“The Lord spoke to Moses: ‘Make a bronze basin for washing and a bronze stand for it. Set it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and put water in it. Aaron and his sons must wash their hands and feet from the basin. Whenever they enter the tent of meeting or approach the later to minister by burning a food offering to the Lord, they must wash with water so that they will not die. They must wash their hands and feet so that they will not die; this is to be a permanent statute for them, for Aaron and his descendants throughout their generations.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Confession time: I didn’t usually wash my hands after using a public restroom (or any restroom really) for most of my life. I stopped to do it occasionally, but just occasionally. Then Covid happened. Now I almost always do. What changed? A relentless public relations campaign that drilled the importance of handwashing into the minds of our culture as a way to “stop the spread.” For most of human history handwashing was practiced about as frequently as I did it before Covid, if that much. But Israel’s priests at least were supposed to wash before entering the tabernacle. Let’s talk about why.

Some of the commands God gave the people of Israel that don’t make a lot of sense in terms of ranking as important enough to be a command from God may have had a spiritual purpose, but they were also very practical. Some of the foods God told the people not to eat in the Kosher laws are common sources of foodborne illnesses. By telling the people to stay away from them, even if He attached a spiritual rationale to it, God was eliminating a potential source of illness from their lives. The same thing goes with regular handwashing. No, they didn’t use soap, but something was better than nothing. As much as they had their hands in animal guts on an average day, keeping their hands clean on a regular basis was a really good idea.

That practical consideration, however, only carries us so far in understanding what is going on in this passage. It doesn’t seem like including the line “so that they will not die” twice in the space of two verses would have been necessary for something that was primarily practical in its focus. The repetition of any idea in an Old Testament passage (or a New Testament passage, for that matter) means that it is something we need to talk about. The fact that what is repeated is a warning against death puts a little more emphasis on the matter.

The question we need to answer is this one: Would God have really struck a priest dead for forgetting to stop at the basin on his way into the sanctuary? Would not taking the time to walk all the way over to the basin before walking back to the altar before offering a sacrifice really have resulted in the death penalty from God? The really uncomfortable answer to that question is…maybe?

On the one hand, we don’t have any evidence in the text that anything like this ever happened. Perhaps that’s because the priests were relentless about keeping this particular law. We know that by Jesus’ day the various Jewish religious leaders practiced handwashing ritually in all kinds of different circumstances, so maybe this is one command they just never got wrong. But given how many other commands the people neglected, forgot about, or just plain disobeyed, that doesn’t seem very likely.

On the other hand, we know that when Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, offered “unauthorized fire” before the Lord just after their ordination ceremony in Leviticus 10 (whose description we just went over in chapter 29), he struck them down on the spot by consuming them with fire from the censer they were using. And, lest we think that was just an “Old Testament God” sort of action, He does something similar to Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 when they lied about how much money they were bringing as an offering to the Lord. (I preached about those passages here and here if you are interested in my thoughts on them.) We also see God exercising immediate and deadly judgment like that in a handful of other places throughout the Scriptures.

The truth is that it very well could be that God would have exercised immediate judgment as His occasionally did if the priests forgot to wash. It could also be, though, that this is a death more like what Adam and Eve experienced in the wake of eating the forbidden fruit. Far from how the serpent made it sound like God meant, the couple did not drop dead after taking a bite. What they experienced was in many ways worse. They became separated from God who is the source of life. In this, they experienced a spiritual death.

Spiritual death is no less real than physical death, but we experience it differently. Instead of something physical, there are going to be emotional consequences of it. It being cut off from God, we are losing access to the only source of goodness in the world. We might still enjoy good things that happen to be in the world around us, but we won’t be able to get at the roots of goodness itself any longer. We’ll lose access to our primary reason for hope. Peace – not merely an absence of conflict, but an abiding sense of wholeness and contentment in our lives – will be something that escapes us.

The hard reality about sin which the apostle Paul makes clear in Romans 6:23 is that sin brings death. It may be a spiritual death for a time, but physical death is on the horizon. This is followed eventually by eternal death. It’s not a pretty picture. Well, if we don’t take God seriously, we are a whole lot more likely to sin. If God is no big deal, then living outside the bounds of His character will seem like a small thing. But it isn’t.

God wanted the priests and the people more generally to take Him seriously. He wanted this because He knows who He is and is perfectly comfortable insisting on being treated as He deserves (even though He is remarkably patient with us when we don’t for the most part). He wanted this for them because the more seriously they took Him, the more likely they were to keep His commands which were all for their benefit. When the people took Him seriously He got acknowledged properly and the people experienced the blessings of making this acknowledgement. It was a win-win situation.

One of the ways God sought to help them toward this end was to give commands that directed them to be very conscious of matters of holiness and righteousness when entering into His presence. In making themselves physically clean, this was to be a reminder of the importance of spiritual cleanness. While we can certainly give attention to the outside and forget all about the inside (this was something Jesus called out the Pharisees for doing on multiple occasions), and while being dirty on the outside does not necessarily impact how clean we are on the inside, one can be a reminder for us of the importance of the other.

Today, thanks to Jesus, we don’t have to worry about all the offerings and sacrifices and ritual washings to make ourselves clean before God like the Israelites did. In Jesus we are made clean. When we place our faith in Him, His righteousness, His right standing before God, is imputed to us. We are made holy like He is. Still, though, sin can corrupt and contaminate our lives. It is important for us to stay away from it. We are to flee temptation as Paul said. Jesus talked about physical dismemberment if that would keep us from falling into sin. He was speaking hyperbolically there as He often did, but He used such graphic hyperbole because the point was that significant. If you need guardrails to help keep you away from certain habitual sins, put those in place. Get others to help you put those in place.

Because of Jesus, you can stand clean and pure before God. You only need to receive what has already been made available to you. To put that in terms that might have rung with more familiarity for the ancient Israelites, you have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. With the help of His Spirit, live clean before Him. There’s nothing stopping you but you.