s agent in this affair, he symbolically represents the Lord. He goes outside the camp (condescending, as it were, to the sinner’s level, reaching out to the afflicted in the place of rejection and destitution), toting the sacrifice consisting of two birds, some cedar wood, a scarlet string, and a branch of hyssop.

The scarlet string is a symbol of the blood of Christ. It was a scarlet cord that Rahab the prostitute hung outside her window when Jericho was taken, so that she and her household were saved when God overthrew the city.

God directed the Hebrews to use hyssop branches to smear sacrificial blood on the posts of their doors before the Lord’s Passover. When the Lord killed the firstborn in Egypt, He passed over any house where He saw the blood of a perfect, spotless lamb. After his sin with Bathsheba, David prays, “Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” (Ps. 51:7)

Wood is always present at a sacrifice, though this is an unusual sacrifice. Wood is necessary for burning. When Abraham offered Isaac, Isaac carried the wood. When Christ offered Himself, He carried the wood (the cross).

In other kinds of ritual sacrifices involving birds, both birds were slain. But this offering differs because only one of the birds was killed; the text says it was slain “in an earthenware vessel over running [Hebrew: living] water.” In other words, the blood of the sacrifice was to be mixed with moving water in a clay vessel. In John 7:38 Jesus says:

He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, “From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.”

And Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians (4:7-12):

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death works in us, but life in you.

The offering in Leviticus is a shadow of the work God would perform through the death of Messiah. The death of one bird was only half of the sacrifice, because the other was dipped in the blood and water and then set free. The death of the one made possible the freedom of the other, and the two parts of the sacrifice together paved the way for an unclean man or woman to be reunited with God and His people.

Jesus shed His blood, and we are now the living sacrifice. We are the bird set free.

I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. ~ Romans 12:1