Forbidden Bible Verses — Leviticus 15:1-12

March 15, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bible spine dwtx.orgThe three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Inspired Scripture and other sources as indicated below.

Leviticus 15:1-12

Laws About Bodily Discharges

15 The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, 2 “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When any man has a discharge from his body,[a] his discharge is unclean. 3 And this is the law of his uncleanness for a discharge: whether his body runs with his discharge, or his body is blocked up by his discharge, it is his uncleanness. 4 Every bed on which the one with the discharge lies shall be unclean, and everything on which he sits shall be unclean. 5 And anyone who touches his bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. 6 And whoever sits on anything on which the one with the discharge has sat shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. 7 And whoever touches the body of the one with the discharge shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. 8 And if the one with the discharge spits on someone who is clean, then he shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. 9 And any saddle on which the one with the discharge rides shall be unclean. 10 And whoever touches anything that was under him shall be unclean until the evening. And whoever carries such things shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. 11 Anyone whom the one with the discharge touches without having rinsed his hands in water shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. 12 And an earthenware vessel that the one with the discharge touches shall be broken, and every vessel of wood shall be rinsed in water.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Last week’s post summarised Leviticus 14, most of which is in the Lectionary, and contains God’s commands for the treatment of leprosy, which was different to what we call Hansen’s Disease today. The leprosy of Leviticus — Tzaraath in Hebrew — may display the same physical characteristics but was also considered a spiritual disease, a type of judgement that God inflicted on Israelites with truly sinful hearts.

The Lord God then moved on to ‘bodily discharges’, to be explained below in more detail.

Please do not eat whilst reading this post. Children should also stay away from your screen, as adult topics are about to be discussed.

The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron (verse 1).

John Gill‘s commentary explains why Aaron needed to be told this information (emphases mine):

Aaron is spoken to as well Moses, because some of these purifications, after mentioned, depended on the priest, as the affair of profluvious men and women, as Gersom observes …

God told the two men to speak to the Israelites and inform them that whenever a man had a discharge from his body, the discharge was unclean (verse 2).

Matthew Henry‘s commentary tells us that this bodily discharge was a type of venereal disease:

We have here the law concerning the ceremonial uncleanness that was contracted by running issues in men. It is called in the margin (v. 2) the running of the reins: a very grievous and loathsome disease, which was, usually the effect and consequent of wantonness and uncleanness, and a dissolute course of life, filling men’s bones with the sins of their youth, and leaving them to mourn at the last, when all the pleasures of their wickedness have vanished, and nothing remains but the pain and anguish of a rotten carcase and a wounded conscience. And what fruit has the sinner then of those things whereof he has so much reason to be ashamed? Rom 6 21. As modesty is an ornament of grace to the head and chains about the neck, so chastity is health to the navel and marrow to the bones; but uncleanness is a wound and dishonour, the consumption of the flesh and the body, and a sin which is often its own punishment more than any other. It was also sometimes inflicted by the righteous hand of God for other sins, as appears by David’s imprecation of a curse upon the family of Joab, for the murder of Abner. 2 Sam 3 29, Let there not fail from the house of Joab one that hath an issue, or is a leper. A vile disease for vile deserts. Now whoever had this disease upon him … He was himself unclean, v. 2.

Gill gives us a nuanced interpretation, as sometimes the bodily discharge was not always a result of improper sexual relations nor was this a universal disease that also affected Gentiles:

Speak unto the children of Israel,…. From whence we learn, says the above mentioned writer, that these uncleannesses were only usual among the children of Israel, not among the Gentiles; that is, the laws respecting them were only binding on the one, and not on the other {s}:

and say unto them, when any man; in the Hebrew text it is, “a man, a man,” which the Targum of Jonathan paraphrases, a young man, and an old man:

hath a running issue out of his flesh; what physicians call a “gonorrhoea,” and we, as in the margin of our Bibles, “the running of the reins”:

[because of] his issue, he [is] unclean; in a ceremonial sense, though it arises from a natural cause; but if not from any criminal one, from a debauch, but from a strain, or some such like thing, the man was not defiled, otherwise he was; the Targum of Jonathan is, “if he sees it three times he is unclean;” so the Misnah {t}.

This brings us to the question of what ‘the running of the reins’ was. Both our commentators lived during the 17th and 18th centuries. French was still in use in some expressions. The French word for ‘kidney’ is rein (nearly rhymes with ‘zen’ but without the ‘n’ sound).

I found a book from 1662 which describes ‘the running of the reins’. It refers to Galenists, which means physicians who followed the ancient Greek Galen’s philosophy and medical practice which influenced medicine for 1,300 years. Some readers will recall studying about Galen (AD 129-216) in biology class. He was from Pergamon in Asia Minor and made many discoveries about how the human body functions.

The book, A new discovery of the French disease and running of the reins their causes, signs, with plain and easie direction of perfect curing the same, by Richard Bunworth was published in 1662, so our commentators probably would have known about it or at least its contents.

While this ‘running of the reins’ was probably not the same as the one that God inflicted on certain Israelites, it is likely to have had similarities.

In our commentators’ day, it was also known as the ‘French pox’ or the ‘French disease’. Chapter 1 gives us its history (see the end of the second paragraph) and symptoms:

THE French pox is certainly a new disease, and not known in Europe till within this hundred years: For when Charles the eight king of France beseig’d Naples, which was in the year 1494, it first began to spread it self, not only through his army, but through all Italy, being brought by the Spaniards from the American Islands into these parts of the world. It hath been variously named, some calling it the Spanish, some the Italian, some the French disease. Others not willing to injure any nation, have stil’d it the Venereal plague.

Now what it is, whence it deduceth it’s original, and to what kind of disease it ought to be referr’d, it is a great difficulty to determine. Some will have it to be the effect of divine justice. Others say it proceeds from a manifest distemper of the aire, that is, when it is very moist. But this stands not with reason, when we find that this disease is contracted as well in times of drowth as well as moisture. Nor can the aire be the cause of it, seeing that never any man was yet infected with the breath of the most distemper’d person. Some blame the copulation of a leprous souldier with a noble courtesan in Spain to have been the original thereof; for when other young men came and made the same use of her, the Foulness of the former mixture dispers’d this contagion to their bodies, and they to others.

The Cause of this disease as the Galenists affirm, is a certain venom which preys upon the blood, is hurtful to the liver, and works by second qualities, heat and drowth. The Chymists not much differing from them, define it to be a vene∣mous ferment, that like a stink seizeth upon the solid and liquid parts of the body. But most commonly it associates it self with the excrements, which are the matter of diseases, that have not the power to resist its virulences.

This contagious disease is contracted many wayes, as by touch in coition, by reason that the active force of the poyson communicates its venome by means of that corrupt matter, or those stinking vapours that proceed from the infected person. Now because that cannot happen but by touch, it follows that the signs of the disease must first appear in those parts which first are lyable by that contaction to receive the infection. And therefore we alwaies find the first symptoms in the privie parts. Sometime it is contracted by lying together in the same bed, by reason that the sweat and impure vapours that exhale from a defil’d body corrode and penetrate the skin of him that is sound. In the same manner the chaps are infected by drinking together, the nostrills by receiving the evil sents of his body. As to the parties receiving, some whose skins are soft and tender, their vessels larger, their spirits more subtile, and more inflam’d, their blood more thin and hot, have a less force to resist, and are consequently more apt to receive this poyson. So we see the tenderest parts of the same body soonest infected, as the privities, which are very tender, and still heated and rarefy’d by copulation. The mouth also and jaws are in the same danger, by reason of the softness and thinness of the subject. Young men also are sooner infected, then aged, and the weaker young men sooner then those who are of stronger constitutions. But women are less subject to infection then men, by reason of the coldness of their temper, as also because those parts are wash’d by their natural evacuations.

Because modern medicine did not start to be developed until the mid- to late 19th century and really took off throughout the 20th, cures for this disease were primitive. As running of the reins sometimes included pustules, one of the cures in Chapter 18 involved daubing them with saltpetre (potassium nitrate) that had been placed in a hog’s bladder before being strained:

Take of the rust of brass one part Salt peter two parts mingle them together and put them in a dish, and with a peice of paper lighted set them on fire, when it hath don flaming, take that which remains and put it into the bladder of a hog, then tye it up close and put the bladder into cold water, and that within will presently dissolve, then strein it through a piece of silk, and keep it for the same purpose to be used as before.

Chapter 21 states that anyone suspecting he had the disease, here called gonorrhea, was advised to seek medical attention sooner rather than later, because things could only become worse:

THE simple Gonorrhea though the symptomes thereof be nothing neer so dangerous as are those of the pox, yet if the patient either through negligence or bashfulness doe neglect the timely cure, it will certainly in a short time turn to the pox, and therefore the remedy thereof is suddainly to be sought. 

Chapter 27 says that the patient, it would seem, ejaculated involuntarily — hence the name ‘running of the reins’ — so that the body could naturally try to purge itself. Yet, the seminal vesicle could become blocked because of the disease. Furthermore, there were other symptoms of this strain of gonorrhea. The book has several chapters on possible cures, all of them quite primitive compared to today:

… in those bodyes that are extream foul, upon a Gonorrhea, nature takes her opportunity to purge the whole body by the seminary vessel. 

Now when this passage is suddenly stopped except there be some other way to carry away the matter, which doth continually flow to these parts, experience teaches us that there doe dangerous symptomes arise from thence as intollerable pain in the back, sickness in the stomack, vomiting or a desire to vomit, inflammation swelling and extream pain in the stones, feavers, and fainting fitts, and sometimes death it self.

In some such body’s as those are, whether you would cure them after the first or second way set down in the twenty first and twen∣ty second Chapters, perhaps besides what is mentioned in the aforesaid Chapters there will be occasion to use the sweating potion, mentioned in the twenty third Chapter: and on the contrary there are some bodyes that doe not require so much circumstance of medicine as is mentioned in the foresaid Chapter, but may perhaps be cured onely by the potion in the twenty first Chapter, or the plaister and electuary in the twenty second Chapter or else by the pills in the twenty third.

This depends wholly upon the prudence honesty and knowledge of the Surgeon.

The like prudence and knowledge is necessary to distinguish a simple Gonorrhea, from a virulent Gonorrhea, as also in prescribing a fit dyet according to the several Circumstances of the patient, as whether he be young, or in years, whither he have a full or a spare body, and lastly whither he be of a hot, cold or indifferent temper.

And, finally, Chapter 28 has this medical advice on how to bring to a head and lance a buboe, another pustule also associated with certain historic plagues, but here relating to gonorrhea:

If it rise not fast enough, use cupping glasses. When tis come to a head lance it, or apply a Caustick to it; the filth being out, tent it to its full depth, covering the tent with Basilicon Doron, or some such medicament that draws without enflaming, keep it open a month or five weeks with moderate exer∣cise and dyet, drinking the purging decoction mentioned in the second Chapter. Take as much rest as you can, and when the orifice inclines to heal, purge as you see occasion.

It all sounds very painful and unpleasant. There were no anaesthetics in those days. No doubt the physicians used brandy or another form of alcohol instead, locally and for the patient to imbibe before lancing a buboe.

This is helpful background for God’s commands which follow.

God gave the law for a man’s unclean discharge: whether his body was running — expelling — the discharge or his seminal vesicle was blocked, he was unclean (verse 3).

Gill explains that the affected man also salivated a lot, another way the body tried to get rid of the disease:

whether his flesh run with his issue; or salivates, or emits a flow of matter like a saliva, or in the manner of spittle:

or his flesh be stopped from his issue; with it, or because of it; because it is gross, as Jarchi says, it cannot come forth freely:

it [is] his uncleanness; whether it be one or the other, he is reckoned on account of it an unclean person. This was an emblem of the corruption and vitiosity of nature, and of all evil things that are in or flow out of the evil heart of man, which are defiling to him; see Matthew 15:18.

Speaking generally, Henry reminds us that being ceremonially unclean meant being unable to worship with everyone else:

He must not dare to come near the sanctuary, it was at his peril if he did, nor might he eat of the holy things. This signified the filthiness of sin, and of all the productions of our corrupt nature, which render us odious to God’s holiness, and utterly unfit for communion with him. Out of a pure heart well kept are the issues of life (Prov 4 23), but out of an unclean heart comes that which is defiling, Matt 12 34, 35.

Inspired Scripture discusses the spiritual implications of venereal disease for Christians, excerpted below:

(1) Recognize that anything that comes from the flesh is unclean. Without Christ, almost anything that comes out of your mouth or body is unclean and offensive in God’s presence: “1 The Lord also spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, 2 “Speak to the sons of Israel, and say to them, ‘When any man has a discharge from his body, his discharge is unclean.’” (Lev. 15:1-2). According to Jesus, is it not what goes into your body that defines you (Mk. 7:14b-15a). Instead, it is “what comes out of a man is what defies him.” (Mk. 7:20). According to Paul, “. . . the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are immorality, impurity, sensuality.” (Gal. 5:24). Furthermore, “. . . the lust of the flesh . .. is not from the Father, but is from the world.” (1 Jo. 2:16). “[T]he mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God . . .” (Ro. 8:7). “[A]nd those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” (Ro. 8:8). Every believer must therefore “. . . put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts.” (Ro. 13:14). For “. . . flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” (1 Cor. 15:50). “For the mind set on the flesh is death . . .” (Ro. 8:6). Thus, “[i]f you live according to the flesh, you must die. . . ” (Ro. 8:13). Thus, without Christ, almost anything emitted from your flesh (including your words) is unclean in God’s holy presence. To live in the Spirit, you should therefore look to cleanse your mind daily through the Holy Spirit (Ro. 12:2).

(2) Jesus came to fulfill the hygiene laws, not abolish them. God told the Jews to be holy and to draw a distinction between the clean and the unclean because He is holy (Lev. 11:44-7). Yet, for different reasons, most Jews and Christians do not follow the purification rules in this chapter. Many Jews see no reason to follow these rules because the impurity described in these rules only kept them from entering the Temple. For the last 2,000 years, there has been no Temple for the Jews to observe these rules. Some Christians also assume that these rules must have been made irrelevant following Christ’s death. Alternatively, some find the rules in this chapter simply too personal to discuss. And this is to be expected. As a result of their original sin, even Adam and Eve were ashamed of their nakedness (Gen. 3:7). Yet, ignoring these rules is a mistake. Jesus warned: “Do not think that I came to abolish the law or the Prophets, I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.” (Matt. 5:17). In the case of the blood sacrifices, Jesus became the blood sacrifice. In the case of the dietary laws, Jesus became our food. In the case of hygiene laws, Jesus instructs that believers make “spiritual sacrifices.” (1 Pet. 2:5). These spiritual sacrifices are designed to make you pure and sanctified before God.

(3) Your body must still remain pure because God’s Holy Spirit dwells within you. After Jesus’ death and the destruction of the Second Temple, the Holy Spirit has resided in every believer (1 Cor. 3:16-17). An unclean person could die if he or she entered the Temple in an impure state (Lev. 15:31). If your body is now the temple where the Holy Spirit resides, you should be motivated to stay spiritually clean at all times.

God then gave Moses and Aaron laws about what the unclean person had touched.

The man’s bed and everything upon which he sat was unclean (verse 4).

Gill elaborates, saying that the Jewish scholars exempted items such as an inverted bushel basket or bucket, something which was not intended as a seat:

Every bed whereon he lieth that hath the issue is unclean,…. Which he constantly makes use of; so the Targum of Jonathan, which is peculiar to him, and appointed and appropriated for him to lie upon. Jarchi says, every bed that is fit to lie upon, thou is appropriated to another service; but, he adds meaning is, which he shall lie upon (or continue to lie upon); for it is not said, which he hath laid upon, but which he lieth upon, and is used by him continually; according to the Misnah {u}, a man that has an issue defiles a bed five ways, so as to defile a man, and to defile garments; standing, sitting, lying, hanging, and leaning:

and everything whereon he sitteth shall be unclean; which is appropriated to sit upon; and so the Targum, as before, what is his proper peculiar seat, what he is used to sit upon, and is fit for that purpose: and it is observed by some Jewish writers {w} that a vessel that is not fit to sit upon is excluded, as if a man was to turn up a bushel, or any other measure, to sit upon it; see Titus 1:15.

God added that anyone who touched the man’s bed would have to wash his own clothes, bathe in water and be unclean until the evening (verse 5).

Gill adds that the person who touched the bed could not even converse with others whilst being temporarily unclean:

… be unfit for conversation with other men till the even, though both his body and clothes are washed.

Whoever sat on anything that the afflicted person had sat on had to wash his own clothes, bathe in water and be unclean until the evening (verse 6).

Whoever touched the body of the man with the discharge had to do the same: wash his clothes, bathe in water and remain unclean until the evening (verse 7).

Gill says that the Jewish scholars interpreted touching as also including the afflicted coming in every day contact with a clean person:

… the Jewish canon is {y}, he that toucheth one that has an issue, or he that has an issue touches him, or anyone moves him that has an issue, or he moves him, defiles food, and drink, and washing vessels by touching, but not by bearing …

God commanded that if the one with the discharge spat — we will see that this is by accident — on a clean person, the latter would have to wash his own clothes, bathe in water and be unclean until the evening (verse 8).

Gill tells us this would be an inadvertent act and would also include sputum and/or mucus:

And if he that hath the issue spit upon him that is clean,…. Not purposely, which is not usual for a man to do, and whenever it is done, nothing is more affronting; but accidentally, when, as Aben Ezra expresses it, he spreads his spittle, and it falls upon a clean person; and under this, as Gersom observes, is comprehended whatever is brought up by coughing, as phlegm, or flows from the nose, or is pressed out of it; and so Maimonides {z}: and this may denote all corrupt communication which proceeds out of the mouth of evil men, whether immoral or heretical, which not only defiles the man himself, but those he converses with; for evil communication corrupts good manners …

God said that the saddle the afflicted man sat on was unclean (verse 9).

Gill says:

And what saddle soever he sitteth upon that hath the issue,…. When he rides upon any beast, horse, ass, or camel, whatever is put upon the creature, and he sits upon it, the saddle, and whatever appertains to it, the housing and girdle:

shall be unclean; and not fit for another to use, but be defiling to him …

Whoever touched anything that had been under the man with the discharge would be unclean until the evening; however, anyone who carried those items had to wash his clothes, bathe in water and be unclean until the evening (verse 10).

Gill clarifies the verse for us:

… various are the traditions of the Jews concerning these things; if one that has an issue and a clean person sit together, in a ship, or on a beam, or ride together on a beast, though their garments do not touch, they are unclean, &c. {a}:

and he that beareth [any of] those things; that carries any of the above things from place to place, as his bed, his seat, his saddle, or anything on which he has lain, sat, or rode.

shall wash his clothes, and bathe [himself] in water, and be unclean until the even …

God said that if the person with the discharge had not washed his hands in water and touched a previously clean person rendered him unclean; the previously clean person — the one the man with the discharge had touched — would have to wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and remain unclean until the evening (verse 11).

Gill gives us the nuances. If the afflicted had washed his hands, the previously clean — the touched person — would only have to wash his whole body. However, if the afflicted had not washed his hands, then the one he touched would have to wash his own clothes and bathe in water, remaining unclean until the evening. God’s design was to separate clean persons from the unclean:

Not only he that touched him that had the issue, but whomsoever, and indeed whatsoever he touched, as the Targum of Jonathan, the Septuagint, and Arabic versions, were unclean; See Gill on “Le 15:4”;

and hath not rinsed his hands in water; which is to be understood, not of the man that is touched, but of him that toucheth; and is interpreted by the Jewish writers, generally, of bathing the whole body; according to Aben Ezra, the simple sense is, every clean person, whom he that hath an issue touches and hath rinsed his hands, he is indeed unclean, but not his garments; and if his hands are not rinsed his garments are unclean, and this is as he that touches all that is under him; wherefore it follows:

he shall wash his clothes, &c. that is, if a man is touched, as the Targum of Jonathan, and not a thing, as directed and prescribed in the above cases instanced in; all which are designed to instruct men to abstain from conservation with impure persons in doctrine and practice.

As for eating and other vessels, if the one with the discharge touched an earthenware vessel, it was to be broken; if he touched a wooden one, it could be rinsed in water and used again (verse 12).

Earthenware was — and is — porous; whatever bacteria or otherwise gets in stays there. Wood, on the other hand, has self-cleansing properties which will make it usable again.

Perhaps that was not known in Gill’s time, as he seemed to be perplexed. Nonetheless, he bowed to God’s superior knowledge and guidance, alluding to a deeper spiritual significance:

… what should be the reason why an earthen vessel defiled by touching should be broken, and a wooden vessel defiled in the same way should not, but be rinsed and cleansed, when an earthen vessel might as well be rinsed and fit for use as that, is not easy to say; it depended upon the will of the lawgiver: according to Ainsworth, the one may signify the destruction of reprobate persons, the other the cleansing of penitent sinners.

Henry concludes with the state of the unclean person afflicted with the discharge:

This signified the contagion of sin, the danger we are in of being polluted by conversing with those that are polluted, and the need we have with the utmost circumspection to save ourselves from this untoward generation.

More on male and female discharges will follow next week.

Next time — Leviticus 15:13-18, 32-33

Fourth Sunday in Lent, Laetare Sunday — Year A — exegesis on the Epistle, Ephesians 5:8-14

March 14, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Laetare Sunday, is March 15, 2026.

This Sunday is Mothering Sunday in the United Kingdom. Centuries ago, people returned to the church they worshipped in as youngsters and visited their mothers afterwards.

There was an ancient tradition of ‘clipping’ the church on this particular day, whereby the congregation would gather outside, hold hands and create a huge circle around the building. It was not only a group hug for Mother Church but also a symbol of protection by the faithful.

This is a joyful Sunday in Lent. The traditional Introit for Laetare Sunday includes these words (emphases mine throughout):

“Laetare Jerusalem” (“O be joyful, Jerusalem”)

ImageTraditionally, priests wore rose coloured vestments to denote that joy. Easter is nearing and we look forward to celebrating and worshipping the Risen Christ.

Image

A Golden Rose (1818-19), photo courtesy of Wikipedia

On the subject of roses, for over 1,000 years, the Catholic Church has commissioned expert goldsmiths to fashion a golden rose, which the Pope then gives to a distinguished Catholic of high social standing. In the past, some of these golden roses have been very elaborate; one was fashioned in the shape of a Jesse tree, which is appropriate, given today’s first reading.

You can read more about Laetare Sunday below:

Laetare Sunday, Mother’s Day and the Golden Rose

Laetare Sunday is Mothering Sunday

Readings for Year A can be found here.

The exegesis for the Gospel reading, John 9:1-41, the account of our Lord’s healing a blind man and His discourse on physical and spiritual blindness, can be found here and here.

The Epistle is as follows:

Ephesians 5:8-14

5:8 For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light–

5:9 for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.

5:10 Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.

5:11 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

5:12 For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly;

5:13 but everything exposed by the light becomes visible,

5:14 for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

The Bible, particularly the New Testament, has many passages contrasting the light of holiness and righteousness with the darkness of existing in sin.

In his 2022 sermon on today’s verses, John MacArthur gives us several such examples:

Now Scripture likes to use this comparison because it is so stark and it is so extreme, so we’re not surprised, then, when we find it a lot of places in the Scripture. If we were to back up, for example, to chapter 6 of 2 Corinthians and the familiar verse 14, we would see the contrast made there: “Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness?”

We would also see this same extreme contrast in Colossians chapter 1, verse 12, where the apostle writes, “Giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in Light. For He rescued us from the domain of darkness.”

You see it also in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 and verses 4 and 5: “But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day would overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness.”

… 1 Peter 2:9, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” This is the contrast that’s so familiar in the New Testament …

You were the darkness. You were not a victim; you were the darkness. Your works were unrighteous, your thoughts were godless, and you were under divine judgment. You were under the control of Satan, who in Luke 22:53 is called—Satan’s title is “the power of darkness.” You were the darkness empowered by Satan, and you were headed in your depravity and your deception toward death, already spiritually dead. You were headed toward death and then destruction. And Jude describes that destruction as “black darkness . . . forever,” which doesn’t mean that hell isn’t going to have any lights. What it means is the darkness has come to hell in the form of the people who came to hell. You are the darkness; you carry the darkness to hell. The darkness of hell is the composite of all the … people who make up that place where there are chains of darkness, black darkness forever …

So there is a contrast, and then there are characteristics … You are light. You are a light in the world. You are the lights that light the darkness of corruption, as Philippians 2 says. You are the light. You’re not just in the Light, but you are the light. Therefore, “Walk as children of Light.” Walk, again, consistently. Walk worthy of your calling—to borrow the language of chapter 4, verse 1 …

Colossians 1:10 … listen to these words: “so that you . . . walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work.” So it’s all goodness, all righteousness, and all truth; that’s the fruit of the Light …

The world has always been dark. It was dark before our Lord came. We know that because Isaiah the prophet, in chapter 9 of his prophecy, in verse 2, says in a prophecy of the coming of Christ—he says, “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.” And he’s speaking into the future, of the darkness of the world before Christ came. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.” That’s a prophecy of the arrival of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by His own confession is the Light of the world. So the people of the world were in darkness before the Light came.

Yes, God had shed His light of glory on the world in many ways, but never, never as definitively and as powerfully as He did when the glory of God was shining in the face of Jesus Christ, who in John 8:12 said, “I am the Light of the world; [whoever] follows Me will not walk in darkness, but will have the Light of life.”

MacArthur gives us an overview of darkness, pointing out that Scripture holds men responsible for it. Interestingly, he preached this sermon on Father’s Day, so let us keep in mind the contrasts for Mothering Sunday where it is being celebrated on Laetare Sunday:

Now today I want to look at this darkness perhaps in a unique way. Because it is Father’s Day, I thought maybe I would help you to understand the darkness that is perpetuated on the world by the sins of the fathers because, as we all know, Adam sinned, and the whole human race fell. Even though Eve sinned first, Adam acted in the place of all of humanity, and it was the fall of Adam that brought about the fall of the entire world. Men have that responsibility.

The world is fallen; the world is dark. It’s been dark ever since that fall of Adam. And the present darkness is to be understood, I think, by understanding, again, the role that fathers play in the increasing darkness of the world. The Old Testament talks about the sins of the fathers. It doesn’t talk about the sins of the mothers, it talks about the sins of the fathers being visited on the third and fourth generation. In other words, what corrupts sequential generations is the sins of the fathers. They have grave responsibility for whatever a society is, whatever a culture is.

The world has always been dark. It was dark before our Lord came …

Since He came, the world has experienced the impact of the Light that shattered the darkness, namely the arrival of Christ. And through the two thousand years since His arrival, millions of people have come to the Light and have been redeemed and are now part of the Light, having been transferred from darkness into Light. Christian influence has gone on for two thousand years …

So here we are, two thousand years after the Light arrived, and the world is as dark now as it was before He came. We are a generation that has seen the fall of the Christian West. We have seen the fall of this country and of influences of Christianity in the West, and we are now in a new era of human history that parallels the time before Christ ever arrived. This is a neopagan world. Its characteristics are precisely what they were in ancient Rome and Greece before the Light arrived …

Women are victims in two ways. Women are victims actively because they become useful to men only for self-gratification; and women become abused by men in a self-gratifying, sexual way. But they are also passively abused because men who live like that shirk all real responsibility designed by God to care for women. Corrupt fathers abuse women for their own pleasure, and they become a toxic masculinity—if you could even call it masculinity. They abuse women for their pleasure; women become victims of their desires. They use women; they use them for the expression of their evil, and they use them to take place in a family or in a relationship that shouldn’t belong to the man by ignoring their own fatherly responsibility.

… God designed men, fathers, to love, lead, feed, provide, protect, instruct, empower, discipline, sacrifice, and suffer for the love of wife and children. When they decide to live only for their own lusts, everything goes wrong. Women are abused, children are therefore abused, as the family completely disintegrates. The abused women turn to resent the abuse, and so you have a responding hardness that comes on women who were designed by God to be tender and compassionate and caring wives and mothers. They grow hard, they grow callous, they grow vengeful, and they attack back.

So you have, essentially, the conflict between unfaithful men and abused women, which destroys the family and, of course, the children and the whole society. Destroy fathers, and you destroy an entire society. When the moral character of true manhood, true fatherhood, is gone, women and children are threatened, hardened, exposed to abuse; and eventually they become angry, and they turn on the men who abuse them, categorically …

We all know the fallout of this. They don’t know what a man’s role is. One of the reasons that you see all the civil unrest, all the damage, all these people in the streets doing destructive things is because fathers teach their children how to suffer well. Fatherless children don’t think they should have to suffer, and so they revolt. Fathers teach their children that life is hard and challenging, and you need to suffer well; and as we read this morning, if you suffer well, it develops your moral character, your perseverance, and your hope. But if you never learn to suffer well, then you hate all the sources of your suffering, and you blame it on some systemic social problem, rather than accepting responsibility for the fact that life is hard, and if you take responsibility for it you can rise above it, if you are thoughtful. It’s not that fathers teach their kids to be criminals; it’s that fathers don’t teach their children how to suffer difficulty, and so they burn things, and tear things down, and destroy things, and kill people …

The darkness of this world is deep. It is a profound darkness. It is an ever-increasing darkness. It is a deep blackness. It is a spiritual black hole engulfing the world, and into which the world plunges deeper and deeper all the time.

Now on to today’s Epistle.

Paul tells the congregation of the church in Ephesus that they were once darkness, but now that they are in the Lord, they are light; the Apostle exhorts them to live as children of light (verse 8).

MacArthur says:

Now the context for this, as you well know, began in chapter 4, as we began to look at the practical instruction of the Spirit of God through the apostle Paul for living the Christian life, for walking through the world in a way that honors the Lord. And we have talked about walking worthy. We have talked about walking in unity. We have talked about walking in purity, walking in integrity … walking in love.

And now we have come to walking in light, just another way to perceive the life of the believer. You were darkness; you were darkness formerly, verse 8 says, “but now you are Light.” This is a stark contrast. They are mutually exclusive; and that is why the Lord has chosen, by His Spirit, this particular analogy. It is the best figure to show the complete separation of the non-Christian from the Christian, the complete separation of the child of Satan from the child of God. One is darkness, the other is light; and the contrast is extreme to show the difference and the distinction and the opposite nature between Christians and non-Christians.

Matthew Henry‘s commentary has more:

Consider what obligations Christians are under to live at another rate than such sinners do: For you were sometimes darkness, but now, etc., v. 8. The meaning is, “Such courses are very unsuitable to your present condition; for, whereas in your Gentile and your unregenerate state you were darkness, you have now undergone a great change.” The apostle calls their former condition darkness in the abstract, to express the great darkness they were in. They lived wicked and profane lives, being destitute of the light of instruction without and of the illumination and grace of the blessed Spirit within. Note, A state of sin is a state of darkness. Sinners, like men in the dark, are going they know not whither, and doing they know not what. But the grace of God had produced a mighty change in their souls: Now are you light in the Lord, savingly enlightened by the word and the Spirit of God. Now, upon your believing in Christ, and your receiving the gospel. Walk as children of light. Children of light, according to the Hebrew dialect, are those who are in a state of light, endued with knowledge and holiness.

Paul says that the fruit — that which is sincere, often evident to others — of the light is found in all that is good and right and true (verse 9).

Matthew Henry puts a high emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s role in personal regeneration:

If we would not be entangled by the lusts of the flesh, we must bring forth the fruits of the Spirit, v. 9. This is expected from the children of light, that, being illuminated, they be also sanctified by the Spirit, and thereupon bring forth his fruit, which is in all goodness, an inclination to do good and to show mercy, and righteousness, which signifies justice in our dealings. Thus they are taken more strictly; but, more generally, all religion is goodness and righteousness. And in and with these must be truth, or sincerity and uprightness of heart.

MacArthur examines the Greek used in the original manuscript:

What does it mean to “walk as children of Light”? Well, verse 9 gives us the characteristics. So we go from a contrast to characteristics: “The fruit of the Light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth.” So those are the things that mark the Light: goodness, righteousness, and truth. And that parallels chapter 4, verse 24, that when you “put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness [and] truth.” Righteousness, holiness, and truth, or goodness, righteousness, and truth—same thing. So if you’re a child of the Light, your life will be marked by all goodness, all righteousness, and all truth.

What is goodness? Agathos—that’s the name of your great-grandma, maybe: Agatha. Agathos. There is kalos, that’s a word for Greek, and it means “good to look at” and “free from defects.” There’s chrēstos, which means it’s something useful. But this is agathos, which means “morally good from the divine perspective.” So how do you know when a person is a believer? Because they are people of Light, and the Light shows up in their goodness, in their goodness.

First Thessalonians 5:15 gives you an illustration: “See that no one repays another with evil for evil, but always seek after that which is good for one another and for all people.” That’s the same word. It’s just general goodness. There’s an opposite, an antonym back in verse 31 of chapter 4: “malice.” “Malice” is kakia; that is general evil. Agathos is general good.

So if you have become a child of the Light, you’re marked by goodness. Secondly, by righteousness; that is, you walk a path that doesn’t deviate from purity. You’re also marked by truth. No longer are you deceived. No longer are you marked by all the expressions of depravity. You walk in integrity, you walk in honesty, you walk in reliability, you walk in trustworthiness, in contrast to the shallow hypocrisy and falseness of those in the dark. Colossians 1:10 elucidates that a bit; listen to these words: “so that you . . . walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work.” So it’s all goodness, all righteousness, and all truth; that’s the fruit of the Light.

Paul encourages the Ephesians to try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord (verse 10).

The KJV reads:

10 Proving what is acceptable unto the Lord.

Henry says the answer to this enquiry is in Scripture:

Proving what is acceptable unto the Lord (v. 10), examining and searching diligently what God has revealed to be his will, and making it appear that you approve it by conforming yourselves to it.” Observe, We must not only dread and avoid that which is displeasing to God, but enquire and consider what will be acceptable to him, searching the scriptures with this view, thus keeping at the greatest distance from these sins.

We are to take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness but rather expose them (verse 11).

MacArthur tells us how important this is in the life of the Church:

… we have not only the contrast, not only this command to walk in the Light, but we have a second command in verse 11: “Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness.” We’ve seen the command to walk in the Light, we’ve seen the characteristics of walking in the Light, now here’s the command not to participate—and that’s a form of the word koinōnia, have fellowship—with “the unfruitful deeds of darkness.” We have nothing to do with them. We don’t participate with them; we don’t fellowship with them; we don’t associate with them. We don’t become linked with them, as 2 Corinthians 6 says, “Don’t get involved in some kind of supposed spiritual enterprise with the darkness.” We don’t associate with people who profess Christ, 1 Corinthians 5, and are immoral. We obviously reach the people in the world who are immoral, but we don’t associate with those who profess salvation who are immoral. So that simple command is not hard to understand. And why would you participate? Because the works are “unfruitful.” On the other hand, their works in the Light are the fruitful works of light. Why do those things that produce nothing of value?

So there’s a contrast—their characteristics—and then a command. Then we have a commission, and I think this is so interesting, kind of getting toward the finish line for us. There’s a commission. If you’re a child of Light, instead of participating in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, instead expose them, expose them. If we listen to Paul in 2 Timothy 4:2, “Preach the word . . . reprove, rebuke.” You don’t ignore the deeds of darkness, you expose them; that’s your responsibility. You expose them for what they are. You expose them to the people who are the darkness. You warn them, you terrify them, for the consequences of what they’re doing.

And in the church you confront it—Matthew 18, discipline: If anybody’s at sin, you go to that person; you take two or three witnesses; you tell the church. You expose sin. The church has to expose sin, not accommodate it, not make people engaged “in the unfruitful deeds of darkness” comfortable. That’s not what the Spirit of God did in Acts chapter 5, when Ananias and Sapphira, who lied to the Holy Spirit, were executed in front of the entire church by God Himself, who slew them in the public service of the church so people would learn not to tolerate sin. We have that responsibility: to expose evil.

Henry explains how we become complicit in sin:

These works of darkness are unfruitful works; there is nothing got by them in the long run, whatever profit is pretended by sin, it will by no means balance the loss; for it issues in the utter ruin and destruction of the impenitent sinner. We must therefore have no fellowship with these unfruitful works; as we must not practise them ourselves, so we must not countenance others in the practice of them. There are many ways of our being accessary to the sins of others, by commendation, counsel, consent, or concealment. And, if we share with others in their sin, we must expect to share with them in their plagues. Nay, if we thus have fellowship with them, we shall be in the utmost danger of acting as they do ere long. But, rather than have fellowship with them, we must reprove them, implying that if we do not reprove the sins of others we have fellowship with them. We must prudently and in our places witness against the sins of others, and endeavour to convince them of their sinfulness, when we can do it seasonably and pertinently, in our words; but especially by the holiness of our lives, and a religious conversation. Reprove their sins by abounding in the contrary duties.

Paul says that we must expose sin because it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly (verse 12).

Henry gives us the historical context to this verse:

The things which are done of them in secret. The apostle seems to speak here of the Gentile idolaters, and of their horrid mysteries, which abounded with detestable wickedness, and which none were permitted to divulge upon pain of death. Observe, A good man is ashamed to speak that which many wicked people are not ashamed to act; but, as far as their wickedness appears, it should be reproved by good men.

MacArthur gives us a 21st century interpretation:

There are just some things that aren’t fit for even conversation, let alone behavior. I don’t know that there’s anything in this culture that fits into verse 12, that is so disgraceful it should never be spoken about, that people haven’t already seen on their iPhone. It’s disgraceful to speak of the things that deviated people do in secret. It’s disgraceful. It’s not anything you would even talk about. It’s so repulsive, it shouldn’t be mentioned. But when people are engaged in that without knowing the details, they need to be exposed. They need to be exposed for their sake. And if it’s in the church, certainly for the Lord’s sake.

Paul says that everything exposed by the light becomes visible (verse 13).

The KJV reads:

13 But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.

Henry explains:

The meaning of this passage may be this: “All those unfruitful works of darkness which you are called upon to reprove are laid open, and made to appear in their proper colours to the sinners themselves, by the light of doctrine or of God’s word in your mouths, as faithful reprovers, or by that instructive light which is diffused by the holiness of your lives and by your exemplary walk.” Observe, The light of God’s word, and the exemplification of it in a Christian conversation, are proper means to convince sinners of their sin and wickedness. It follows, For whatsoever doth make manifest is light; that is, it is the light that discovers what was concealed before in darkness; and accordingly it becomes those who are children of light, who are light in the Lord, to discover to others their sins, and to endeavour to convince them of the evil and danger of them, thus shining as lights in the world.

MacArthur tells us of the fine balance involved in exposing sin, particularly these days:

God never wants sin hidden, but that doesn’t mean you talk about all of the lurid details of things that should never even be spoken of. But it has to be made visible, “for everything that becomes visible [becomes visible because of the] light.” Light makes manifest what’s in the darkness.

So we have a contrast between light and darkness, characteristics of light—goodness, righteousness, and truth. The command: “Walk as children of light.” The negative command: “Don’t do the fruitless deeds of darkness.” And we have a commission: “Expose the darkness.”

In verse 14, Paul reverses the order of words from verse 13, saying that everything that becomes visible is light. He gives the Ephesians and us a strong, yet beautiful, exhortation, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you”, inspired by Isaiah 60:1:

‘Arise, shine, for your light has come,
    and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.

Henry interprets the verse for us:

… as if he had said, “In doing this, you will copy after the great God, who has set himself to awaken sinners from their sleep, and to raise them from the death of sin, that they might receive light from Christ.” He saith. The Lord is constantly saying in his word what is more particularly expressed in Isa 60 1. Or, Christ, by his ministers, who preach the everlasting gospel, is continually calling upon sinners to this effect: Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead. The same thing in the main is designed by these different expressions; and they serve to remind us of the great stupidity and the wretched security of sinners, how insensible they are of their danger, and how unapt they naturally are to spiritual motions, sensations, and actions. When God calls upon them to awake, and to arise, his meaning is that they would break off their sins by repentance, and enter on a course of holy obedience, and he encourages them to essay and do their utmost that way, by that gracious promise, And Christ shall give thee light; or Christ shall enlighten thee, or shall shine upon thee. “He shall bring thee into a state of knowledge, holiness, and comfort, assisting thee with his grace, and refreshing thy mind with joy and peace here and rewarding thee with eternal glory at length.” Observe, When we are endeavouring to convince sinners, and to reform them from their sins, we are imitating God and Christ in that which is their great design throughout the gospel. Some indeed understand this as a call to sinners and to saints: to sinners to repent and turn; to saints to stir up themselves to their duty. The former must arise from their spiritual death; and the latter must awake from their spiritual deadness.

MacArthur concludes:

This is a call to become a child of Light. This is a call to wake, you that are sleeping in the darkness, “and arise from the dead, and Christ will” give you light, or, “Christ will shine on you.” Once sin has been exposed, then the call to the sinner is to repent; Christ will give you light. That’s a gospel verse tucked into this section: “Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon you.”

We’re all here today worshiping … because that is exactly what happened in our lives—right?—in our deadness, in our darkness. The Lord one day said, “Awake, sleeper, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.” Pray that God would be so gracious as to awaken you if you’re still in the darkness.

I hope that everyone reading this has a joyful Laetare Sunday and that mothers celebrating their special day have one filled with happiness and delight.

Forbidden Bible Verses — Leviticus 14:54-57

March 8, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bible penngrovechurchofchristorgThe three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary from Matthew Henry, John Gill and Bible Hub.

Leviticus 14:54-57

54 This is the law for any case of leprous disease: for an itch, 55 for leprous disease in a garment or in a house, 56 and for a swelling or an eruption or a spot, 57 to show when it is unclean and when it is clean. This is the law for leprous disease.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Last week’s post discussed God’s commands to Moses and Aaron about what the priest had to do when leprosy recurred on a cleansed item made from linen, wool or animal skin. If it recurred after seven days in isolation, then the item was to be completely burned in the fire. Sometimes the priest could remove the affected area of fabric or skin; if it was still clean after that, it was washed again and be declared clean. If it recurred, however, it had to be burned in the fire.

N.B.: Bible scholars agree that this leprosy is different to what we call Hansen’s Disease today. The leprosy of Leviticus — Tzaraath in Hebrew — may display the same physical characteristics but was also considered a spiritual disease, a type of judgement that God inflicted on Israelites with truly sinful hearts.

Nearly all of Leviticus 14, which deals with the cleansing of lepers and houses, is in the Lectionary.

Note that, in both instances, sacrifices were required once the person or the house had been cleansed.

Matthew Henry‘s commentary summarises the cleansing rituals for us and what this period from Israelite history means for the Christian (emphases mine):

The former chapter directed the priests how to convict a leper of ceremonial uncleanness. No prescriptions are given for his cure; but, when God had cured him, the priests are in this chapter directed how to cleanse him. The remedy here is only adapted to the ceremonial part of his disease; but the authority Christ gave to his ministers was to cure the lepers, and so to cleanse them. We have here, I. The solemn declaration of the leper’s being clean, with the significant ceremony attending it, ver 1-9. II. The sacrifices which he was to offer to God eight days after, ver 10-32. III. The management of a house in which appeared signs of a leprosy, ver 33-53. And the conclusion and summary of this whole matter, ver 54, etc. …

Here … It is supposed that the plague of the leprosy was not an incurable disease. Uzziah’s indeed continued to the day of his death, and Gehazi’s was entailed upon his seed; but Miriam’s lasted only seven days: we may suppose that it often wore off in process of time. Though God contend long, he will not contend for ever.

These are the Lord’s commands for cleansing lepers. Here, God gave commands to Moses only, although Moses would have had to convey them to Aaron as high priest and Aaron’s sons as lesser priests:

Laws for Cleansing Lepers

14 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “This shall be the law of the leprous person for the day of his cleansing. He shall be brought to the priest, 3 and the priest shall go out of the camp, and the priest shall look. Then, if the case of leprous disease is healed in the leprous person, 4 the priest shall command them to take for him who is to be cleansed two live[a] clean birds and cedarwood and scarlet yarn and hyssop. 5 And the priest shall command them to kill one of the birds in an earthenware vessel over fresh[b] water. 6 He shall take the live bird with the cedarwood and the scarlet yarn and the hyssop, and dip them and the live bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the fresh water. 7 And he shall sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed of the leprous disease. Then he shall pronounce him clean and shall let the living bird go into the open field. 8 And he who is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes and shave off all his hair and bathe himself in water, and he shall be clean. And after that he may come into the camp, but shall live outside his tent for seven days. 9 And on the seventh day he shall shave off all his hair from his head, his beard, and his eyebrows. He shall shave off all his hair, and then he shall wash his clothes and bathe his body in water, and he shall be clean.

10 “And on the eighth day he shall take two male lambs without blemish, and one ewe lamb a year old without blemish, and a grain offering of three tenths of an ephah[c] of fine flour mixed with oil, and one log[d] of oil. 11 And the priest who cleanses him shall set the man who is to be cleansed and these things before the Lord, at the entrance of the tent of meeting. 12 And the priest shall take one of the male lambs and offer it for a guilt offering, along with the log of oil, and wave them for a wave offering before the Lord. 13 And he shall kill the lamb in the place where they kill the sin offering and the burnt offering, in the place of the sanctuary. For the guilt offering, like the sin offering, belongs to the priest; it is most holy. 14 The priest shall take some of the blood of the guilt offering, and the priest shall put it on the lobe of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot. 15 Then the priest shall take some of the log of oil and pour it into the palm of his own left hand 16 and dip his right finger in the oil that is in his left hand and sprinkle some oil with his finger seven times before the Lord. 17 And some of the oil that remains in his hand the priest shall put on the lobe of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot, on top of the blood of the guilt offering. 18 And the rest of the oil that is in the priest’s hand he shall put on the head of him who is to be cleansed. Then the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord. 19 The priest shall offer the sin offering, to make atonement for him who is to be cleansed from his uncleanness. And afterwards he shall kill the burnt offering. 20 And the priest shall offer the burnt offering and the grain offering on the altar. Thus the priest shall make atonement for him, and he shall be clean.

21 “But if he is poor and cannot afford so much, then he shall take one male lamb for a guilt offering to be waved, to make atonement for him, and a tenth of an ephah of fine flour mixed with oil for a grain offering, and a log of oil; 22 also two turtle-doves or two pigeons, whichever he can afford. One shall be a sin offering and the other a burnt offering. 23 And on the eighth day he shall bring them for his cleansing to the priest, to the entrance of the tent of meeting, before the Lord. 24 And the priest shall take the lamb of the guilt offering and the log of oil, and the priest shall wave them for a wave offering before the Lord. 25 And he shall kill the lamb of the guilt offering. And the priest shall take some of the blood of the guilt offering and put it on the lobe of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed, and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot. 26 And the priest shall pour some of the oil into the palm of his own left hand, 27 and shall sprinkle with his right finger some of the oil that is in his left hand seven times before the Lord. 28 And the priest shall put some of the oil that is in his hand on the lobe of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot, in the place where the blood of the guilt offering was put. 29 And the rest of the oil that is in the priest’s hand he shall put on the head of him who is to be cleansed, to make atonement for him before the Lord. 30 And he shall offer, of the turtle-doves or pigeons, whichever he can afford, 31 one[e] for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering, along with a grain offering. And the priest shall make atonement before the Lord for him who is being cleansed. 32 This is the law for him in whom is a case of leprous disease, who cannot afford the offerings for his cleansing.”

Bible Hub has a good homiletic by W Clarkson, ‘Admission (or Readmission)’, which explains how the Old Testament cleansing of a leper points to Christ’s salvific blood in the New Covenant (bold in the original):

When leprosy had departed from the flesh, he who had been, but no longer remained, a leper was, in the sight of Jehovah and of his people, still ceremonially unclean. He was in a bodily condition which made him readmissible to Divine and human fellowship, but he must first “be cleansed” (verse 4) before he would be readmitted. The ceremonies here prescribed give a picture of our readmission to the favour of God and the fellowship of his people.

I. SACRIFICE OF ANOTHER’S LIFE. As a “clean bird” (verse 4) was taken and its blood was shed (verse 5), as the life-blood of the pure and innocent creature was poured out that the leper might be clean and pure in the sight of God, so is the life-blood of the spotless Lamb shed for us. There must be for our acceptance and admission, or readmission after backsliding, a “sacrifice for sin.”

II. PERSONAL APPLICATION OF THAT SACRIFICE. “He shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed… seven times” (verse 7). “The living bird” was to be “dipped in the blood of the bird that was killed.” Here is the truth that if the “blood of Christ” is to be effectual for our salvation, it must be applied to our individual conscience. We who seek to be cleansed from all iniquity and condemnation, must ourselves personally apply for mercy through the shed blood of the Redeemer. By an act of living faith we must bathe in the “fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness.”

III. PERSONAL PUTTING AWAY OF DEFILEMENT, The leper was to “wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean.” And again, after a week’s interval, was to shave and to wash, removing all his hair, even to the eyebrows (verse 9); everything about him that could in any possible way be defiled by the plague was to be carefully removed. So, if we are to be admitted (or readmitted) to God’s favour and man’s communion, we must deliberately put away from ourselves, from heart and life, every evil way, everything which is, or may be, tainted with iniquity (2 Timothy 2:19).

IV. DIVINE ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF OUR INTEGRITY. Everything here pointed to the fact that the Divine Ruler of Israel was prepared to acknowledge the cleanness of the leper. The water was to be “running water” (verse 5) – pure, as opposed to that which was stagnant and foul; “cedar wood” was to be used (verse 6), type of that which is fragrant and healthful; the “scarlet” wool (verse 6) hinted the red and healthy blood, which had been impure but was so no longer; “hyssop” (verse 6) was suggestive of fragrance; but that which, above all, was indicative of God’s acknowledgment of the wholeness of the leper was the action respecting the living bird: that was released, let “loose into the open field” (verse 7). This either signified that the uncleanness of the leper was borne away on the wings of the bird, where it should never be found again (a similar institution to the scapegoat, Leviticus 16:22, 23), or that the leper was thenceforth free to go whithersoever he pleased. Either way, it expressed symbolically the truth that there was reinstatement for the man who had been healed in the privileges he had forfeited. We have in the Scriptures every possible assurance that “repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ,” are followed by fullness of Divine favour. The returned prodigal has the kiss of reconciliation, the ring and robe of honour, and the feast of joy. “Being justified by faith, we have peace with God… and rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:1, 2). The soul that is healed of its sore disease is pronounced clean in the sight of God, and is free of its Father’s house, to enter its many rooms and partake of its many joys. – C.

These were God’s commands for cleansing houses. He addressed both Moses and Aaron:

Laws for Cleansing Houses

33 The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, 34 “When you come into the land of Canaan, which I give you for a possession, and I put a case of leprous disease in a house in the land of your possession, 35 then he who owns the house shall come and tell the priest, ‘There seems to me to be some case of disease in my house.’ 36 Then the priest shall command that they empty the house before the priest goes to examine the disease, lest all that is in the house be declared unclean. And afterwards the priest shall go in to see the house. 37 And he shall examine the disease. And if the disease is in the walls of the house with greenish or reddish spots, and if it appears to be deeper than the surface, 38 then the priest shall go out of the house to the door of the house and shut up the house for seven days. 39 And the priest shall come again on the seventh day, and look. If the disease has spread in the walls of the house, 40 then the priest shall command that they take out the stones in which is the disease and throw them into an unclean place outside the city. 41 And he shall have the inside of the house scraped all round, and the plaster that they scrape off they shall pour out in an unclean place outside the city. 42 Then they shall take other stones and put them in the place of those stones, and he shall take other plaster and plaster the house.

43 “If the disease breaks out again in the house, after he has taken out the stones and scraped the house and plastered it, 44 then the priest shall go and look. And if the disease has spread in the house, it is a persistent leprous disease in the house; it is unclean. 45 And he shall break down the house, its stones and timber and all the plaster of the house, and he shall carry them out of the city to an unclean place. 46 Moreover, whoever enters the house while it is shut up shall be unclean until the evening, 47 and whoever sleeps in the house shall wash his clothes, and whoever eats in the house shall wash his clothes.

48 “But if the priest comes and looks, and if the disease has not spread in the house after the house was plastered, then the priest shall pronounce the house clean, for the disease is healed. 49 And for the cleansing of the house he shall take two small birds, with cedarwood and scarlet yarn and hyssop, 50 and shall kill one of the birds in an earthenware vessel over fresh water 51 and shall take the cedarwood and the hyssop and the scarlet yarn, along with the live bird, and dip them in the blood of the bird that was killed and in the fresh water and sprinkle the house seven times. 52 Thus he shall cleanse the house with the blood of the bird and with the fresh water and with the live bird and with the cedarwood and hyssop and scarlet yarn. 53 And he shall let the live bird go out of the city into the open country. So he shall make atonement for the house, and it shall be clean.”

W Clarkson’s ‘Cleansing the Corrupt House’ explains that corruption related not only to a family home, which replaced a tent once God’s people attained the Promised Land, but also, in different ways, still relates to families themselves, to nations and to the Church:

That the Divine Lawgiver should, in this tabernacle period of Israel’s history, anticipate a time when their future houses would be affected by some disorder similar to leprosy in the human skin, and that he should direct a treatment of such houses closely corresponding with that of the human leper, is exceedingly remarkable. Nothing could possibly impress the Hebrew mind more powerfully with the idea that “the face of the Lord was against” that spiritual evil of which leprosy was the chosen type. How direct the argument and forcible the conclusion that, if not only every remotest particle of leprosy itself was to be ruthlessly put away but also anything which to the bodily eye had even a near resemblance to it, and was thus suggestive of it, – how offensive, how intolerable, in the sight of God must that evil thing itself be held! Here are –

I. THREE MAIN PRINCIPLES ON THE SUBJECT OF CORRUPTION. In God’s view, as we gain it from his Word,

1. Corruption (impurity) may attach to the “house” or community as well as to the individual. We read of “the iniquity of the house of Israel,” and of “the iniquity of the house of Judah” (Ezekiel 4:5, 6); of “the house of Israel dealing treacherously with God” (Jeremiah 3:20), etc.

2. That earnest effort should be made to cleanse it from corruption. The leprous house of stone was to be cleansed: the stones in which the plague was were to be taken away (verse 40); the house was to be scraped round about, and its unclean dust cast out of the camp (verse 41); other stones were to be placed and other mortar used instead (verse 42): the leprous part was to be removed and the house renovated. So must the contaminated community purify itself, removing that from it which is evil and corrupting its Achan, its Ananias and Sapphira, its Simon the sorcerer, its guilty member (1 Corinthians 5), etc.

3. That, all efforts failing, the house will be destroyed. “He shall break down the house, the stones of it,” etc. (verse 45). A community of any kind that is incurably corrupt

(1) had better be broken up deliberately by the hand of man; but if no

(2) will certainly be dissolved in time by the hand of God. The history of the world abounds in proofs that moral and spiritual corruption lead on to feebleness, decay, dissolution.

II. THREE MAIN APPLICATIONS OF THE PRINCIPLES. To any leprous “house,” to any community into which seeds of corruption have been introduced, these principles will apply. They may with peculiar appropriateness be referred to:

1. The nation. The “house of Judah” and the “house of Israel” were continually warned that they had erred from the ways of the Lord and become corrupt, that they must cleanse themselves from their impurities, or that they would be abandoned by God to their doom. Assyria, Judaea, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Ottoman Empire, provide striking and eloquent illustrations.

2. The family. The “house of Eli” and the “house of Saul” illustrate the principles of the text; so also many a “house” in Christian times that has risen to honour and influence, that has grown leprous (corrupt), that has not heeded the warnings of the Word of God to put away the evil of its doings, and that has fallen into decay and has disappeared.

3. The Church. This is the “house of God” on earth (1 Timothy 3:15; 2 Timothy 2:20; Ephesians 2:19; Hebrews 3:6). This house may show signs of leprosy; and in individual Churches corruption may break out – in doctrine (Galatia), in public worship (Corinth), in morals (Pergamos, Thyatira), in spiritual life (Ephesus, Sardis, Laodicea). The corrupt Church must be cleansed, or it will be disowned of the Divine Lord, and it will perish in his high displeasure (Revelation 2:5, 16, 23, 27; Revelation 3:3, 17-19). – C.

We come now to the concluding verses.

Henry points out:

This is the conclusion of this law concerning the leprosy. There is no repetition of it in Deuteronomy, only a general memorandum given (Deut 24 8), Take heed in the plague of leprosy.

God told Moses that this was the law for any case of a leprous disease: for an itch (verse 54), which meant an unusual skin blemish which did not heal readily.

John Gill‘s commentary says:

This [is] the law for all manner of plague of leprosy, and scall. The leprosy in general in the bodies of men, and of that in particular which was on the head and beard, and went by the name of the scall, Leviticus 13:29. In Leviticus 14:54 is a recapitulation of the several laws and rules relating to leprosy of all kinds, delivered in this and the preceding chapter.

These were also the divine laws concerning for leprous disease in a garment or in a house (verse 55), the rules for the former being covered in Leviticus 13 (here and here).

These laws also covered leprosy involving a swelling or an eruption or a spot on the skin (verse 56), as God mandated in the initial verses of Leviticus 13.

These commands showed when the affected area of skin was unclean or clean; God concluded by saying, ‘This is the law for leprous disease’ (verse 57).

Henry ends with this observation about spiritual cleanliness, which also pertains to Christians, even though the physical manifestations of leprosy affected largely only the people of Israel:

We may see in this law, 1. The gracious care God took of his people Israel, for to them only this law pertained, and not to the Gentiles. When Naaman the Syrian was cured of his leprosy he was not bidden to show himself to the priest, though he was cured in Jordan, as the Jews that were cured by our Saviour were. Thus those who are entrusted with the key of discipline in the church judge those only that are within; but those that are without God judgeth, 1 Cor 5 12, 13. 2. The religious care we ought to take of ourselves, to keep our minds from the dominion of all sinful affections and dispositions, which are both their disease and their defilement, that we may be fit for the service of God. We ought also to avoid all bad company, and, as much as may be, to avoid coming within the danger of being infected by it. Touch not the unclean thing, saith the Lord, and I will receive you, 2 Cor 6 17.

Unfortunately, we have more unpleasant topics which involved divine commands: male and female bodily discharges, although verses related to the latter are in the Lectionary.

Next time — Leviticus 15:1-12

Third Sunday in Lent — Year A — exegesis on the Epistle, Romans 5:1-11

March 7, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Third Sunday in Lent is March 8, 2026.

Readings for Year A can be found here.

The exegesis (parts 1 and 2) for the Gospel reading, John 4:5-24, discusses Christ’s two-day stay in Samaria.

The Epistle is as follows (emphases mine):

Romans 5:1-11

5:1 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,

5:2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

5:3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,

5:4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,

5:5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

5:6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

5:7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person–though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.

5:8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

5:9 Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.

5:10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.

5:11 But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

Romans 5:1-5 is the Epistle for Trinity Sunday in Year C, the exegesis for which is here.

In his 1982 sermon, John MacArthur summarises those first five verses:

Now, there are six links in an unbreakable chain that unite us to the Savior. We’ve been looking at that in verse 1 and all the way down through verse 11. And we suggested these six links: First, peace with God; second, standing in grace; thirdly, hope of glory; fourth, possession of love; fifth, certainty of deliverance; and sixthly, joy in God.

… Now, remember that the first link that ties us eternally to the Savior is peace with God, verse 1, “Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” In other words, from now on God is on our side. We’ve made our peace. And it isn’t so much that we were hostile against God as it was that God was hostile against us. Remember? God was angry about our sin. The Bible says He’s angry with the wicked every single day, Psalm 7:11. So we are secure because we are at peace with God. His anger is satisfied. His wrath is satisfied in the death of Jesus Christ.

Secondly, we are secure because we stand in grace, verse 2:  “By whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand.” Now grace operates where there is sin. If you don’t have any sin then you don’t need any grace, right? So, grace operates where there is sin. Now if we stand in grace, then when we sin, what happens? Grace operates. And what does grace do? Forgives our sin because of Christ; and so we are secure then, not only because we’ve made peace with God and His wrath has been spent on Christ, but because we stand in grace. And grace is God’s undeserved favor to sinners.

Thirdly, we are linked eternally to the Lord through the hope of glory, the end of verse 2:  “We rejoice in hope of the glory of God” … we are secure because God saved us to bring us to glory. There are three tenses to salvation:  past, present, future. We have been saved. We are being saved. We shall be yet saved. We wait for the full salvation, the redemption of our bodies, the full and ultimate glorification. And we looked at Romans 8 and said: “Whom the Lord justifies He also (What?) glorifies.” So, He has saved us to bring us to glory. Salvation wouldn’t even be salvation. You couldn’t even call it that if you could lose it. You can’t even define it that way because salvation can only be defined as three parts:  Past, that is we have been saved from the sins of the past; present, we are being saved; future, we shall yet be saved in full glory. And so the hope of glory links us to Christ.

And then … verse 3, not only that but we also rejoice or exult in our tribulations because we know that tribulation, not only does it not take away our salvation, not only does it not weaken us, but rather it produces endurance, and endurance produces proven character and proven character has a greater hope. So, Paul is saying we are anchored to the Savior by the promise of ultimate glory, and even when we go through trial that just increases our hope of glory because trials produce proven character. And the more spiritual character you have the more spiritually mature you are, the more confident you are in the hope of ultimate salvation. And that’s why verse 5 says:  “Hope does not disappoint us.” It is not something we are ashamed of because we know God will bring to pass what He has promised.

So, the security of our salvation is then based on peace with God, standing in grace and hope of glory. Now, let’s go to the fourth link and one with which we are also wonderfully familiar as we look at verse 5. “And hope makes not ashamed.” It does not disappoint, “because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given unto us.” Now stop there for the time. Here we find the fourth link, and we’ll call it the possession of love. God has begun a love relationship that stretches through all eternity. We have become the possessors of love. That’s what that says. “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts” by the resident Holy Spirit who is given unto us. When you become a Christian, God deposits in you the Holy Spirit. And Paul the apostle calls Him in Ephesians, the earnest, or the arrabn. It means engagement ring, or down payment, or guarantee. In other words, when you become a Christian you’re given a guarantee, and that is the guarantee of your ultimate glory, the guarantee of your ultimate salvation, the guarantee of heaven, the guarantee of your perseverance, your security. And that guarantee is none other than the indwelling Holy Spirit given to every Christian. And the Holy Spirit, then, produces in us an awareness of the love of God.

Matthew Henry tells us what we can expect from verses 6 through 11:

The apostle here describes the fountain and foundation of justification, laid in the death of the Lord Jesus. The streams are very sweet, but, if you run them up to the spring-head, you will find it to be Christ’s dying for us; it is in the precious stream of Christ’s blood that all these privileges come flowing to us: and therefore he enlarges upon this instance of the love of God which is shed abroad. Three things he takes notice of for the explication and illustration of this doctrine:—1. The persons he died for, v. 6-8. 2. The precious fruits of his death, v. 9-11. 3. The parallel he runs between the communication of sin and death by the first Adam and of righteousness and life by the second Adam, v. 12, to the end.

Paul says that, while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly (verse 6).

The KJV reads:

6 For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.

Henry says:

1. We were without strength (v. 6), in a sad condition; and, which is worse, altogether unable to help ourselves out of that condition—lost, and no visible way open for our recovery—our condition deplorable, and in a manner desperate; and, therefore our salvation is here said to come in due time. God’s time to help and save is when those that are to be saved are without strength, that his own power and grace may be the more magnified, Deut 32 36. It is the manner of God to help at a dead lift,

2. He died for the ungodly; not only helpless creatures, and therefore likely to perish, but guilty sinful creatures, and therefore deserving to perish; not only mean and worthless, but vile and obnoxious, unworthy of such favour with the holy God. Being ungodly, they had need of one to die for them, to satisfy for guilt, and to bring in a righteousness.

MacArthur expands on the magnanimity of God’s love:

Let’s look at verse 6, and Paul wants to talk a little more about this love and he wants to define the nature of it. And oh, is this important! You don’t want to lose your train of thought here. Tell us about this love. Tell us how we can know what kind of love it is … 

… “For when we were yet without strength,” means powerless, impotent, without strength to do what? Without strength to do anything that pleased God. Without strength to overcome sin. Without strength to overcome Satan. Without strength to overcome the world. Without strength to overcome death. Without strength to overcome hell. Without strength period to live a righteous life. Without strength to save ourselves when we were literally paralyzed by our sin, and unable to do anything about it. We had no moral ability at all, none. We were enemies of holy God.

It says in Romans 8:7 we were at enmity against God. And in the flesh we cannot please God. So we were powerless to overcome our sin, powerless to overcome Satan, powerless to overcome death, powerless to overcome hell, powerless to please God, powerless. And when God looked at us, all He could see in us was something to make Him be disgusted, to be full of wrath and anger. Why? What’s the word at the end of verse 6? Ungodly, we were the very opposite of God. We were ungodly.

So, here are these ungodly, impotent people. And that is amazing that God, who is absolutely pure, absolutely holy, looked at people who were repulsive to His holy nature, who were the very opposite of everything He is and He loved them. And how much? … verse 6 … so much that in due time, at the right time, in the fullness of time, at the right season, at the moment God prescribed, Christ (What?) died for the ungodly.

I suppose we could understand it if God were to love the good and God were to love the godly and God were to love the pure. But the mystery of divine love is that He loved the folks that were the opposite of all of that …

Now listen carefully, if there was nothing in us to attract Him to love us in the first place, what could there be in us to make Him stop loving in the second place? Couldn’t be anything. You see the point he’s making? I mean, if Christ died for us when we were ungodly, impotent, ugly sinners and God could love us then, is it going to be any problem for Him to love us now? Christ died… I love that, the end of verse 6, underline it, “Christ died for the ungodly.” Oh, that’s great.

Literally it says He died in behalf of the ungodly, or instead of the ungodly, or for the sake of the ungodly, however you want to translate huper. It can be translated all those ways. Just translate it this way, He died instead of the ungodly, in behalf of. Great truth, great truth. In John 11, they got up and said, “It is fitting that a man should die huper the people, or die in behalf of the people, for the sake of the people.

In Galatians 3:13 Christ became a curse instead of us on our behalf. What a wonder that at the proper moment in the fullness of time He appeared once in the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, the consummation of human history. And the marvel of it is that He died with such love that He loved the unlovely, unloveable, godless people.

Paul goes on to say, emphasising it with ‘indeed’, that rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, although perhaps someone might actually dare to die for a good person (verse 7).

Henry explains:

Compare John 15 13, 14, Greater love has no man. (1.) One would hardly die for a righteous man, that is, an innocent man, one that is unjustly condemned; every body will pity such a one, but few will put such a value upon his life as either to hazard, or much less to deposit, their own in his stead. (2.) It may be, one might perhaps be persuaded to die for a good man, that is, a useful man, who is more than barely a righteous man. Many that are good themselves yet do but little good to others; but those that are useful commonly get themselves well beloved, and meet with some that in a case of necessity would venture to be their antipsychoi—would engage life for life, would be their bail, body for body. Paul was, in this sense, a very good man, one that was very useful, and he met with some that for his life laid down their own necks, ch. 16 4. And yet observe how he qualifies this: it is but some that would do so, and it is a daring act if they do it, it must be some bold venturing soul; and, after all, it is but a peradventure.

MacArthur says:

I think righteous and good simply are synonyms, talking about the same kind of person. Sometimes in human society, somebody might die for a good person. In other words, somebody might sacrifice his life for the sake of another good person. But the point of verse 7 is nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to die for a bad person, nobody but God.

Paul underlines that point, saying that God proves His great love for us, the ungodly, in the fact that Christ died for us while we were still sinners (verse 8).

The KJV reads:

8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Henry gives us this analysis:

But Christ died for sinners (v. 8), neither righteous nor good; not only such as were useless, but such as were guilty and obnoxious; not only such as there would be no loss of should they perish, but such whose destruction would greatly redound to the glory of God’s justice, being malefactors and criminals that ought to die. Some think he alludes to a common distinction the Jews had of their people into ndyqym—righteous, hsdym—merciful (compare Isa 17 1), and rssym—wicked. Now herein God commended his love, not only proved or evidenced his love (he might have done that at a cheaper rate), but magnified it and made it illustrious. This circumstance did greatly magnify and advance his love, not only put it past dispute, but rendered it the object of the greatest wonder and admiration: “Now my creatures shall see that I love them, I will give them such an instance of it as shall be without parallel.” Commendeth his love, as merchants commend their goods when they would put them off. This commending of his love was in order to the shedding abroad of his love in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. He evinces his love in the most winning, affecting, endearing way imaginable. While we were yet sinners, implying that we were not to be always sinners, there should be a change wrought; for he died to save us, not in our sins, but from our sins; but we were yet sinners when he died for us.

MacArthur links verse 8 to verse 5:

Now let me get you a little deeper into verse 5. It says: “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts.” Now listen very carefully. That is not talking about our love for God. That is talking about God’s love for us. How do you know that? Because the rest of the passage makes a point of that, verse 8: “God commended His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” It’s talking about God’s love for us. And so the truth is that God’s love for us has been deposited in our hearts by the presence of the Holy Spirit. What are we saying, practically? That the Holy Spirit gives the believer the sense that God loves Him. That’s a… That’s a subjective thing.

But, let’s face it, we are emotional beings. We are beings who feel and respond to the moving of the Spirit of God. And the truth you see that gives solidity to all the rest of the things we know in our minds, for example, we can know in our minds that we have peace with God, that because there was a divine transaction on the cross in which God’s wrath was poured out and now He can make peace with sinners.

We can know in our minds that we stand in grace and we can have a sense of that standing cognitively. In other words, we can say, that’s logical, that’s reasonable. And we can know in our minds that we’ve been redeemed for future glory. But God goes beyond that and says, not only do I want you to know that factually and by revelation, I want you to feel that in your heart. And so He sheds abroad in our hearts His love through the Holy Spirit …

“But God commended,” and this is … why divine love is so surpassing. “But God commended His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Now, beloved, if this passage doesn’t shake you to the foundation of your being, it is because you don’t know how God hates sin, or you don’t know how sinful we are. Infinitely holy God, who is of purer eyes than to behold evil, cannot look upon iniquity. The God who hates every sin, every evil deed, evil thought, evil word, despises it with the fury of all of heaven, that He could reach out and love ungodly, impotent sinners. That is the surpassing nature of divine love.

The word “commended” in verse 8 means He proved, He proved the nature of His love, the level of His love, the zenith of His love because while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Now, that is the security of our salvation. I’m going to sum this up. Listen carefully. If God can love us when we are ungodly, wicked, impotent sinners, if He can love us enough to have His Son die for us to save us when we are godless, will He not love us enough to keep us after we have become His children? You see the point?

If God loved us that much as miserable sinners, then how much more surely, now that we have been justified by Christ’s blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God (verse 9).

Henry says that:

the argument holds very strongly; if God justified and reconciled us when we were enemies, and put himself to so much charge to do it, much more will he save us when we are justified and reconciled. He that has done the greater, which is of enemies to make us friends, will certainly the less, which is when we are friends to use us friendly and to be kind to us. And therefore the apostle, once and again, speaks of it with a much more. He that hath digged so deep to lay the foundation will no doubt build upon that foundation.—We shall be saved from wrath, from hell and damnation. It is the wrath of God that is the fire of hell; the wrath to come, so it is called, 1 Thess 1 10. The final justification and absolution of believers at the great day, together with the fitting and preparing of them for it, are the salvation from wrath here spoken of; it is the perfecting of the work of grace.

MacArthur has more:

… and now we come to the summation. I call it certainty of deliverance, and this sort of builds on the point of peace with God. But look at this, this is really something, verse 9. “Much more than being now made right with God,” that’s justified, “made right with God by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him.”

What are you saying here, Paul? Well, we have been justified by His blood, that’s past. And we shall be saved from wrath in the future through Him. Now that’s just a statement of fact. We’ve been made right with God by His blood, and listen to me carefully now. Salvation by definition is past, present and what? Future. So, if we were made right with God, how long, or to what extent were we made right? For good, so we shall be saved from wrath because there is no such thing as a biblically defined part-time salvation. You can only understand salvation in its fullness. And so because we were made right with God by the blood of Jesus Christ, we will be saved from the wrath to come through Christ. That transaction covers past, present and future. And the wrath to come is the lake of fire. You can read it in Revelation, chapter 20, the lake that burns with fire and brimstone where the godless are sent forever.

Now, God is a God of wrath, but that wrath that is to be poured out on men was gathered in by Jesus. And when we put our faith in Him that wrath is set aside and we are no longer, as Paul calls men in Ephesians 2:3, children of wrath, that is, bull’s eye for the guns of God’s judgment. We have been saved from wrath. That’s the wonderful promise, I think, Paul made to the Thessalonians. He says in verse 10: “To wait for His Son from heaven whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus who delivered us,” past tense, “from the wrath to come.” No Christian is ever going to stand in judgment. No Christian is ever going to know the wrath of God. The full fury of wrath for your sin as a Christian was poured out on Jesus Christ. So, we will be delivered in the future.

Paul reiterates this truth, saying that, if we were reconciled to God through Christ’s death when we were sinners, then how much more surely will we be reconciled when we will be saved by His life (verse 10).

Henry tells us that Paul is speaking of our Lord’s life in heaven:

Reconciled by his death, saved by his life. His life here spoken of is not to be understood of his life in the flesh, but his life in heaven, that life which ensued after his death. Compare ch. 14 9. He was dead, and is alive, Rev 1 18. We are reconciled by Christ humbled, we are saved by Christ exalted. The dying Jesus laid the foundation, in satisfying for sin, and slaying the enmity, and so making us salvable; thus is the partition-wall broken down, atonement made, and the attainder reversed; but it is the living Jesus that perfects the work: he lives to make intercession, Heb 7 25. It is Christ, in his exaltation, that by his word and Spirit effectually calls, and changes, and reconciles us to God, is our Advocate with the Father, and so completes and consummates our salvation. Compare ch. 4 25 and 8 34. Christ dying was the testator, who bequeathed us the legacy; but Christ living is the executor, who pays it. Now the arguing is very strong. He that puts himself to the charge of purchasing our salvation will not decline the trouble of applying it.

MacArthur says:

In other words, if God reconciled us to Himself when we were His enemies, don’t you think He’ll keep us now that we’re His friends? You say, oh, but sin gets in the way. No, no, no, you don’t understand. You see, when He reconciled us in the first place we were wretched, rotten, vile, godless, impotent sinners. We’ll never be worse than that. And if that was not a barrier to His reconciliation then, it poses no barrier to keeping us reconciled now. Do you understand that? So, being now justified, reconciled, when we were enemies, don’t you think much more we’ll be kept when we’re His friends? If He redeemed us when we hated Him, do you think He will not keep us when we love Him?

Now, let me take it a second way. And this verse, you haven’t yet got to the heart of it. Here it comes. “If when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by” what?, by the what? “the death of His Son, much more we’ll be continually being reconciled,” I think that’s the idea there, “by His life.”

Now, what is this saying? Here it comes. If Jesus saved us in His death, don’t you think He could keep us in His life? In other words, if a dead Savior on the cross can redeem us, can’t a living Savior keep us? A great truth, isn’t it? If Jesus in death provided our salvation, what can He be doing now in glorified resurrection life? You see, that’s the whole point. If He could save us in His death, He can keep us in His life. Great truth.

By the way, blood in verse 9, and death in verse 10 are synonyms.

They’re synonyms … This is what people call, in theology, an a fortiori argument. It argues from the lesser to the greater. If God already did the greater, saved us when we were wretched sinners, will He not to the lesser, keep us? If Christ did the greater when He was dead, can He not do the lesser now that He’s alive? 

Paul says that even more important is the fact that we can boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation (verse 11) with the Father.

The KJV puts it better:

11 And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.

Henry explains how important this is:

All this produces, as a further privilege, our joy in God, v. 11. God is now so far from being a terror to us that he is our joy, and our hope in the day of evil, Jer 17 17. We are reconciled and saved from wrath. Iniquity, blessed be God, shall not be our ruin. And not only so, there is more in it yet, a constant stream of favours; we not only go to heaven, but go to heaven triumphantly; not only get into the harbour, but come in with full sail: We joy in God, not only saved from his wrath, but solacing ourselves in his love, and this through Jesus Christ, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the foundation-stone and the top-stone of all our comforts and hopes—not only our salvation, but our strength and our song; and all this (which he repeats as a string he loved to be harping upon) by virtue of the atonement, for by him we Christians, we believers, have now, now in gospel times, or now in this life, received the atonement, which was typified by the sacrifices under the law, and is an earnest of our happiness in heaven. True believers do by Jesus Christ receive the atonement. Receiving the atonement is our actual reconciliation to God in justification, grounded upon Christ’s satisfaction. To receive the atonement is, (1.) To give our consent to the atonement, approving of, and agreeing to, those methods which Infinite Wisdom has taken of saving a guilty world by the blood of a crucified Jesus, being willing and glad to be saved in a gospel way and upon gospel terms. (2.) To take the comfort of the atonement, which is the fountain and the foundation of our joy in God. Now we joy in God, now we do indeed receive the atonement, kauchomenoi—glorying in it. God hath received the atonement (Matt 3 17; 17 5; 28 2): if we but receive it, the work is done.

MacArthur recaps the previous verses, each of which points to Christ’s saving work on the cross:

It’s all through Jesus Christ. Verse 1: “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Verse 2: “By whom also we have access.” Verse 6: “In due time Christ died for the ungodly.” Verse 8: “Christ died for us.” Verse 9: “Justified by His blood, we’re saved from wrath through Him.” “Reconciled to God,” verse 10, “by the death of His Son, we shall be saved by His life. And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Do you see? It’s always through Christ. No, God never loved us because we were lovable. We were not lovable. He saved us in the midst of our sin and He did it for His own glory, to show what a glorious, gracious, merciful, loving God He was, to put Himself on display throughout all eternity, and what kind of God would He be if He turned His back on us? There would be no glory in that. Certainly if He did the greater, He will do the lesser. If He saved us, He’ll keep us. We were enemies, but He made us His friends. He reconciled us to God …

MacArthur then comes to verse 11:

… while He is alive now at the right hand of the Father, what is He doing? Interceding for us, taking our case and saying, Father, that’s My child, I have borne their sin, I’ve borne their judgment, I’ve borne Your wrath, they’re to be forgiven. And He intercedes, He ever, ever, ever lives to make intercession for us and thus carries our salvation to the extreme, the uttermost, and that is ultimate glorification. And when Jesus said, “Because I live,” John 14:19, “you shall live also,” He wasn’t just talking about the resurrection there. He was saying. “Because I live you shall live also, because I live now I will intercede for you to be sure that your eternal life is eternal.” Great truth.

So, we’re secure, kept by God because He’s faithful. And the means by which He keeps us? Peace with God, standing in grace, hope of glory, possession of love, certainty of deliverance, and a last one in verse 11. We’ll just call it joy in God. “And not only so,” and this is, you know, this is more than you can bear, if that isn’t enough. “Not only so,” says Paul, “we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ by whom we’ve now received the reconciliation.” And here’s another subjective reality, another reason that we know we belong to God, is because He fills our heart with joy. The fruit of the Spirit is what? Love, joy, peace, joy. And again I say, salvation is not merely a future though certain good, it is a present and abundant joy. And one of the ways that you know you belong to God and one of the great securities is that internal joy.

It’s already been talked about. Verse 2:  “We rejoice.” Verse 3 we exult, or we rejoice greatly. This is the third time it’s mentioned. We have joy in God. The concept here is to exult again, to rejoice jubilantly, to…to be thrilled. And so our present sense of joy is an additional guarantee of future salvation. That sense of inner joy produced by the Holy Spirit. The believer’s joy is all in God, you know. You don’t joy in your own righteousness, you don’t joy in your own ability, your own worthiness. You joy in God and that’s why the psalmist says:  “O magnify the Lord with me and let us exult His name together.” … The psalmist said:  “I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. I will go to the altar of my God, my God, my exceeding joy.”

And so, we don’t boast in ourselves. We don’t rejoice in ourselves. We don’t say, hey, how wonderful we are. We’re not the kind of religious people who pat ourselves on the back about how good we are. We joy in God.

MacArthur concludes by addressing people who do not have that assurance of salvation and joy:

I guess we need to ask a question, at this point … Do you have the security we’ve talked about? Do you know without a shadow of a doubt that you belong to Jesus Christ now and forever? If you don’t, one of two reasons has caused that. First, you do not know Christ, you’re not a Christian.

You don’t have the Holy Spirit. You’re not secure because you have no salvation. Then I would open my arms in the imagery of Christ if He were here and say, come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Christ wants you to enter into His salvation, now and forever. Put your faith in Jesus’ blood, who died for you, bore the wrath of God. Embrace Him as Lord and Savior. Only a fool says no. Only an utter fool holds on to his own selfishness, his own sinfulness, his own vile life and rolls the dice to gamble against eternity. That’s a fool. Wisdom comes to Christ. And not only does that secure the future, but, oh my, it fills the present with love and joy. There’s joy, it says in the New Testament, in believing.

But, there are some of you who may not sense security, you may not feel assured in your salvation and it may be that you have lost that internal witness of the Spirit, affirming the love of God to you. And you’ve lost your joy in the reconciliation provided because you’re walking in sin, you’re living in disobedience. And it may be a small thing, you know. You may not be able to see some glaring evil that is very obvious to the whole world. It may be some small sin that is choking out your sense of assurance. You confess, ask the Spirit of God to search your heart, give you that full sense of God’s love and joy in the Spirit.

May all reading this enjoy that peace with God and assurance of salvation which comes only through Jesus Christ’s reconciling us with God the Father for eternity. What a marvellous truth!

Forbidden Bible Verses — Leviticus 13:53-59

March 2, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 comment

Bible ancient-futurenetThe three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary from Matthew Henry, John Gill and Bible Hub.

Leviticus 13:53-59

53 “And if the priest examines, and if the disease has not spread in the garment, in the warp or the woof or in any article made of skin, 54 then the priest shall command that they wash the thing in which is the disease, and he shall shut it up for another seven days. 55 And the priest shall examine the diseased thing after it has been washed. And if the appearance of the diseased area has not changed, though the disease has not spread, it is unclean. You shall burn it in the fire, whether the rot is on the back or on the front.

56 “But if the priest examines, and if the diseased area has faded after it has been washed, he shall tear it out of the garment or the skin or the warp or the woof. 57 Then if it appears again in the garment, in the warp or the woof, or in any article made of skin, it is spreading. You shall burn with fire whatever has the disease. 58 But the garment, or the warp or the woof, or any article made of skin from which the disease departs when you have washed it, shall then be washed a second time, and be clean.”

59 This is the law for a case of leprous disease in a garment of wool or linen, either in the warp or the woof, or in any article made of skin, to determine whether it is clean or unclean.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Last week’s post began God’s instructions to Moses and Aaron concerning leprosy in wool, linen or skin (hide), which appeared as reddish or greenish spots or blotches.

Today’s post concludes Leviticus 13.

N.B.: Bible scholars agree that this leprosy is different to what we call Hansen’s Disease today. The leprosy of Leviticus — Tzaraath in Hebrew — may display the same physical characteristics but was also considered a spiritual disease, a type of judgement that God inflicted on Israelites with truly sinful hearts.

The question some will ask is what this has to do with Christians or the Church.

Bible Hub has a homiletic by W Clarkson on last week’s and today’s verses, which involves our immediate environment. I shall conclude with the rest of Clarkson’s ‘Impure Surroundings’ at the end of this post (uppercase in the original):

I. THE IMPURE SURROUNDINGS BY WHICH WE MAY BE ENVIRONED. These are many:

1. Depraved tastes and cravings in our body (for the body is the immediate clothing of the spirit).

2. Unholy companionships.

3. Corrupt political associations.

4. Impure, demoralizing books (or any form of hurtful literature).

5. Injurious occupation – that which wounds the conscience or enfeebles the inner life.

6. A deadening Church – a religious society where the form without the power of godliness is left.

We left off last week with the priest burning a leprous garment or skin in the fire.

However, the divine judgement of leprosy sometimes disappeared for good or it re-emerged.

God told Moses and Aaron that if the priest examined an isolated garment after seven days and if the leprosy had not spread in the warp or the woof (weft) of the fabric or in any article made of (animal) skin (verse 53), then the priest shall command that ‘they’ (someone other than the priest) wash the item and shut it up for another seven days (verse 54).

John Gill‘s commentary gives us the spiritual meaning of verse 53, which those involved would have hoped was a good sign (emphases mine):

… it may be hoped it is not a fretting [active] leprosy: so when men do not proceed to more ungodliness, as wicked men commonly do, but there is a stop put to their vicious life and conversation, it is an hopeful sign of future good.

Gill explains the washing procedure in verse 54. He gives it a Christian outlook. The washing was a foreshadowing of Christ’s cleansing blood for the sinner:

The priest did not wash it himself, but ordered others to do it; and this was either the part in which the plague was, or the whole garment or skin in which it was; which may be typical of the washing of the garments of men in the blood of Christ, which cleanses from all sin, Revelation 7:14:

and he shall shut it up seven days more: the garment or skin in which the leprosy was, or suspected to be, to see what alteration would be made by that time through the washing, whether the colour would be altered, or whether it would spread any more or not.

After that period of seven days, the priest would examine the fabric or the skin once more; if the original spots or blotches remained, even if they had not increased in size, the item was still unclean; God commanded that the article be thrown into the fire, as it was unclean, whether on the front or the back (verse 55).

Gill tells us:

And the priest shall look on the plague after it is washed,…. That is, on the second seventh day, or thirteenth day from his first inspection of it:

and, behold, [if] the plague has not changed its colour; and the plague be not spread, it [is] unclean, thou shalt burn it in the fire; if it remains just as it was at first, very green or very red, and has not diminished of its colour at all, nor changed from one colour to another, although it should not have spread itself, yet it is defiled, and to be burnt without the camp, as before; that which spreads itself here and there, it is to be burnt:

it [is] after inward, [whether] it [be] bare within or without; that is, whether it be threadbare on the wrong or right side of the garment, the nap being eaten off by the leprosy; which shows it to be a fretting, eating, and corroding one: in the Hebrew text it is, “in the boldness of the hinder,” or “in the baldness of the fore part”; they are the same words which are used of the boldness of the back part and fore part of the head, Leviticus 13:42; the nap being off either of the outer and right side of the cloth, or of the inner and wrong side, made it look like a bald head, whether before or behind.

However, if the affected area had faded after washing, the priest was to tear out of the skin or the fabric (verse 56).

Gill says that this was done to preserve as much of the original untainted item as possible:

And if the priest look, and, behold, the plague [be] somewhat dark after the washing of it,…. Is become of a weaker colour, either not quite so green, or not quite so red as it was, or is “contracted,” and does not spread itself, See Gill on “Le 13:6”; but is rather become less:

then he shall rend it out of the garment, or out of the skin, or out of the warp, or out of the woof; that is, that piece which has the plague in it, and burn it, as Jarchi says; that so the whole may not be lost, which is otherwise pure, and clean, and free from any infection. The manner of expression confirms what I have observed on Leviticus 13:48; that the warp and woof are considered as separate things, and as before they are wove together, or wrought into one garment. This rending out may denote the denying of ungodliness and worldly lusts, the parting with right eye and right hand sins, and having no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness.

Should leprosy reappear in the item in a new place, whether in the warp or the woof or the skin, that meant the disease was still spreading; the priest was to burn in the fire the article with the disease (verse 57).

Gill points out that Jewish scholars disagree as to whether just the affected portion was to be removed and burnt or the whole article:

And if it appear still in the garment, either in the warp, or in the woof, or in anything of skin,…. After the piece has been rent out, in another part of the garment, &c. where before it was not seen:

it [is] a spreading [plague]; or leprosy; a flourishing one, as the word signifies, a growing and increasing one:

thou shalt burn that wherein the plague [is] with fire; according to Aben Ezra, only that part in which the plague was; but Jarchi says the whole garment; with whom Ben Gersom seems to agree, who reads the words, thou shall burn it, with that in which the plague is; the whole garment, skin, warp, or woof, along with the part in which the leprosy is.

However, if, after washing, the disease departed — no longer appeared — in the warp or the weft or the skin, the item was to be washed a second time, at which point it was clean (verse 58).

Gill refers again to this being a foreshadowing of the cleansing blood of Christ:

After it had been shut up seven days, and viewed by the priest again: if the plague be departed from them: …

then it shall be washed the second time, and shall be clean; and so reckoned even thoroughly clean, and used; this denotes the thorough washing and cleansing of sinners by the blood of Jesus, see Psalm 51:2; this washing was by dipping; and so the Targum renders it; and Jarchi observes, that all washings of garments, which are for dipping, they interpret by the same word.

Matthew Henry‘s commentary summarises these verses for us:

… in no case must sentence be given merely upon a surmise, but it must be shown to the priest. If, upon search, it was found that there was a leprous spot (the Jews say no bigger than a bean), it must be burnt, or at least that part of the garment in which the spot was, v. 52, 57. If the cause of the suspicion was gone, it must be washed, and then might be used, v. 58.

God concluded His commands to Moses and Aaron by saying that they were the law ‘for a case of leprous disease in a garment of wool or linen, either in the warp or the woof, or in any article made of skin, to determine whether it is clean or unclean’ (verse 59).

Henry concludes that these divine commands were:

to intimate the great malignity there is in sin: it not only defiles the sinner’s conscience, but it brings a stain upon all his employments and enjoyments, all he has and all he does. To those that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure, Tit 1 15. And we are taught hereby to hate even the garments spotted with the flesh, Jude 23. Those that make their clothes servants to their pride and lust may see them thereby tainted with a leprosy, and doomed to the fire, Isa 3 18-24. But the ornament of the hidden man of the heart is incorruptible, 1 Pet 3 4. The robes of righteousness never fret nor are moth-eaten.

The second part of W Clarkson’s ‘Impure Surroundings’ tells us that we must be vigilant at all times with regard to sin and its various manifestations (bold in the original):

II. THE DIVINELY SUGGESTED TREATMENT OF THEM. We gather from these verses that we should:

1. Exercise vigilance in detecting. With the same carefulness with which the priest made himself sure in the matter of the leprous garment (verses 50-57), we must make certain whether there be in any of our surroundings – or of those for whom we are responsible – the plague which will work spiritual mischief in the heart and ultimate ruin to the character.

2. Make serious effort to cleanse. If, after seven days, there had been no spreading of the plague, the priest was to wash the garment (verse 54), and if the plague departed, it was to be washed a second time, and then it was clean (verse 58). All that was salvable was to be saved. If by vigorous and repeated washing any spotted garment could be preserved, it was not to be destroyed. All that is reformable in our institutions and surroundings must be reformed. We must cleanse where we can make pure and where it is unnecessary to destroy. But sometimes we must:

3. Unscrupulously destroy. When unmistakable signs of leprosy appeared, the priest was to “burn that garment;” it was to “be burnt in the fire” (verse 52). When we find in anything that surrounds us and that is exerting an influence upon us, that which is really hurtful to us – that which would lead us astray from God, we must sacrifice it altogether, at whatever cost (see Mark 9:43-47). Our belongings must be put into the fire rather than be permitted to stain our soul. – C.

Next week, I shall summarise Leviticus 14, most of which is in the Lectionary. It concerns the cleansing of lepers and leprous houses.

Next time — Leviticus 14:54-57

Second Sunday in Lent — Year A — exegesis on the Epistle, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, part 2

March 1, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

The Second Sunday in Lent is March 1, 2026.

Readings for Year A can be found here.

The exegesis for the Gospel reading, John 3:1-17, the story of Nicodemus’s first encounter with Jesus, is here.

The Epistle is as follows (emphases mine):

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

4:1 What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh?

4:2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.

4:3 For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

4:4 Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due.

4:5 But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.

4:13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.

4:14 If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.

4:15 For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

4:16 For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us,

4:17 as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) — in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

This exegesis covers the first five verses of Romans 4. Here is the link to my exegesis of the last five verses, written for the Second Sunday of Lent, Year B, in 2024.

Part 1 of this exegesis covers verses 1 through 3, concerning Paul’s argument for the effectual call, God’s imputation of righteousness to those of faith and justification by faith. It also recounts Abraham’s amazing story of conversion from paganism into faith in God and great obedience to Him.

John MacArthur, in his second of three sermons from 1982 on these verses, gives us a brief summary of Paul’s argument thus far:

Now, let’s look at Romans chapter 4 again and notice the first point that he makes in verses 1 to 8. And the first point is this; Abraham was justified by faith not works, by faith not works. The second point is by grace not law. And the third point is by divine power not human effort …

First there is a negative and then there is a positive. Let’s go back to the negative in verses 1 and 2, “What shall we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh, hath found?” In other words, Paul says, look, I’ve been telling you you’re saved by grace through faith. Some of you are going to say, now wait a minute. We’ve always believed you’re saved by works and Abraham is proof of that. Abraham was a perfect man so God chose him. So, Paul brings up Abraham. All right, what did Abraham find? What did he gain by his unaided human flesh? As pertaining to his flesh, Abraham as a human being, what did he discover? What did he gain with God?

Verse 2, “For if Abraham were justified (or made right with God) by works, then he has something of which to glory; but not before God” …

What did he gain in his own human flesh? First of all, if he gained righteousness with God because of his own human effort, then he should be glorified, not God, right? But you’re not going to get away with that before God. If Abraham was justified by works, he could boast, but not from God’s viewpoint. He was not made right with God by his works.

Now this is basic but so important. You cannot do anything on your own effort to gain acceptance with God. You can’t do that; it isn’t so many spiritual pushups. It isn’t being a good person, better than other people. You can’t do it on your own. Chapter 3 verse 20, “By the deeds of the law,” that is by your good works, keeping God’s law, “no flesh is made right with God in His sight.” Nobody comes on those terms. Verse 27 says, “Where is boasting then? It is excluded.” And it is excluded not by the law of works but by the law of faith. In other words, if you were saved by what you did then you get the glory. You can say, I had the intelligence, I had the foresight, I had the insight, I had the cleverness, I had the righteousness to do good works and to come to God all on my own. Then you get the glory. You get the credit. But not before God. God is not in the business of glorifying men; He’s in the business of glorifying Himself. Nobody was ever made right with God by works.

… If a man is made right with God by works, it’s utterly and absolutely contrary to everything the Bible teaches …

The positive is in verse 3. Let’s look at what the Scripture says. It wasn’t by works, but rather Genesis 15:6 is quoted, “Abraham believed God and it was put to his account for righteousness.” Last time we talked about his genuine saving faith. And now we will see that because of that saving faith, God put righteousness into his account. In other words, God graciously gave him something he didn’t deserve. God graciously gave him something he couldn’t earn. It wasn’t by his works. As pertaining to his flesh, he could not please God. He could not accomplish righteousness. But when he believed God in obedience, in confidence, and in the promise of a Redeemer, God put to his account righteousness.

MacArthur reminds us that faith is the channel for justification. just as it was for Abraham, so it is for us:

How can a man be right with God? How can a sin be forgiven and how can he receive entrance into God’s kingdom? Not by his own works but rather by what he believes. His righteousness, the righteousness of Christ, put to his account.

Now, that’s what we mean by justification by faith. Now justification; you hear that word. It’s a technical term and it sort of refers to a legal status, that we have been declared to be just by our faith.

Now let me just give you a little footnote for you theologians, some of you might just feel this going right on by. Don’t worry about that. I’ll be back to you in a moment. But there’s a lot of talk about justification by faith and all of the ins and outs and nuances of it. But try to keep this thought in mind. And I try to articulate this in a simple way so that you’ll be able to at least have something to sort of meditate on. People say, “Well, if you’re saved by faith, then faith is a work, so salvation is by works.” But the Bible says you can’t be saved by works but you’re saved by faith, therefore faith can’t be a work biblically. So what may appear to you to be very logical is unbiblical. You got that? Somebody said if you can get that in your head you’ve got it in a nutshell.

Now listen, let me say it another way. Who said that? Faith is never the basis of justification. It is never the reason for justification. It is only the channel by which justification is received. And that’s a distinction we make in terminology even though we can’t fully understand it with our minds. Faith is not what I do to earn salvation. It’s not that God says, oh, look at his faith, it’s so wonderful. Faith is not like, “I believe for every drop of rain, a flower grows.” If you believe that you’re dumb. One flower doesn’t grow for every drop of rain. I told you it was dumb. “I believe that someone in the great somewhere.” There is no someone and there is no somewhere. So, people who just sort of believe, you know, the religious people, they don’t earn salvation by their believing. Saving faith is simply the hand that reaches out to take the gift that is sovereignly offered. But the initiation comes from God. It isn’t that God is responding to some kind of virtuous faith.

… God does not justify the believing person because of the worthiness of his faith but because of the worthiness of the One who is believed in. Our faith is not meritorious; it is only the empty hand that takes the gift.

In Acts 13:39, 38 says: “Be it known unto you therefore men and brethren that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins.” That’s Paul’s sermon. And then in verse 39, “By Him, all that believe are justified from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses.” There’s no work that can justify you, but believing brings about justification. And that believing, as I said again, is simply receiving the gift.

MacArthur spells out saving faith for us with attributes for each letter of the word — F-A-I-T-H, as follows:

First, saving faith includes “F,” facts, facts …

First Corinthians chapter 15 gives us the facts. They’re very clear. “I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you which you also received” and you believed in it, obviously implied. “And it’s which you stand, by which you also are saved if you keep in memory what I preached unto you unless you have believed in vain” … Here they are, verse 3: First of all, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Now that is a lot. Christ, who is He? He died, a substitutionary atonement for our sins according to the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies.

Verse 4, “That He was buried, that He rose again the third day, as predicted in the Scriptures, that after His resurrection He was seen by Cephas [Peter], then the twelve, then 500 brethren of whom the greater part remain to the present time but some are fallen asleep. And after that He was seen of James, then of all the Apostles. And last of all, He was seen of me also, as one born out of due time.” Now there are the facts, that Jesus is the Christ, according to the Old Testament prophets, that He died a substitutionary death for sin on the cross, that He was literally buried in the ground from which three days later He arose in triumph and resurrection. His resurrection is literal and bodily and physical as given evidence to by the testimony of over 500 eyewitnesses and the last of which is myself.

Those are the facts. The facts: Saving faith starts with the facts. It is not enough to just believe this or that or the other thing. In fact if, Galatians 1 says, somebody comes along and fouls up the facts and preaches to you some other gospel, let him be what? Accursed. You cannot alter the facts. You cannot touch the facts. They are essential to the matter of believing. In fact, in 2 John 10, if anybody comes along and starts talking about some other Christ, don’t let him in your house, don’t even bid him God speed or you’ll be a partaker of his evil deeds. The facts.

Second, the “A” in faith stands for “agreement.” It is one thing to know the facts; it is something else to believe the facts. And this element of saving faith is, having been exposed to and understanding the facts you then believe the facts to be the facts. It’s one thing to know about them, something else to believe them. That’s the issue. That’s where we were this morning, you see. Where the disciples said after Jesus walking on the water, the next day, “We believe and are sure that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” First the facts and then agreement with the facts. The affirmation of those facts within the heart. Yes, I know they’re true. Yes, I believe they’re true.

Now listen to me. Are there people who know the facts who aren’t saved? Sure. Are there people who believe the facts who aren’t saved? Are there? Yes. Many people. They believe them. I’ve been witnessing to a man for over 20 years who believes it all. That’s as far as it goes. So, you have to come to the third letter “I” and I think that stands for “internalization.” You know the facts. That’s why we preach the facts. That’s why we preach the Bible as a literal, historical book. That’s why we preach the reality of the Scripture. That’s the facts. And then to try to convince people to believe the facts and then you come to the internalization, which is to desire to make that belief personal. It’s personal appropriation.

… Jesus said in John 8, you come along and you believe on Me but only when you continue in My word are you My real disciple. There has to be an internalization, a desire for personal appropriation.

And you know, I guess I could say at this point even you could stop and say a person would be short of really being saved, because I know there are people who know the facts, believe the facts and they want that reality in their life, they long for that reality, but they can’t let go of something. Have you ever met people like that? And so, that takes us to that fourth letter, “T,” and let’s call that “trust.” Trust, it is not merely intellectual knowledge, the facts; it is not merely agreement, believing the facts; it is not merely personal desire, wanting it to happen; but it is trust, which says, “Here it is, I give you my life and I accept it.” This I call total commitment. If you want, you can make the “T” stand for that: trust, true trust, full commitment. This means I repent of my sin, this means I affirm the lordship of Jesus Christ, I turn around and I put my life in His care. I trust Him with my life. Full commitment …

When you come to Christ there is a turning from idols to God, a turning from sin to God, a repenting of the past to move toward God. Don’t ever let anybody tell you there is a salvation apart from repentance. There is not. It is a turning, and that’s that aspect of trust, where you drop all you possess and receive all that He has to give.

That brings us to the last letter, “H,” and that is for “hope,” for hope. Facts, agreement, internalization, trust, and hope. Now hope is a very important concept and I want you to understand why. Listen very carefully to what I say. When you were saved you were saved in hope. Do you know why? Because you have not yet seen the ultimate provision in your salvation, right? You believe with all your heart that you’re going to go to heaven but you haven’t seen heaven. You believe with all your heart that you’re going to dwell in the presence of the eternal God but you haven’t seen that yet. You believe with all your heart that you’re going to be in a place where Jesus Christ will be. You believe you’re going to be in the presence of the redeemed saints forever and forever. You believe that there’s going to be a time when you are perfect and you lose your human frailties and your propensity to sin. You believe that and you are saved in hope.

Now watch. So that true salvation is not some momentary kind of thing, but it is a commitment of my entire temporal and eternal destiny to God. It is giving Him my forever.

On those points, in looking at Abraham’s life, MacArthur brings up God’s changing his name:

Abram was his name first. It means “exalted father.” God changed his name to Abraham which means “the father of many nations,” for He had given him that promise. And it was twofold. Physically from the loins of Abraham would come multitudes of people, millions of people. The Semitic world, Arab and Jew alike, descended from Abraham. Genesis 17, the first 8 verses, talk about how God said Abraham will produce generations of people. In fact, it is said that they would be as the sand of the sea, or the stars of the heavens. He was the father of many, but not only physically, spiritually as well; for he is the father of all those who are of faith. He is the pattern established, and all others who put their faith in God follow the pattern of their father, Abraham.

Galatians makes this abundantly clear. Paul, writing in chapter 3 verse 6, says: “Even as Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness, know ye therefore that they who are of faith, the same are the sons of Abraham, and the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham saying, in thee shall all nations be blessed, so then they who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham.”

So, not only did Abraham in a sense produce physical seed, but as well set the standard for spiritual production. And so, as millions follow his directive of faith, they occupy a place uniquely identified in the Scripture as children of Abraham. And that is because he is the example of justification by faith. And Paul makes that point in Romans and as I noted, he makes it in Galatians because it is so very important.

In refuting righteousness through human works — a persistent, common, yet highly erroneous belief — Paul continues his argument by saying that to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as one’s due (verse 4).

Paul is saying that God’s imputation of righteousness is a free gift of grace to His imperfect human creation.

Matthew Henry‘s commentary says:

Now, if Abraham had merited this by the perfection of his obedience, it had not been an act of grace in God, but Abraham might have demanded it with as much confidence as ever any labourer in the vineyard demanded the penny he had earned. But this cannot be; it is impossible for man, much more guilty man, to make God a debtor to him, Rom 11 35. No, God will have free grace to have all the glory, grace for grace’s sake, John 1 16.

MacArthur agrees:

In other words, if you did something to earn your salvation it wouldn’t be grace it would be wages, wouldn’t it? If you worked for it, God would owe it to you. But salvation comes by grace, free absolute favor on the part of God. It was not something Abraham had earned, but something he was given by grace.

MacArthur looks at the Greek word for ‘work’ in that verse:

The word in verse 4 is interesting, ergazomai, the word that talks about working there. It means “to do that which brings results.” If we received righteousness because of some work of our own doing, then there would be no grace involved, it would just be merit. It would just be like going to work, putting in your eight hours, collecting your check at the end of the week. You don’t go to your boss and say, “Hey, I’ve given a full week, please be gracious and pay me.” You don’t want grace, you want pay for your works; he’s in debt to you. And God is not. God is not. God is in the debt of no man. You can earn no saving wages. God owes you absolutely nothing and that is abundantly clear in the Scripture. Because the intended purpose, you see, of all men and all creation and everything that is, the intended purpose of all of this is to give God what? Glory, and if men were redeemed by works, it would violate the intended purpose of the universe. All things are by Him and for Him …

And, there is also that very obvious reality that you couldn’t be saved by your works. And I’ll give you four reasons, just kind of summing them up and adding that last one at the end. Number one, you couldn’t be saved by your own works because your works make no provision for your past sin. In other words, you can’t be saved by present righteousness because that doesn’t do anything with your past sin. That doesn’t account for it. That doesn’t deal with it. How can your past sins find atonement if you’re redeemed by works? Secondly, fallen creatures cannot produce the divine standard and the divine standard is “Be ye (What?) perfect.” Thirdly, if you say you’re redeemed by works then Christ’s death is utterly needless. And then fourthly, and the point we made a moment ago, God’s glory would be eclipsed by the glory of man.

Paul then pivots to Abraham’s position as a believer.

Paul says that, to one — Abraham or any subsequent true believer — who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness (verse 5).

Henry explains:

And therefore to him that worketh not—that can pretend to no such merit, nor show any worth or value in his work, which may answer such a reward, but disclaiming any such pretension casts himself wholly upon the free grace of God in Christ, by a lively, active, obedient faith—to such a one faith is counted for righteousness, is accepted of God as the qualification required in all those that shall be pardoned and saved. Him that justifieth the ungodly, that is, him that was before ungodly. His former ungodliness was no bar to his justification upon his believing: ton asebe—that ungodly one, that is, Abraham, who, before his conversion, it should seem, was carried down the stream of the Chaldean idolatry, Josh 24 2. No room therefore is left for despair; though God clears not the impenitent guilty, yet through Christ he justifies the ungodly.

MacArthur has more, citing a personal example:

… inherent in that concept is that you see yourself as ungodly. A man came to me Wednesday night. He was introduced to me and he’s been coming to our church and I’m so happy about that. I hope he’s here tonight. And he said to me, “I enjoy this church and I enjoy this fellowship and I enjoy these people and I like to listen, but,” he said, “I think you’ve pointed out my basic problem. My basic problem is I do not see myself as a sinner. I don’t see that I’m a sinner.”

I said, “That’s the basic problem.” If you don’t see yourself as a sinner, there’s no salvation for you. Unless you believe on Him that justifies the ungodly, there’s no accounting righteousness to you. And so, you must affirm initially that you are the ungodly. To the one that knows in his heart that he can’t work his way into God’s kingdom by his own self-effort, to the one who knows in his heart he must abandon the self-righteous route, to the one in his heart who knows that he is ungodly, unacceptable to God, and by faith embraces the One who justifies the ungodly, there is saving grace.

… And until you face the reality of your ungodliness and your incapacity, you’re irredeemable …

You see, it is not the worst sinner who loses heaven, it is the one who thinks himself the least sinner who loses heaven. So, from start to finish, right relationship with God is a gift appropriated by faith.

I hope that this two-part exegesis helps us to better understand the mysteries of and the power of faith in God and in His Son Jesus Christ.

The verses of Romans 4 that the Lectionary omitted are here:

Romans 4:6-12 – Abraham, David, God, justification by faith through grace, righteousness before circumcision

Paul discusses Abraham’s justification by faith through God’s grace, which occurred several years before his circumcision to seal the covenant that God made with him. Despite his adultery and other serious sins, David also realised God’s forgiveness in Psalm 32:1-2, which Paul cites in his letter to the Romans.

Paul’s objective was to say that outward symbols, e.g. circumcision, might seal a covenant but do not provide salvation.

Key verses:

9 Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. 10 How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. (Romans 4:9-10)

The same holds true for the Church’s sacraments and ordinances. They do not save us in and of themselves. However, they do provide grace that we may obey God, through His Son Jesus Christ, who was also ever obedient to His Father.

We then move on to verses 13 through 17, discussed in this exegesis for the Second Sunday in Lent, Year B, Romans 4:13-25.

May all reading this have a blessed — and contemplative — week ahead.

Second Sunday in Lent — Year A — exegesis on the Epistle, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, part 1

February 28, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 comment

The Second Sunday in Lent is March 1, 2026.

Readings for Year A can be found here.

The exegesis for the Gospel reading, John 3:1-17, the story of Nicodemus’s first encounter with Jesus, is here.

The Epistle is as follows (emphases mine):

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

4:1 What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh?

4:2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.

4:3 For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

4:4 Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due.

4:5 But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.

4:13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.

4:14 If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.

4:15 For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

4:16 For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us,

4:17 as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) — in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

This exegesis covers the first five verses. Today’s looks at verses 1 through 3. Here is the link to my exegesis of the last five verses, written for the Second Sunday of Lent, Year B, in 2024.

John MacArthur, who preached three sermons on the first five verses in 1982, introduces Paul’s letter to the Romans to us:

We come … to the fourth chapter of Romans, Paul’s great epistle. Some have called it the Magna Carta of the Christian faith, the great statement of Christian doctrine. All religious thinking, all religious activity, all religious instruction must measure itself by the standard really of the book of Romans, which lays down God’s truth in terms of His plan for redeeming man. So, it’s a great, great epistle.

… we’re going to begin to look at chapter 4, a great chapter. If we were to entitle the chapter we could title it “The Faith of Abraham,” because the whole chapter is really the story of Abraham. Paul uses him as an illustration of the truth that salvation is by faith not works. And Abraham is the illustration.

Matthew Henry‘s commentary tells us why Paul chose Abraham as that illustration:

The great gospel doctrine of justification by faith without the works of the law was so very contrary to the notions the Jews had learnt from those that sat in Moses’ chair, that it would hardly go down with them; and therefore the apostle insists very largely upon it, and labours much in the confirmation and illustration of it. He had before proved it by reason and argument, now in this chapter he proves it by example, which in some places serves for confirmation as well as illustration. The example he pitches upon is that of Abraham, whom he chooses to mention because the Jews gloried much in their relation to Abraham, put it in the first rank of their external privileges that they were Abraham’s seed, and truly they had Abraham for their father. Therefore this instance was likely to be more taking and convincing to the Jews than any other. His argument stands thus: “All that are saved are justified in the same way as Abraham was; but Abraham was justified by faith, and not by works; therefore all that are saved are so justified;” for it would easily be acknowledged that Abraham was the father of the faithful. Now this is an argument, not only à pari—from an equal case, as they say, but à fortiori—from a stronger case. If Abraham, a man so famous for works, so eminent in holiness and obedience, was nevertheless justified by faith only, and not by those works, how much less can any other, especially any of those that spring from him, and come so far short of him in works, set up for a justification by their own works? And it proves likewise, ex abundanti—the more abundantly, as some observe, that we are not justified, no not by those good works which flow from faith, as the matter of our righteousness; for such were Abraham’s works, and are we better than he? The whole chapter is taken up with his discourse upon this instance, and there is this in it, which hath a particular reference to the close of the foregoing chapter, where he has asserted that, in the business of justification, Jews and Gentiles stand upon the same level. Now in this chapter, with a great deal of cogency of argument, I. He proves that Abraham was justified not by works, but by faith, ver 1-8. II. He observes when and why he was so justified, ver 9-17. III. He describes and commends that faith of his, ver 17-22. IV. He applies all this to us, ver 22-25.

MacArthur has more on Jewish thought concerning Abraham, who is also the father in faith of Christians:

Paul has told us how to be right with God and he said a man is right with God not by what he does but by what he believes, by believing in Jesus Christ and His perfect work. And now it is very important that Abraham be his illustration because this that he has just taught would be unacceptable to the Jewish mind. And so he selects Abraham to make his point.

Let me give you some reasons why. First, Abraham would show the eternal truth of righteousness by grace through faith since Abraham was an Old Testament character. In other words, by using Abraham, Paul is saying this is nothing new, this is something very old. Abraham even preceded Moses. Abraham even preceded the identity of the nation Israel. Abraham really belongs in the patriarchal period, the very primitive time. He appears early on in the book of Genesis. And if Paul can establish that a man in the book of Genesis was saved by grace through faith and not of works, then he has given to us a timeless truth and nothing new at all.

Secondly, he selects Abraham because Abraham is also the supreme example of faith. Nobody in the Old Testament exercised as much or more faith than Abraham. And the New Testament even tells us that Abraham — the book of Galatians tells us — is the father of all who believe. In a very real sense, all who come to God by faith are children of Abraham, who sort of set the standard for faith by believing God in a most incredible way.

Now, this would run contrary to the rabbis’ teaching. Let me fill you in a little bit. The majority of rabbis at the time of Paul and the time of our Lord in Jewish history believed — and this is still what the majority of them believe, certainly of the Orthodox persuasion — that Abraham was made right with God, was saved if you will, was forgiven of his sin, was given eternal life, was chosen by God for salvation because of his character. He was the best man in the world, the best man in his generation. Therefore he was chosen by God to be the father of His people Israel. And they say Abraham was a righteous man and that’s why God chose him. And we ask two questions. Number one, how could any man be righteous at God’s standard level? And then a second question, how could a man keep God’s righteous standard when it hadn’t been given yet?

Well, they answer back, do the rabbis, he kept it by intuition and anticipation. He sensed in his conscience the law of God and he kept it as he anticipated it and he kept it intuitively. And so the rabbis said he was the best man, he was a good man; he was a righteous man on his own terms therefore God chose him because of his self-righteousness. And so, Paul selects Abraham in order to destroy this myth, to wipe out the Jewish illusion and establish the truth that Abraham is not an example of a righteous man whom God chose, he is an example of an unrighteous man whom God chose. He is not an example of a man who earned salvation by his good works; he is an example of a man who received salvation by grace through believing. In simple child-like trust, in complete yieldedness to God, he took God’s word at face value, believed God. And by that act of faith he received righteousness. And of course it was very important to the Jews to have Abraham be an example of a righteous man whom God chose because they believed by their own self-righteousness God had to choose them too.

But Paul wants them and us to realize that it may be the supreme discovery of all of life to find out that you don’t need to torture yourself with a losing battle to earn salvation. You don’t need to torture yourself with a losing battle to gain acceptance with God on your own good works. You don’t need to think you can buy salvation on the installment plan.

And there’s a third reason that he chose Abraham. And that is because up till now all that he has said to us has been theological theory, theological truth, and it needs flesh and blood. And so he takes it out of the abstract and puts it into the concrete. He gives it flesh, the flesh of Abraham.

Paul begins by asking what are we to say that Abraham gained, he being our ancestor according to the flesh (verse 1).

Notice that Paul uses the word ‘our’, referring to his own Jewish ancestry.

Henry explains Paul’s introduction:

What has he found, kata sarka—as pertaining to the flesh, that is, by circumcision and his external privileges and performances? These the apostle calls flesh, Phil 3 3. Now what did he get by these? Was he justified by them? Was it the merit of his works that recommended him to God’s acceptance? No, by no means, which he proves by several arguments.

MacArthur takes this further, summarising Paul’s argument to come:

First of all, he was justified by faith, not works, verses 1 to 8. Secondly, he was justified by grace, not law, verses 9 to 17. Thirdly, he was justified by divine power, not human effort, verses 18 to 25. Simple enough; he was justified by faith not works, by grace not law, by divine power not human effort. And in both…or rather in all three, there are both negative and positive perspectives. Faith not works; grace not law, divine power not human effort, and Paul hits on both the negative and the positive in each case …

Secondly, and conversely, if it can be demonstrated that Abraham was justified by faith then everyone must be justified by faith for Abraham is the standard. If Abraham can’t glory and boast then nobody can because it must be of grace. So, this is critical.

… The reason that they believed that Abraham was righteous is because they picked certain scriptures, selected certain scriptures, turned and twisted certain scriptures to come to their own conclusion …

So, because of all of this teaching that Abraham was righteous before God on the basis of his own personal righteousness, Paul has to attack Abraham. And he has to disprove that because, you see, Abraham became the standard and then the Jews said that’s the standard so we all gain righteousness by living as Abraham in perfect obedience to the rules. And so they all tried to keep the law. So, Abraham’s faith must be made clear.

Paul takes the Jewish line of thinking and begins to refute it.

He says that if Abraham were justified through his works, then he has something to boast about, but not before God (verse 2).

Henry tells us:

Observe, he takes it for granted that man must not pretend to glory in any thing before God; no, not Abraham, as great and as good a man as he was; and therefore he fetches an argument from it: it would be absurd for him that glorieth to glory in any but the Lord.

MacArthur elaborates:

Verse 2, Well, if he were justified by works — that is by those things which he did by his natural unaided powers — if he was able to be justified by those things, then he should have something of which to glory, then he had a right to boast. “But not before God.”

And that’s Paul’s way of saying, but not so. He can’t open his mouth before God. The translation is really saying in verse 2, if Abraham was justified by works, then he has something about which to boast. I mean, if I save myself by being so good, then I have a right to say, hey, I’m so good I saved myself. But, from God’s viewpoint he had no right to boast. He had no basis for pride, none at all. Now Paul’s going to prove that in the rest of the chapter. He was not justified by his works.

… you can be so good that nobody even likes to be around you, but the sum of it all is you that cannot attain unto God’s standard of righteousness. That’s why it says in chapter 3 verse 27 that boasting is excluded. No one can boast. And that’s Ephesians 2, “We’re saved by grace through faith, that not of ourselves; it is the gift of God not of works lest any man should boast.” Because salvation is designed to give glory to God, not glory to man.

So, Abraham had nothing about which he could boast. Now what Paul is doing here, if any of you have studied debate or logic, Paul presents what is called a hypothetical syllogism. A hypothetical syllogism has a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. Now the major premise is: If a man is justified by works he has ground for boasting. The minor premise is: Abraham was justified by works. The conclusion is: Therefore Abraham has a right to boast. But then God says, not on your life. So, if the conclusion isn’t true then we ought to back up. Now the major premise, if a man is justified by works he has ground for boasting, is that true? Yes it’s true. If you were justified by works you’d have ground for boasting, right? So that’s true. The minor premise, Abraham was justified by works, is that true? That’s not true. So we cannot grant the minor premise, therefore the syllogism doesn’t work. The minor premise is false. Abraham was not justified by works, not before God.

Paul directs his audience to Scripture, asking what it says, which is, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness‘ (verse 3), Genesis 15:6.

Henry explains, saying that God does not require perfect faith in order for Him to impute righteousness to us:

It is expressly said that Abraham’s faith was counted to him for righteousness. What saith the scripture? v. 3. In all controversies in religion this must be our question, What saith the scripture? It is not what this great man, and the other good man, say, but What saith the scripture? … Now the scripture saith that Abraham believed, and this was counted to him for righteousness (Gen 15 6); therefore he had not whereof to glory before God, it being purely of free grace that it was so imputed, and having not in itself any of the formal nature of a righteousness, further than as God himself was graciously pleased so to count it to him. It is mentioned in Genesis, upon occasion of a very signal and remarkable act of faith concerning the promised seed, and is the more observable in that it followed upon a grievous conflict he had had with unbelief; his faith was now a victorious faith, newly returned from the battle. It is not the perfect faith that is required to justification (there may be acceptable faith where there are remainders of unbelief), but the prevailing faith, the faith that has the upper hand of unbelief.

MacArthur says similarly:

… how does Paul prove his point? I love this; this is a man after my own heart. Where does he go? Verse 3, “For what saith (What?) the scripture?” That, my friend, is the coup de grace. That’s all you really have to know, right? What does the Bible say? What saith the scripture? And he quotes Genesis 15:6, “Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness.” That’s Genesis 15:6. Not exactly new, right?

How did he gain righteousness? “Righteousness” means to be right with God. How did he get right with God? Well, it wasn’t that he was so good on his own that God just sort of had to accept him, but rather he believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness.

Now we enter into this section from verses 3 to 8 in which we find the positive, Abraham was justified by faith. Abraham believed God. Look at Galatians for a moment. This is again Paul’s argument, chapter 3 verse 6 of Galatians. It says there, “Even as Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Know ye therefore that they who are of faith the same are the sons of Abraham. And the Scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles through faith preached before the gospel unto Abraham saying, ‘In thee shall all nations be blessed.’ So then they who are of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.” Abraham was saved by faith, not by works so that all who are saved by faith since Abraham in a real sense are the children of Abraham. He’s sort of the father of all who exercise faith.

MacArthur gives us Abraham’s story as described in the Book of Hebrews:

… it says in verse 8 of Hebrews 11, “By faith (and always Abraham is associated with faith) by faith Abraham when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed and he went out, not knowing where he went.” Now this is faith. He lived in the city, the Bible tells us, called Ur, the city of the Chaldees. He had his family, his possessions, his reputation, his business. His life was there. There was no nation Israel. There was no promised land. There was no people of God, as such. And yet God came and it says he was called; present participle indicated that he was being called, that God was working over Abraham. And when he was being called he also obeyed. And that was a great act of faith because God said, get up and get out of Ur of the Chaldees and I want you to go somewhere else and I’m not going to tell you where you’re going, but you just abandon everything and leave.

So, he left the land of his birth, forsook his home, his estate, severed ties with those he loved and he left, abandoning present security for future uncertainty. That’s faith. Why did he do that? Because he believed God; he believed that God would fulfill His good promise and that God would take him to a good place and that God would bless his life. He believed that. And that’s all God asks.

Verse 9, his faith was patient: “By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.” To God, Abraham was the chosen man. And yet Abraham never really saw the fulfillment. He never really saw the land unfold as the possession of God’s people. He never owned any land, he spent his life as a tent dweller wandering around just like Isaac and Jacob did. He never saw the fulfillment of his dreams. It was to be out of his loins that another generation would see that. He never saw that. And yet always as he went he believed. And verse 10 says, “He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” He always had his eyes on God. He always had that heavenly perspective, that heavenly vision. And so his faith was a patient faith.

And then came a great testing in verse 17: Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. God finally gave him the son, Isaac, and God said I want you to slaughter him on the altar. And he did. He took him up, put him on the altar, ready to drop the knife. Why did he do that? It’s very clear. “By faith Abraham, when he was tested,” verse 17, “offered up Isaac and he that had received the promise offered up his only begotten son of whom it was said, ‘In Isaac shall all thy seed be called.’” In other words, he would kill the very fulfillment of the promise. Why? Accounting that God was able to raise him up even from the dead. He said, look, if God says I’m going to have a nation out of this child and God says kill him, then I kill him in confidence that God will raise him up. Now that’s faith, great faith. Had Abraham ever seen a resurrection? Never. Oh, what faith. Go to a land you’ve never seen, have a child you cannot have, kill the child who is the hope of all the promise. And he would have done it all, so great was his faith. He is a model of faith.

Now as we draw to a conclusion, go back to Romans 4 and see what this means to you now. Verse 3, what does the scripture say in Genesis 15:6? Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness. How did he gain righteousness? How was he made right with God? How did he become acceptable with God? Through his perfection? No, through his faith. Because he believed God enough to leave his country, because he believed God enough to trust God to give him a son, because he believed God enough to kill that son if God said so and believe that he would raise him from the dead, great faith.

MacArthur discusses the Greek word for ‘counted’, ‘reckoned’, ‘imputed’:

The word “counted,” very important word. It’s the word logizomai. That word is used eleven times in this section. In fact, I think it’s eleven times right in this immediate section. And what does it mean, logizomai? It means “to credit to one’s account, to put to one’s account, to reckon, to impute to one.” And what it’s saying is that because he believed, God imputed to him, put to his account, a righteousness which Abraham on his own did not possess. That’s the whole point. And, beloved, that’s what salvation is all about. When you believe God, when you believe the Word of God and the promise of God then God takes a righteousness you don’t have and puts it to your account. That’s a legal act. Righteousness is put on your account. It’s like being a beggar, a pauper, and having nothing, and having the world’s richest person put in the bank a fortune to your account; it belongs to you. We are credited with a righteousness we do not have and how? By faith; this is the heart, listen, of all Christian theology. It’s the heart.

Abraham was still a sinner, and Genesis recounts his major sins, however, God imputed righteousness to him for his strong, unyielding faith which manifested itself through obedience to God’s instructions to him.

God gives us believers, Abraham’s descendants in faith, the same free gift through Jesus Christ:

Listen, do you know why God can credit righteousness to your account? Because He credited your sin to Christ’s account. And on the cross Christ paid the price for your sin, which then satisfies God’s requirement and allows God to credit His righteousness to your account and mine. That’s the heart of the Christian faith. God never ever could have credited righteousness to Abraham’s account had not Abraham’s sin been paid for. And it was on the cross of Jesus Christ, though Christ had not yet come into the world. That’s no more difficult to understand than that our sin should be credited to Christ who came 2,000 years ago. He is the apex of redemptive history.

In his next sermon, MacArthur gives us more detail on Abraham’s unwavering obedience to God, initially leaving the thriving Mesopotamian city of Ur for a life in tents:

It was a busy city. As best archaeologists can identify, the city probably had about 300 thousand inhabitants. It was a commercial city, a very important city located in Mesopotamia which is on the Persian Gulf, in those days located in the area of two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Archaeologists, in dealing with this ancient site, have told us that it probably located itself in about four square miles of area. They also have determined that the people, for the most part, were highly educated, very proficient in math, proficient in astronomy, adept at weaving and engraving, and commonly wrote. That is they had reduced their language to writing even in the time of Abraham by the twelfth chapter of Genesis, and in writing they put their writing down on clay tablets.

They worshiped multiplied gods. They were what we call “polytheistic.” They had many gods, the foremost of which was a god by the name of Nanna, N-a-n-n-a, who was the moon god. Now Abraham’s father’s name was Terah, T-e-r-a-h, and according to Joshua 24:2 he was an idolatrous man. He worshiped idols. So, Abraham was raised in a pagan environment. He was raised in an important, educated kind of place, a place of some importance, a place where there may have been effective trades as well as splendid agriculture. But he was raised a pagan. He was raised in a family where they worshiped idols.

God came to this man Abraham in the midst of his pagan environment and He called to him to follow a new path. He said to him, “Abraham, I want you to leave everything.” Notice verse 1: “The Lord said to Abram, ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred and from thy father’s house unto a land that I will show thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee and in thee (or through thee) shall all families of the earth be blessed.’”

Now, this is a sovereign call. We don’t know any preliminary information about Abraham really, except as chapter 11 verse 27 tells us, he was begotten by Terah. We really don’t know much about him, but God called him. And people have often asked the question why. And the answer is because God is God and He calls whomever He wants. And He called Abraham and if He had called somebody else, we would have asked the same question with the same answer. Now God promised him three things: land, verse 1; seed, verse 2, a nation; blessing, verse 3. A land, a nation, blessing. And God said through him would come the hope of salvation for the world. Through his loins all families of the earth would be blessed. And so today, we who are saved, we who know salvation in Jesus Christ, according to Galatians 3:9 are blessed with Abraham the believer. We have been blessed because the seed came through his loins.

Now what was his response? Verse 4, very matter of fact: “So Abram departed.” He just packed up and left; instantaneous obedience. He responded to the sovereign call of God. By the way, he was about 60 years of age. He was making, or was to make, by God’s call, a complete break with his lifestyle, his career — whatever that might have been — his possessions, his friends, his relatives, his religion. Look at verse 1: Get out of thy country, leave thy kindred, get out of thy father’s house. Now that is a very far-reaching, sweeping kind of directive. And he responded, “as the Lord had spoken unto him.”

Notice at that point Abraham was still Abram. God did not change his name to Abraham until later.

Abram’s departure and subsequent journey was not without its problems initially:

Now, I want you to get the picture. God said, leave your father’s house and leave your kindred and get out of this place and go to a land that I’m going to show you. But he couldn’t shake them. He got stuck with Lot, he got stuck with his father, dragged the whole crew. And they never got past Haran and they stayed there for 15 years. And that was not complete obedience. Fifteen wasted years, in a sense, still in Mesopotamia, still an idolatrous city, for Haran was as idolatrous as was Ur. And instead of making a clean break, he had dragged along his relatives.

But you’ll notice in verse 32 that Terah died at the age of 205 and he died in Haran. And then over in chapter 12 verse 4, Abram at that point decided to leave. It’s almost as if once he got rid of the tremendous power and pressure of his father, he could get on with it; not an uncommon situation, by the way, when the call of God comes and someone is sort of stuck with that pressure and reluctant to be fully obedient. But he began to move. After the death of his father, verse 5, “Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son and all their substance that they had gathered and the souls they had gotten in Haran and they went forth to go to the land of Canaan. Into the land of Canaan they came.” And again, I have to believe that it wasn’t the fullest kind of obedience yet, but it’s getting better. At least he’s now leaving Haran and he’s moving out. He crosses the hot, burning desert to an absolutely unknown place. And I believe at this point his faith is sufficient to be honored by God, verse 6: “Abram passed through the land of the place of Shechem, to the oak of Moreh, and the Canaanite was then in the land, and the Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘Unto thy seed will I give this land.’ And there builded he an altar to the Lord, who appeared unto him.”

Now, here we see for the first time the response of a sovereignly chosen man. He responds by worshiping the true God. It’s almost as if he couldn’t bring himself to do this until he had unloaded his idolatrous father. But he worshiped the true God. Verse 8, “He removed from there to a mountain on the east of Bethel, pitched his tent, having Bethel on the west and Ai on the east, and there he builded an altar unto the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord.” Now here is the man of faith. He has now come to worship the true God. He has jettisoned, if you will, the past idolatry, he is moving ahead and he becomes the model of faith.

He was not perfect. For sure, he was not perfect. For example, the first test he had to face was a famine, and when he faced a famine, instead of seeking help from God, he decided to seek help from the Egyptians. And he got himself in a compromising situation and you remember he had to lie to Pharaoh, didn’t he? At least he thought he did. If he had trusted God to meet his needs in the famine instead of trusting Egypt, which seemed later to be a rather common problem for the Jews, he could have avoided that sin. He also maintained that unequal yoking by dragging along Lot with him and that resulted in dire consequences, the greatest of which is indicated to us in the nineteenth chapter in the turning of Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt.

In chapter 15 we see Abraham experiencing fear. We even see that man, Abraham, that model of faith, committing adultery in a stupid effort to produce the seed that he wasn’t sure God could produce. And going in unto Hagar, his handmaid, and producing from that stupid act of adultery a nation of proud, arrogant enemies of Israel.

But, in spite of his imperfection, he recovered from his lack of faith and his sin and he was a man who believed God. No man is perfect and no man believes God perfectly. But Abraham was a model of believing God even with his imperfection. That’s comforting, isn’t it? … And I guess the amazing epitaph of Abraham comes in Hebrews 11:13 where it says he died in faith never having received the promise. He never saw the fulfillment. He never saw the land, he never saw the nation, and he never saw the blessing. He died. But he died believing that God would keep His word. That’s what faith’s all about. And even the pagans were rather in awe of him. In Genesis 23:6 the pagans said of him, “You are a prince of God.” They could see a quality about him that made him stand out.

… And it tells us in Genesis 23 verse 4 that all his life long he remained a stranger …

He’s a classic illustration of the definition of faith given in Hebrews 11. Faith is basically “the substance of things (What?) hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And he believed, though he never saw.

Now let’s go into Romans chapter 4. This man then becomes the model of faith. He believes what he can’t see. And he dies believing what he’s never seen. And you want to know something? That’s how it is for a Christian. We believe in One whom we have never seen, right? And we believe we’re going to a city whose builder and maker is God, and to the very moment when we breathe our last breath, we are hoping for eternity, that we’ll see that place which we have never seen. We are believing in a salvation which we cannot see, a Savior which we cannot see, a heaven which we cannot see, an eternal blessedness which we cannot see. And so, in that sense, we are the children of Abraham. That is, we carry a faith that is like the faith of Abraham. With all of our human imperfections, as with his, we are saved by God through faith. That’s Paul’s message.

I shall continue this exegesis tomorrow, beginning with verse 4.

May all reading this have a blessed Sunday. Lenten guidance, e.g. fasting, is relaxed on Sundays, when we remember our Lord’s resurrection on the third day. As such, we celebrate and take heart in every Sunday, for it is a ‘little Easter’.

Forbidden Bible Verses — Leviticus 13:47-52

February 23, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 comments

Bible treehuggercomThe three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary from Matthew Henry and John Gill.

Leviticus 13:47-52

47 “When there is a case of leprous disease in a garment, whether a woollen or a linen garment, 48 in warp or woof of linen or wool, or in a skin or in anything made of skin, 49 if the disease is greenish or reddish in the garment, or in the skin or in the warp or the woof or in any article made of skin, it is a case of leprous disease, and it shall be shown to the priest. 50 And the priest shall examine the disease and shut up that which has the disease for seven days. 51 Then he shall examine the disease on the seventh day. If the disease has spread in the garment, in the warp or the woof, or in the skin, whatever be the use of the skin, the disease is a persistent leprous disease; it is unclean. 52 And he shall burn the garment, or the warp or the woof, the wool or the linen, or any article made of skin that is diseased, for it is a persistent leprous disease. It shall be burned in the fire.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Last week’s post concluded God’s commands to Moses and to Aaron concerning skin disorders, specifically leucoderma and baldness and, more generally, how the leper was to be treated, i.e. isolated outside the camp of the Israelites.

Bible scholars agree that this leprosy is different to what we call Hansen’s Disease today. The leprosy of Leviticus — Tzaraath in Hebrew — may display the same physical characteristics but was also considered a spiritual disease, a type of judgement that God inflicted on Israelites with truly sinful hearts.

Today’s post looks at leprous garments or skins. Another section on this topic will follow next week.

God told Moses and Aaron that there could be cases of leprous diseases in a woollen or a linen garment (verse 47).

John Gill‘s commentary discusses the speculation on the matter through the centuries as to how fabric could become infected (emphases mine):

Whether this sort of leprosy proceeded from natural causes, or was extraordinary and miraculous, and came immediately from the hand of God, and was peculiar to the Jews, and unknown to other nations, is a matter of question; the latter is generally asserted by the Hebrew writers, as Maimonides {e}, Abraham Seba {f}, and others {g}; but others are of opinion, and Abarbinel among the Jews, that it might be by the contact or touch of a leprous person. Indeed it must be owned, as a learned man {h} observes, that the shirts and clothes of a leper must be equally infectious, and more so than any other communication with him; and the purulent matter which adheres thereunto must needs infect; such who put on their clothes; for it may be observed, that it will get between the threads of garments, and stick like glue, and fill them up, and by the acrimony of it corrode the texture itself; so that experience shows that it is very difficult to wash such a garment without a rupture, and the stains are not easily got out: and it must be allowed that garments may be scented by diseases, and become infectious, and carry a disease from place to place, as the plague oftentimes is carried in wool, cotton, silk, or any bale goods; but whether all this amounts to the case before us is still a question. Some indeed have endeavoured to account for it by observing, that wool ill scoured, stuffs kept too long, and some particular tapestries, are subject to worms and moths which eat them, and from hence think it credible, that the leprosy in clothes, and in skins here mentioned, was caused by this sort of vermin; to which, stuffs and works, wrought in wool in hot countries, and in times when arts and manufactures were not carried to the height of perfection as now, might probably be more exposed {i}; but this seems not to agree with this leprosy of Moses, which lay not in the garment being eaten, but in the colour and spread of it …

Gill explains why the Lord specified only woollen and linen fabrics:

only wool and linen were defiled by leprosy; Aben Ezra indeed says, that the reason why no mention is made of silk and cotton is because the Scripture speaks of what was found (then in use), as in Exodus 23:5; wherefore, according to him, woollen and linen are put for all other garments; though, he adds, or it may be the leprosy does not happen to anything but wool and linen; however, it is allowed, as Ben Gersom observes, that when the greatest part of the cloth is made of wool or linen, it was defiled by it: the Jewish canon is, if the greatest part is of camels hair, it is not defiled; but if the greatest part is of sheep, it is; and if half to half (or equal) it is defiled; and so flax, and hemp mixed together {l}; the same rule is to be observed concerning them.

This particular type of leprosy could be found in the warp or woof (weft) — vertical and horizontal threads, respectively — of wool or linen as well as in an animal skin or anything made of such a skin (verse 48).

Gill addresses the fabric first, saying that there was a possibility that the threads could become contaminated even before the fabric was woven:

Whether [it be] in the warp, or woof, of linen, or of woollen,…. When these are woven and mixed together, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to judge whether the plague of leprosy was in the one or in the other; one would think it should be unavoidably in both; wherefore Castalio renders the words, whether “in the outer part of it, or in the inner”; in the outside or inside, or what we call the right side or the wrong side of the cloth: but to me it seems that the warp and woof, whether of linen or woollen, are here distinguished not only from garments made of them, but from the cloth itself, of which they are made, and even to be considered before they are wrought together in the loom; and, according to the Jews, when upon the spindle {m} …

Gill then discusses the skins the Israelites used at the time. While the skins might be untouched, the threads joining them might be infected, therefore, rendering everything leprous:

whether in a skin, or anything made of skin; that is, whether in unwrought skin, which is not made up in anything, or in anything that is made of skins, as tents, bottles, &c. but skins of fishes, according to the Jewish traditions, are excepted; for so they say {n}, sea skins, i.e. skins of fishes, are not defiled by plagues (of leprosy); for which the commentators {o} give this reason, that as wool and linen are of things which grow out of the earth, so must the skins be; that is, of such animals as live by grass, that springs out of the earth; but if anything was joined unto them, which grew out of the earth, though but a thread, that received uncleanness, it was defiled.

God told Moses and Aaron that ‘if the disease is greenish or reddish in the garment, or in the skin or in the warp or the woof or in any article made of skin, it is a case of leprous disease, and it shall be shown to the priest’ (verse 49).

Gill describes the green and the red people would have been looking for, specifies that such spots would appear only on undyed fabrics or skins and says it was up to the owner of the item to present it to the priest:

Either of these two colours were signs of leprosy in garments; but it is not agreed whether stronger or weaker colours are designed; the radicals of both these words being doubled, according to some, and particularly Aben Ezra, lessen the sense of them; and so our translators understand it; but, according to Ben Gersom, the signification is increased thereby, and the meaning is, if it be exceeding green or exceeding red; and this is evidently the sense of the Misnah {p}; garments are defiled by green in greens, and by red in reds, that is, by the greenest and reddest; the green, the commentators say {q}, is like that of the wings of peacocks and leaves of palm trees, and the red like crimson or scarlet; and now these garments or skins, in which the green or red spots appeared, must be white, and not coloured or dyed: the canon runs thus {r}; skins and garments dyed are not defiled with plagues (of leprosy); a garment whose warp is dyed, and its woof white, or its woof dyed, and its warp white, all goes according to the sight; that is, according to what colour to the eye most prevails, whether white or dyed:

either in the warp or in the woof, or in anything of the skin; the same held good of these as of a garment, or anything else made of them:

it [is] a plague of leprosy; it has the signs of one, and gives great suspicion that it is one:

and shall be shewed unto the priest; by the person in whose possession it is, that it may be examined and judged of whether it is a leprosy or no.

If the priest determined that the cloth or skin was leprous, he would isolate it for seven days (verse 50).

On the seventh day, the priest was to re-examine the item; if the disease had spread — i.e. the spot(s) became larger — that meant that a persistent leprosy was present and the item was unclean (verse 51).

The KJV reads:

51 And he shall look on the plague on the seventh day: if the plague be spread in the garment, either in the warp, or in the woof, or in a skin, or in any work that is made of skin; the plague is a fretting leprosy; it is unclean. 

Gill tells us that the leprous item was viewed as a curse and sign of corruption, from which one would infer a divine, spiritual judgement upon the owner:

According to the Jewish canon {s}, if the plague was green and spread red, or red and spread green, it was unclean; that is, as Bartenora {t} explains it, if it was red in the size of a bean, and at the end of the week the red had spread itself to green; or if at the beginning it was green like a bean, and at the end of the week had spread itself to the size of a shekel, and the root or spread of it was become red;

the plague [is] a fretting leprosy; according to Jarchi, a sharp and pricking one, like a thorn; which signification the word has in Ezekiel 28:24. Ben Gersom explains it, which brings a curse, corruption, and oldness into the thing in which it is; an old “irritated, exasperated” leprosy, as Bochart {u}, from the use of the word in the Arabic tongue, translates it …

If the item proved to be leprous, the priest burned the item; God repeated that the item ‘shall be burned in the fire’ (verse 52).

Both Gill and Matthew Henry say that having a leprous garment or other article was a source of great spiritual shame.

Gill says:

… it shall be burnt in the fire; which may teach both to hate the garment spotted with the flesh, and to put no trust in and have no dependence on a man’s own righteousness, which is as filthy rags, and both are such as shall be burnt, and the loss of them suffered, even when a man himself is saved, yet so as by fire, 1 Corinthians 3:15.

Henry‘s commentary arrives at the same verdict:

The learned confess that it was a sign and a miracle in Israel, an extraordinary punishment inflicted by the divine power, as a token of great displeasure against a person or family.

Next week we look at God’s commands for the priest with regard to re-examining leprous garments.

Next time — Leviticus 13:53-59

First Sunday in Lent — Year A — exegesis on the Epistle, Romans 5:12-19, part 2

February 22, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

The First Sunday in Lent is February 22, 2026.

Readings for Year A can be found here.

The exegesis for the Gospel reading, Matthew 4:1-11, the temptation of Christ, can be found here.

The Epistle is as follows (emphases mine):

Romans 5:12-19

5:12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned–

5:13 sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law.

5:14 Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.

5:15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.

5:16 And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification.

5:17 If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

5:18 Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.

5:19 For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

In this passage, Paul discusses the two Adams: the one of Original Sin and Christ, the second Adam, He who frees us from sin.

Part 1 of this exegesis examines death and explains why we all die, even infants.

We are now looking at the divine greatness that the second Adam, Christ, brings in redeeming mankind. His free gift to us far outweighs the sinful nature we inherited from the first Adam.

Paul says that Christ’s free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s — the first Adam’s — sin; the judgement following Adam’s trespass brought condemnation (to physical death), but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification (verse 16).

Matthew Henry‘s commentary says:

It is but the guilt of one single offence of Adam’s that is laid to our charge: The judgment was ex henos eis katakrima, by one, that is, by one offence, v. 16, 17, Margin. But from Jesus Christ we receive and derive an abundance of grace, and of the gift of righteousness. The stream of grace and righteousness is deeper and broader than the stream of guilt; for this righteousness does not only take away the guilt of that one offence, but of many other offences, even of all. God in Christ forgives all trespasses, Col 2 13.

In his second of two sermons from 1982 on these verses, John MacArthur explains the magnitude of Christ’s free gift to mankind as being much more effective (verse 15) than Adam’s Original Sin could be in its condemnation to physical death. It is also to a greater extent (verse 16):

… God’s grace, which is an inherent attribute of His nature, is expressed to men in a gift of His grace, which comes to them by Jesus Christ. And so by one man, Jesus Christ, comes the gift of salvation, justification, righteousness, which is expressive of God’s attribute of grace. It’s the free gift of God’s marvelous grace. And the Bible talks so much about the grace of God; how thankful are we for that unending grace.

So the grace of God, then, now think of it, comes to us and does more than just repair what Adam lost. It doesn’t just take man back to where he was before the Fall. It takes him through innocence to eternal righteousness. And so it says it has abounded [verse 15]. It’s more than just cancelling sin. I mean, when you were saved it wasn’t just a transaction where you came to Christ and He said, well, it’s okay, you’re sins are gone. I erase the Adamic problem. Ultimately, of course, still you’re having a problem with it, but when you get out of this body we’ll just erase the Adamic problem and that will be it, you won’t have to bother with sin. No, it’s more than that. It’s not only the ending of the Adamic problem. In this life we get power over our sins. But when we’re glorified then we will see the release from all the sin principle. But it will be more than that, won’t it? It will be an opening up of the eternal bliss and all the riches of eternity which God will bestow upon us. So the effectiveness of Christ’s gift is greater than Adam’s offense …

There’s a second comparison, not only in effectiveness but in extent. This is marvelous. And Paul’s thinking here is so precise. It’s a comparison of extent. It shows the extent of Adam’s condemnation and the extent of Christ’s justification. Verse 16, follow it, “And not as it was by one that sinned so is the gift.” And that’s just saying the same thing he said in the beginning of verse 15. Again he’s saying the one sinning and the one offering the gift are not the same. I mean, the analogy is only an analogy of one-act, one-man again, but the act of each was so different that the one who sinned and the gift must be seen as distinct. So Adam and Christ are analogous at one point and at no other points. It is not like Adam’s sin that is the gift, that’s what he’s saying. The gift of Christ is not like the offense of Adam, not only regarding its effectiveness but also regarding its extent …

… look at the end of verse 16. The free gift is not of one sin but of what? Many transgressions unto justification. So the extent is different; one sin with Adam and many sins or transgressions in relation to Christ.

Now let me help you to follow the thought. It’s simply saying by one… And somebody says, well what is it? One man there in verse 16 or one sin? It’s one man’s sin, so it’s a moot point. It’s by one man’s sin, that man being Adam. Verse 15 stresses the one man, verse 16 stresses the one trespass, so it doesn’t matter which way you see this. But it’s the sin of one man, one sin of one man, brought about judgment, brought about condemnation on everybody. But the free gift is of many offenses. Now this is a marvelous thought and I want you to get it.

What do we mean by many offenses? Listen. The judgment on the whole human race proceeded from one sin. But justification through the free gift of grace proceeds from many transgressions. John Murray writes, “The one trespass demanded nothing less than the condemnation of all. But the free gift unto justification is of such a character that it must take the many trespasses into its reckoning. It could not be the free gift of justification unless it blotted out the many trespasses. Consequently the free gift is conditioned as to its nature and effect by the many trespasses, just as the judgment was conditioned as to its nature and effect by the one trespass.”

Now I know this taxes the limits of your mind. But what he is simply saying is Adam’s one sin damned everybody, but Christ in justification can forgive all sins, so how much greater than is Christ’s one act than Adam’s? Adam’s being attached to one sin, Christ’s being attached to all sin. And so we say the evil from which Christ saves us is far greater than that which Adam initiated. Christ has done more than remove the curse. He gives justification from an innumerable load of sins.

Paul says that if death exercised dominion because of Adam’s Original Sin, ‘much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ’ (verse 17).

Henry tells us:

By Adam’s sin death reigned; but by Christ’s righteousness there is not only a period put to the reign of death, but believers are preferred to reign of life, v. 17. In and by the righteousness of Christ we have not only a charter of pardon, but a patent of honour, are not only freed from our chains, but, like Joseph, advanced to the second chariot, and made unto our God kings and priests—not only pardoned, but preferred. See this observed, Rev 1 5, 6; 5 9, 10. We are by Christ and his righteousness entitled to, and instated in, more and greater privileges than we lost by the offence of Adam. The plaster is wider than the wound, and more healing than the wound is killing.

Having covered effectiveness in verse 15 and extent in verse 16, we now come to efficacy, or capacity to get the correct result, in verse 17. MacArthur says:

Thirdly, there’s a difference in efficacy, in efficacy. That means the capacity for producing a desired result. You probably know that word, but that’s what it means, the ability to produce a result. We could say there’s a difference in results. There was a difference in the product. And that’s in verse 17, “For if by one man’s offense death reigned by one, much more they who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.” So Adam brought the reign of death and Christ brings what? The reign of life; so there’s a big difference in the efficacy. That is the capacity to produce a desired result.

You see, Adam sinned a sin but he had no idea of the result he was producing, did he? …

But on the other hand, much — you see it again in verse 17, the middle of the verse — much more again. There’s that much more. Much more they who receive abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one Jesus Christ. Here’s Adam’s one sin, it does not produce the desired results. Here’s Christ’s one righteous act and it produces not only the desired results, but fully reigning in life. Death reigns in the first half of the analogy but we reign in life in the second half. It’s a thrilling concept. And the idea is that grace overpowers the consequence of sin. The free gift of righteousness, given the believer by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, overpowers the reign of death. Sin in Adam set us against God. And death reigns. Righteousness in Christ makes us right with God and we reign.

Now what does it mean there at the end of verse 17 to reign in life through Jesus Christ? What does it mean to reign in life? Well, first of all it means to be alive. Jesus said, “I am come that you might have (What?) life.” What kind of life? Spiritual life, right? Eternal life. And that you might have more abundant life, spiritual, abundant, glorious life. And it says that we not only have life but we reign in life. We are kings and priests, says Peter, doesn’t he? We reign in life. What a great thought. We don’t just get life, and again you come to that contrast. I mean, Adam’s is a one dimensional thing. He sins: death. But Christ is a multi-dimensional. He grants us justification by faith in Him. And we don’t just get life we reign in life. I mean, we get life plus. It isn’t that life reigns over us. We reign in life as kings inheriting all of God’s possessions, a marvelous thought. And that life goes on forever. What a glorious truth. In fact, Jesus said, I’ll give them eternal life, John 10, and they shall never what? Perish. “Neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand. My Father which gave them Me is greater than all and none is able to pluck them out of My Father’s hand.” And in Colossians, Paul says, “Your life is hid with Christ in God.” And here we are reigning in that new life in Christ.

What is the practical use of this? Well, let’s think about it. First of all, it tells us that God is a transformer of life. Isn’t that wonderful? Aren’t you glad to know that? Aren’t you glad to know that in Jesus Christ you can become something different than you were? Aren’t you glad that He transforms your life? That salvation is a total change? …

And not only do we get life, but we reign in life. What do you mean we reign? Well, in that life we have authority and we have power. Over what? Over sin and darkness. You say, “You mean as a believer I do?” That’s right. If you’re a Christian you reign in the sense that you have power over sin. That’s right. That’s why Paul in Romans 6 is going to tell us this, and this is a sneak preview, verse 17, “God be thanked that whereas you were the slaves of sin, you have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered to you, being then made free from sin you became the servants of righteousness.” In other words, you’re not a victim of sin anymore. You reign in life. You have power and authority by God’s power and His Spirit over those things and so you are called to live a holy triumphant righteous life. You’re not a victim, you’re a victor. We are to reign in life. I don’t think Christians understand what that means. We’re kings and priests. We have authority over those things. How great is our salvation.

Paul begins his conclusion.

He says that, given the above, it follows — ‘Therefore’ — that just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all (verse 18).

This brings MacArthur to his fourth element, the essence. He cautions us against interpreting this as universalism, based on Romans and in 1 Corinthians 15:

A fourth element of the analogy is the essence.  Not only is the effectiveness contrasted and the extent and the efficacy or result, but the essence.  And here we get down to the heart of the matter.  Verse 18 leads us into verse 19, which is the key to this thought. Verse 18 by the way sums up everything that’s been said, and most Bible teachers would feel that verse 18 picks up at the end of verse 12, and 13 through 17 are a parenthesis explaining the analogy in verse 12.  So that if you were to read verse 12, “Wherefore as by one man’s sin entered into the world and death by sin and so death passed upon all men for all have sinned” then jump to 18 “therefore as by the offense of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.”

In other words, it seems that verses 13 to 17 are qualifying explanations of the analogy given in verse 12, which is only really the first half of the analogy, that is that one man’s sin…by one man sin came, and then the analogy comes full circle in verse 18. And as that happened, the offense of one bringing men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one, that is the Lord Jesus Christ, the free gift comes to all men, bringing them justification of life.

And so we see then this is a sort of pulling together. Through one man, Adam, comes sin, condemnation and death. Through one man, Christ, comes righteousness, justification and life.  And you notice, by the way, here he uses the word “all men” are condemned and then he uses “all men” are brought to justification of life.  And again it’s a literary “all.”  The “all men” means all that are in Adam.  The “all men” means all that are in Christ.  The “all” is consistent with that to which it’s related, just like the “many” was earlier, as we saw in verse 15.  The “many” who are in Adam experienced the result of Adam’s act.  The “many” who are in Christ experience the result of Christ’s act.  Here they’re called “all.”  It is the “all” who are in Adam and the “all” who are in Christ.  Now some people have used verse 18 to try to teach universal salvation, that everybody ultimately, all men, are going to be justified.  But the second clause of verse 18 is restrictive.  It is restricted to those to whom it refers.  And the “all men” who are brought to justification of life are the “all” affected by the act of Christ.  And the only ones affected by the act of Christ are those who believe in Him.  He’s made that clear in chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5.  So we don’t want Paul to teach salvation through faith in Jesus Christ in chapter 3, 4 and the first half of 5, and then all of a sudden unload a doctrine of universalism here in verse 18 of chapter 5.  What he is simply saying is that all in Adam experience Adam’s act and all in Christ experience Christ’s act.

Just let me see if I can’t support that. I just thought of the verse that comes after 1 Corinthians 15:22 would help maybe.  First Corinthians 15:22 I have quoted, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”  And there you have that same use of “all.”  As in Adam all died. Which all?  The all that were in Adam.  Even in Christ shall all be made alive.  Which all? The all that were in Christ.  But verse 23, I think, really sets it out.  “But every man in his own order.  Christ the first fruits; afterward they that are Christ’s.”  Now there’s the definition of the “all” of verse 22.  The “all” of verse 22 is defined in verse 23 as they that are Christ’s.  So we don’t see any universalism.

Paul then contrasts Adam’s disobedience with Christ’s obedience unto death.

Just as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous (verse 19).

Henry points out the emphasis that Paul has put upon this contrast between the two Adams, the earthly one and the heavenly one:

… by the righteousness and obedience of one (and that one is Jesus Christ, the second Adam), are many made righteous, and so the free gift comes upon all. It is observable how the apostle inculcates this truth, and repeats it again and again, as a truth of very great consequence. Here observe, 1. The nature of Christ’s righteousness, how it is brought in; it is by his obedience. The disobedience of the first Adam ruined us, the obedience of the second Adam saves us,—his obedience to the law of mediation, which was that he should fulfil all righteousness, and then make his soul an offering for sin. By his obedience to this law he wrought out a righteousness for us, satisfied God’s justice, and so made way for us into his favour. 2. The fruit of it. (1.) There is a free gift come upon all men, that is, it is made and offered promiscuously to all. The salvation wrought is a common salvation; the proposals are general, the tender free; whoever will may come, and take of these waters of life. This free gift is to all believers, upon their believing, unto justification of life. It is not only a justification that frees from death, but that entitles to life. (2.) Many shall be made righteous—many compared with one, or as many as belong to the election of grace, which, though but a few as they are scattered up and down in the world, yet will be a great many when they come all together. Katastathesontai—they shall be constituted righteous, as by letters patent. Now the antithesis between these two, our ruin by Adam and our recovery by Christ, is obvious enough.

Like Henry, MacArthur also tells us that verse 19 explains the difference in the essence of verse 18 — disobedience versus obedience:

So after summarizing in verse 18 he comes to 19 and this is where we see the essence which is different.  And this gets us to the very essential nature of the act of Adam and Christ.  “For as by one man’s (What?) disobedience.”  So the essence of Adam’s act or its essential nature was what?  What was it, an act of what?  Disobedience.  And many were what?  Made sinners.  “So by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.”  What is the essential nature of Christ’s act?  If Adam’s was disobedience, Christ’s is obedience.  Very important.

Adam’s sin is labeled as to its essential nature.  It was an act of disobedience.  God said don’t eat, he ate.  Disobedience.  And what happened?  This is really very important theologically.  “Many through that act,” and the many again are the many who were in Adam, and you’re back to that same use of “many” and “all” for the sake of the analogy.  “The many in Adam were made sinners.” That’s a very strong term by the way. It means a very strong identification. They were constituted sinners. Solidarity in sin, sinnership, if you don’t mind me coining a word, became ours through Adam’s disobedience.  And as a result of that, Ephesians 2 says that all men are the children of disobedience.  We’re all children of disobedience.  We’ve been born into a disobedient race.

And then the contrast, “Through the obedience of one.” That’s Christ.  He said so many times, “I do only that which the Father tells me to do.”  “He was in all points tempted like as we are yet without sin.”  And I love what Philippians 2 says, “He became obedient to death, even the death of the cross.” He was obedient to death.  He was obedient in life to death.  He was always obedient.  And I think you have here this idea of obedience tying it in with Paul’s later statement in Philippians 2. The obedience of which he speaks is the obedience of death.  But His whole life was one act of obedience, wasn’t it?  One uninterrupted act of obedience culminating in the cross. And by it, I love this, many were made righteous. Strong word.  We were constituted righteous.

At this point, it is worth noting today’s Gospel reading, Matthew 4:1-11, the exegesis for which is here:

Matthew 4:1-11

4:1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

4:2 He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.

4:3 The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

4:4 But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

4:5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple,

4:6 saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”

4:7 Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

4:8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor;

4:9 and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”

4:10 Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

4:11 Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

As sin is so rarely mentioned in church these days, many Christians do not realise how much God hates sin. Those who have been following my Forbidden Bible Verses on the Old Testament will have read that God demanded animal sacrifices for sin. Those could only ever partially cover the Israelites’ transgressions. Furthermore, because they were such imperfect sacrifices, the Israelites had to offer those sacrifices repeatedly. Yet, it was God’s way of preparing His people for the Messiah, Christ Jesus. It was only with Christ’s death on the cross — the ultimate and only satisfactory blood sacrifice — that the sins of the whole world were and are forgiven.

MacArthur says this about God’s view of sin and His love of the sinner:

Somebody might think it’s like meting out the gas chamber for someone who jaywalked. But that’s because they don’t understand the holiness of God.

Every member of the human race that’s died has died because of that one sin. God hates it. He hates it. And any sin, any sin, one sin calls forth His holy instant hatred and judgment. And you want to know something? That not only tells you how much God hates sin, but does it tell you something else about His grace? If He hates sin that much and He can forgive you for all the sins you’ve committed and all the sins I’ve committed, then He is a God whose grace is as great as His anger. Right? Very practical.

By the way, there are no first-degree, second-degree, or third-degree sins. Sin is sin. And sin, one sin, has potentiality beyond the power of human calculation. And I submit to you that we need God’s view of sin, don’t we? Because it will only be when we get God’s view of sin that we’ll understand how magnanimous is God’s what? His grace.

Now would you take it a step further? … You look at the cross of Jesus Christ and you see Him dying on the cross. And will you remember to yourself that God hates sin so much so that one sin damned the whole human race, and He hates that sin so much and yet He takes all the sins of all the human race and He puts them on Himself and He bears in His body our sins? And does that tell you a little about His love? And He offers forgiveness. Oh, marvelous, incomprehensible wonder. And so says Paul, one sin by Adam damned the race but God gathered up many trespasses and in a gracious act bore them all unto justification in order, in other words, in order that men might be made right with God.

Listen, the only thing that is more powerful in the heart of God than His hatred of sin is His love of the sinner. And so, He went to those extremes in order to provide salvation for us, who are so utterly unworthy.

May everyone reading this have a good week ahead, keeping in mind obedience to God and faith in Christ Jesus, our only Mediator and Advocate.

First Sunday in Lent — Year A — exegesis on the Epistle, Romans 5:12-19, part 1

February 21, 2026 in Catholic, Protestant | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 comment

The First Sunday in Lent is February 22, 2026.

Readings for Year A can be found here.

The exegesis for the Gospel reading, Matthew 4:1-11, the temptation of Christ, can be found here.

The Epistle is as follows (emphases mine):

Romans 5:12-19

5:12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned–

5:13 sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law.

5:14 Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.

5:15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.

5:16 And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification.

5:17 If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

5:18 Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.

5:19 For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

In these verses, Paul discusses the two Adams. Some might have trouble with the concept that Jesus is the second Adam, particularly since the first Adam conferred Original Sin upon the whole of the human race.

Even more difficult is the notion that Adam was a type of Christ. Perhaps it is best to understand that in an antithetical sense. Adam’s eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge affected all humans since.

However, Paul posits that Christ as the second Adam is more powerful than the first sinful Adam in that He redeemed — rescued — us from the sin that the first Adam tainted us with and brings us to the promise — the guarantee — of eternal life to all that believe in Him.

The First Reading, or Lesson, for this Sunday is about Original Sin:

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

2:15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;

2:17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

3:2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;

3:3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”

3:4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die;

3:5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

3:6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

3:7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

See how wily Satan — appearing as the serpent — is in manipulating human frailty? We are all tempted in this mortal life. Consequently, everyone who matures into a sentient being sins in one way or another.

Matthew Henry‘s commentary introduces today’s verses from Romans 5:

The parallel that the apostle runs between the communication of sin and death by the first Adam and of righteousness and life by the second Adam ( v. 12, to the end), which not only illustrates the truth he is discoursing of, but tends very much to the commending of the love of God and the comforting of the hearts of true believers, in showing a correspondence between our fall and our recovery, and not only a like, but a much greater power in the second Adam to make us happy, than there was in the first to make us miserable.

We wonder why we all die. It is particularly tragic in the case of infants who live for only a few days. However terrible this is, it is because we all harbour a sinful nature, even a newborn who has never sinned, more about which below.

In one of his two sermons from 1982 on these verses, John MacArthur says:

Death reigns.

Now the question that comes to mind is why? How is it that death reigns in the world? Why is it that everyone must die, whether at the end of a long life or at the beginning? Whether dying in the 90s or dying in the first moments after birth, and all in between? Why is it? How did death come to be the reigning monarch of the world?

The answer is in our passage. And we’re going to see it, particularly in verses 12 through 14 … We’ll get the answer to this question. And I want to warn you at the very beginning that you’re going to have to concentrate and think with me because this is a very, very carefully detailed argument by Paul, and it’s one that plunges us deep into mysteries which we will never be able to understand until some day we get to heaven. But we want to do our best to grasp them.

Now let me confess to you at the very beginning that the intention of the passage is not primarily to teach why we all die. That just comes along with the rest of the things that he’s teaching. The major lesson that he wants to teach here is that — now listen to it, this is the message of chapter 5 verse 12 to 21 — he wants to teach that one man’s deed can affect many. That’s the primary principle. Because, you see, he has just described in chapter 1, 2 and the first half of chapter 3, he has described the awful lostness and sin of man. Then beginning in the second half of chapter 3 and in chapter 4 and in the first half of chapter 5, he has told us how Christ has reversed man’s lostness. Christ has justified by His death on the cross all who come to Him in faith …

Through Jesus Christ all men can be reconciled to God just as through Adam all men were alienated from God. That’s his whole point in the text …

Now let me say something else by way of footnote. The analogy is an antithetical analogy. It is an analogy of opposites, not an analogy of likes. In other words, it is that Adam is analogous to Christ only in the sense that one man could affect so many. Everything else about the analogy is an opposite. In Adam you have sin and condemnation and death. In Christ you have obedience, righteousness and life, so that the factors of the analogy are absolutely antithetical or opposite. The only analogous point comes in the one man affecting so many …

If He is the second Adam, if He is as the Bible says the last Adam, then the first Adam has to be a real Adam.

It is helpful to read Romans 5:9-11 to increase our understanding of today’s verses:

9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11 Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Paul continues that line of thought — ‘Therefore’ — by saying that, just as sin came into the world through one man (the first Adam), and death came through sin, consequently, death spread to all because all have sinned (verse 12).

Henry gives us this analysis:

By one man sin entered. We see the world under a deluge of sin and death, full of iniquities and full of calamities. Now, it is worth while to enquire what is the spring that feeds it, and you will find it to be the general corruption of nature; and at what gap it entered, and you will find it to have been Adam’s first sin. It was by one man, and he the first man (for if any had been before him they would have been free), that one man from whom, as from the root, we all spring. [1.] By him sin entered. When God pronounced all very good (Gen 1 31) there was no sin in the world; it was when Adam ate forbidden fruit that sin made its entry. Sin had before entered into the world of angels, when many of them revolted from their allegiance and left their first estate; but it never entered into the world of mankind till Adam sinned. Then it entered as an enemy, to kill and destroy, as a thief, to rob and despoil; and a dismal entry it was. Then entered the guilt of Adam’s sin imputed to posterity, and a general corruption and depravedness of nature. Eph ho—for that (so we read it), rather in whom, all have sinned. Sin entered into the world by Adam, for in him we all sinned. As, 1 Cor 15 22, in Adam all die; so here, in him all have sinned; for it is agreeable to the law of all nations that the acts of a public person be accounted theirs whom they represent; and what a whole body does every member of the same body may be said to do. Now Adam acted thus as a public person, by the sovereign ordination and appointment of God, and yet that founded upon a natural necessity; for God, as the author of nature, had made this the law of nature, that man should beget in his own likeness, and so the other creatures. In Adam therefore, as in a common receptacle, the whole nature of man was reposited, from him to flow down in a channel to his posterity; for all mankind are made of one blood (Acts 17 26), so that according as this nature proves through his standing or falling, before he puts it out of his hands, accordingly it is propagated from him. Adam therefore sinning and falling, the nature became guilty and corrupt, and is so derived. Thus in him all have sinned. [2.] Death by sin, for death is the wages of sin. Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death. When sin came, of course death came with it. Death is here put for all that misery which is the due desert of sin, temporal, spiritual, eternal death. If Adam had not sinned, he had not died; the threatening was, In the day thou eatest thou shall surely die, Gen 2 17. [3.] So death passed, that is, a sentence of death was passed, as upon a criminal, dielthen—passed through all men, as an infectious disease passes through a town, so that none escape it. It is the universal fate, without exception: death passes upon all. There are common calamities incident to human life which do abundantly prove this.

MacArthur points out that man’s principal weakness is the desire to be like God:

Now the first point: Sin entered the world through one man. That’s what it says in verse 12, “As by one man sin entered into the world.” Now note that carefully. It does not say that Adam originated sin. Sin had already originated prior to Adam. For the Bible says the devil sinneth from the beginning. Now I don’t know what beginning that was, it was certainly the beginning of his sin. But it predates Adam. So Adam didn’t originate sin, he learned it from the one who originated it, the devil. He merely introduced it into the human realm. That’s why it says as by one man sin entered not into existence, but into the cosmos, into the human system, into mankind. And Adam was acting as an introductory point. He was acting as an agent for Satan. Satan made the product; Adam just introduced it into the marketplace …

Now listen. Let me give you a perspective. God only gave Adam one command, just one. And that is the only thing that kept Adam in a point of submission to God. I mean, that’s the only thing that differentiated between Adam and God. I mean, if there were no commands and no prohibitions, then Adam would have had the same right to rule as God had. But by giving him just one prohibition, He put him at that one point under Him, didn’t He? And He said you’re man and I’m God. And I’m only going to give you one little thing to show that it’s so.

But there’s something about man that can’t stand to be ruled, even at that one small point. And he wants to be like God and that was the temptation, wasn’t it? Satan knew that one well, by the way, because that’s why he fell. He said, “I will exalt myself, I will be like the Most High God.” That’s always where man is, competing to be like God. And so Satan, who wanted to be like God, came and tempted Eve to want to be like God and Adam to want to be like God and to not be under anything, not even that one prohibition that was the only thing that separated Adam, as it were, from God, or made him distinct from God in terms of authority and dominion. And so, at the core of Adam’s sin was selfishness, self. Self is at the core of sin always, as it was with Lucifer when he fell …

Now would you notice it says in verse 12 that by one man sin entered the world, not sins. It’s not talking about acts, it’s talking about the nature, it’s talking about character, not deeds. When Adam sinned, the sin principle, the corrupt decaying principle of sin entered into the human stream …

So Paul presents Adam acting as mankind. That is, by the way, what his name means, mankind. He is the solid mass of humanity …

So, principle number one, sin entered the world through one man.  Principle number two … death entered the world through sin. “In the day you eat you shall surely (What?) die.”  So when the corrupting principle came, so did its penal consequence.  When the corrupting principle entered into the human stream, so did the penalty for that corrupting principle.  Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.”  Ezekiel 18:4 says, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.”  The wages of sin is death, the soul that sins, it shall die.  Genesis 2:17 says, you eat, you die.  So death is not — now listen to me, death is not — natural to the constitution of man as created in the image of God.  God did not create a man who would die.  That came as a penal act, a penalty, a consequent punishment to sin.

We were never made for death.  Listen to me now.  That is why hell was never made for us.  It was made for the devil and his angels, not for us.  That was never to be our place.  But when we sinned in Adam and the evil was passed on through all the generations, along with that evil came its penal consequence, death.

If Adam hadn’t sinned, people say, what would have happened?  Well, he would have been taken to heaven without ever dying.  And the norm would have been Enoch and Elijah; just take a walk one day and walk to heaven, just jump in a chariot of fire and blast off.  That would have been the norm.  Death came as the penalty for sin.  Death then is the unfailing fruit of the poison that entered Adam’s heart. And solidarity and guilt involve solidarity and penalty.  Sin and death will never be separated.  And that’s why Hebrews 9:27 says, “It is appointed unto men once to die.”  Adam died, so everybody who comes out of Adam’s loins is going to die.  The sin principle, its penal consequence is there …

And so Adam sinned and he wasn’t even tricked.  First Timothy 2:14 says he wasn’t even deceived. He just flat out sinned, willfully, deliberately, in full consciousness of what he was doing. In a perfect realization of the solemn consequences he deliberately chose to sin. And when he did, he brought death upon himself and he passed it on to everybody else because we all sinned in his loins, as he represented all of human history.

MacArthur says this of the tragic instances where infants die:

Death comes not because you commit sins, but because you bear in you a sin principle, a corrupt nature. How do we know that? Well, what about when a little baby dies? What about a baby that’s two hours old or three hours old or three days or four weeks or six months? Have they committed overt acts of sin? Are they guilty of unbelief and rejection of Jesus Christ? Lying, cheating, stealing? No, no, no. But they die, don’t they? Why do they die? Because constitutionally they sinned in the loins of Adam and they inherited that sin principle and with it the penalty as well. And that’s why death is in the world, because we’re born to die. We have inherited a principle, a disposition, a state of existence. We like to call it, in theology, depravity, total depravity.

On this topic, Henry says:

It is a great proof of original sin that little children, who were never guilty of any actual transgression, are yet liable to very terrible diseases, casualties, and deaths, which could by no means be reconciled with the justice and righteousness of God if they were not chargeable with guilt.

MacArthur says that there are three types of death that mankind experiences:

… by one man’s act we have been made sinners. We didn’t have a choice, we just came into the world and that’s the way we were. And so death reigns over sin. Where sin reigns, death reigns.

Now what kind of death is it? And I’ll give you a little thanatology here. First, spiritual death. When Adam sinned did he die on the spot physically? Did he die eternally? No. He just died spiritually. What does that mean? Separation. Death is separation. Physical death is separation from the living. Spiritual death is separation from the living God. Eternal death is eternal separation from the living God and the living who are living in the presence of the living God.

So there are three kinds of death. First, a spiritual death and that’s separation from God. Paul talks about that in Ephesians 2 where he says you are dead in trespasses and sin, you walk according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that works in the children of disobedience. In other words, you are spiritually dead. In Ephesians 4, the key verse in understanding spiritual death might be verse 18, “The understanding is darkened, being alienated from the life of God.” You don’t have any spiritual life. You’re alive to the world, you’re alive to the physical dimension, you’re alive to the things of man, you’re alive to the things of the devil but you’re dead to God, spiritually dead.

The second kind of death is physical death. That’s separation from the living. And that’s inevitable, too. Death is that great enemy of Hebrews chapter 2 who holds every man in fear. It always amazes me that people are mostly afraid of physical death when they mostly ought to be afraid of spiritual death because Jesus said, “Fear not them that destroy the body but fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body (Where?) in hell.” If you want to fear something, don’t fear physical death … If there’s something to fear it isn’t the physical death, it’s the spiritual death. But once we’ve taken care of the spiritual dimension and we’re living in spiritual life, then physical death becomes promotion. Then Paul can say, “For me to live is Christ and to die is (What?) gain.” So there is spiritual death and there is physical death.

And then there’s eternal death, and eternal death simply means the eternal state of both the ones I’ve just mentioned, where you’re separated from the living God and you’re separated from the people who are really living and you’re with those who are eternally dying apart from God forever in hell. You’re under wrath and this is called in Revelation … 21:8, the second death. And so, when Adam sinned, pollution, corruption of a vile nature entered the human stream, and it passed on its influence to every human ever born and we come into the world spiritually dead. We come into the world heading for physical death and if something doesn’t happen to make us spiritually alive, eternal death. That’s how it is.

You say, “Well how did that happen?” It happened from one man. One man did that to the whole human race. You say, “Well, if I would have been there I wouldn’t have done it.” Hindsight. If he looked back five minutes after he did it and had to do it over again, he wouldn’t have done it.

Paul says that sin was in the world before the law (the Ten Commandments, Mosaic law), but sin is not reckoned when there is no law (verse 13).

Paul goes on to say that, regardless, death occurred between Adam and Moses, even to persons whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come (verse 14), a reference to Christ.

Henry explains that even when God’s law was not codified, divine law regarding human behaviour with the penalty of death existed:

Sin was in the world before the law; witness Cain’s murder, the apostasy of the old world, the wickedness of Sodom. His inference hence is, Therefore there was a law; for sin is not imputed where there is no law. Original sin is a want of conformity to, and actual sin is a transgression of, the law of God: therefore all were under some law. His proof of it is, Death reigned from Adam to Moses, v. 14. It is certain that death could not have reigned if sin had not set up the throne for him. This proves that sin was in the world before the law, and original sin, for death reigned over those that had not sinned any actual sin, that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, never sinned in their own persons as Adam did—which is to be understood of infants, that were never guilty of actual sin, and yet died, because Adam’s sin was imputed to them. This reign of death seems especially to refer to those violent and extraordinary judgments which were long before Moses, as the deluge and the destruction of Sodom, which involved infants.

MacArthur gives the reason as being man’s sinful nature from Adam onwards:

… verse 13 says sin can’t be charged to one’s account when there is no law. In other words, how can you be guilty for breaking a rule if there’s no rule? Right? So if you have a period of time from Adam to Moses where there’s no law and death reigns and they’re not dying because they broke a law, then what is it about them that’s causing them to die? It isn’t an act of sin they commit, it is what? The sin nature.

So this period of history from Adam to Moses verifies that men die not because they do acts of sin, but because they bear a sin corrupting principle within them[selves].

Paul’s the indirect mention of Christ at the end of verse 14 is the transition into His being the second Adam, the Redeemer. We see this in the remaining verses.

In his second sermon from 1982 on these verses, MacArthur says that Paul:

gives five contrasts as he presents Christ as the one who brings life as Adam brought death. There are five contrasts that he makes. There is a contrast in the effectiveness of each man’s act. There is a contrast in the extent of each man’s act. There is a contrast in the efficacy or the provision of each man’s act. There is a contrast in the essence of each man’s act. And there is a contrast in the energizing force of each man’s act. Now we’ll move through these words. And, by the way, let me just say to you that there’s a lot of reiteration here. He seems to say things over and again, but the reiteration is not redundancy. It is not redundancy at all. Every time he says it, it has a new nuance. It has a new facet. It is, rather than redundancy, somewhat characteristic of Paul’s tendency toward eloquent fullness. It’s as if he’s examining a truth from every conceivable angle, and the analogy is a marvel of the genius of the Spirit of God who delivered it to Paul.

Paul says that the free gift (grace, salvation from Christ) is not like the trespass (Adam’s Original Sin); for, if many died through the one man’s (Adam’s) trespass, many more surely have ‘the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many’ (verse 15).

Henry elaborates:

First, If guilt and wrath be communicated, much more shall grace and love; for it is agreeable to the idea we have of the divine goodness to suppose that he should be more ready to save upon an imputed righteousness than to condemn upon an imputed guilt: Much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace. God’s goodness is, of all his attributes, in a special manner his glory, and it is that grace that is the root (his favour to us in Christ), and the gift is by grace. We know that God is rather inclined to show mercy; punishing is his strange work. Secondly, If there was so much power and efficacy, as it seems there was, in the sin of a man, who was of the earth, earthy, to condemn us, much more are there power and efficacy in the righteousness and grace of Christ, who is the Lord from heaven, to justify and save us. The one man that saves us is Jesus Christ. Surely Adam could not propagate so strong a poison but Jesus Christ could propagate as strong an antidote, and much stronger.

MacArthur examines the classical Greek:

Now let’s look at the first in the series of contrasts, and that we would call a contrast in effectiveness. And that’s in verse 15. “But not as the offense so also is the free gift, for if through the offense of one many were dead, much more the grace of God and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” Now here’s a contrast in effectiveness, a contrast between Adam’s offense and Christ’s free gift. Notice the beginning of verse 15, what it says. Just to give you the literal translation, the free gift is not like the transgression …

For example, he uses the word offense, paraptma in the Greek. It means fall, a deviation from the path.  You could translate it two ways most commonly and that would be transgression or trespass, cross over the boundary, to deviate from the path.  So what Adam did was a deviation.  It was evil.  It was sinful.  It was against God.  But in terms of Christ it is a free gift.  That is the word charisma, it is a grace gift.  It is therefore good and righteous and pleasing to God.  So the one-man, one-act analogy stands, but it stands in contrast because Adam on the one hand does an evil thing against God, Christ on the other hand does that which is expressive of the mind and heart and will of God.

MacArthur discusses Paul’s use of ‘all’, ‘many’ and ‘much more’:

Through the offense act many are dead, or literally died. Many died, and how many is the many? All men. He uses the word “many” here, by the way, for the sake of his analogy. And we’ll see later he uses the word “all” also for the sake of the analogy and he moves back and forth. He uses “many” here, though “many” means all. And then when he says “many in Christ,” really “many” means many, not all. Later on he’ll say all in Christ because he said all in Adam, and all in Adam means everybody, but all in Christ means many. Got it? But what he’s doing is taking a literary device for the sake of keeping his analogy pure, and sometimes he uses “many,” which is more true of one than the other, and sometimes he uses “all,” which is more true of one than the other. But we understand that because the rest of Scripture will make that clear …

There’s another reason he uses “many,” because I think he really has in mind Isaiah 53:11 where it says the Messiah shall justify many.  And so speaking off that prophetic utterance he takes the many, which is true of Christ’s justifying and abounding unto many, and he applies it to Adam even though the many means all, and frankly all is many.  So we aren’t harmed by that analogy at all.

So the sin of Adam, let’s look back at it now in verse 15. The sin of Adam involved all his posterity.  All here is called many, but it really refers to all men.  All of them were involved in the sin in the loins of Adam, as we saw last week.  They were all guilty in Adam.  They were all ruined in Adam, so that every human being born into the world is born a sinner and he doesn’t even have to commit a deed of sin to have the death sentence in him. That’s why little tiny infants die.  It isn’t that they’ve committed some sin. It is that they bear in them the inheritance of Adam, for they sinned in Adam. Consequently they are born in sin and those in sin have upon them the sentence of death.  And so Adam’s offense brought death.

Now notice the middle of the verse. And here’s the heart of the comparison, the words “much more,” much more.  Now here we have a comparative.  Adam did this but Christ did what? Much more. Adam’s had this effect, Christ had much more.  So we see there was a difference in effectiveness.  Christ’s act had a greater effectiveness. And we’ll see that.  It’s really kind of saying to us, if one thing happened in Adam, much more surely will another happen in Christ. If one thing came from Adam’s sin, much more shall we be guaranteed and assured. If we know that to be true, how much more will we know that one thing done in Christ’s righteousness shall as well have a great and even greater effect.  The evil of Adam brought death.  The free gift of Christ not only freed men from death, it didn’t just return them to the innocency of Adam; it took them out of death beyond the innocency of Adam to the righteousness of Christ.  So it’s much more, you see.

I shall continue this exegesis tomorrow, beginning with verse 16.

May all reading this have a blessed Sunday and a good beginning to Lent in prayer, fasting (where possible) and contemplation.

© Churchmouse and Churchmouse Campanologist, 2009-2026. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Churchmouse and Churchmouse Campanologist with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? If you wish to borrow, 1) please use the link from the post, 2) give credit to Churchmouse and Churchmouse Campanologist, 3) copy only selected paragraphs from the post — not all of it.
PLAGIARISERS will be named and shamed.
First case: June 2-3, 2011 — resolved

Creative Commons License
Churchmouse Campanologist by Churchmouse is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://churchmousec.wordpress.com/.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,537 other subscribers

Archive

Calendar of posts

March 2026
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

http://martinscriblerus.com/

Image
Blogarama.com - Blog Directory
Bloglisting.net - The internets fastest growing blog directory
Powered by WebRing.
This site is a member of WebRing.
To browse visit Here.
Writing For Christ
Powered By Ringsurf
Blogging Episcopalians
Powered By Ringsurf
Free Page Rank Tool
Image

Blog Stats

  • 1,875,340 hits
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started