Pray the Word with David Platt is a resource from Radical.net.

Numbers chapter 35, verse 28.

For he must remain in his city of refuge until the death of the high priest.

But after the death of the high priest, the manslayer may return to the land of his possession.

So the picture here in Numbers 35 is even if someone accidentally kills someone else,

then they need to stay in this city of refuge, so this area allotted for people who are

guilty of offenses in this way. and they must stay there until the

death of the high priest, which could be a matter of days, or it could be a matter of decades.

Could be a short time, could be a long time. So it caused you to wonder, well, why is it the death

of the high priest? Well, there's one sense in which,

okay, the death of a high priest kind of marked the end of that error and a new high priest

comes in. So there's that picture, but there's probably a symbolic picture here that the priest,

the high priest specifically, has died.

The penalty of death in an even greater sense has been paid among God's people, among the

high priest.

And so when one of God's image bearers is killed even accidentally, then the person responsible

for that and the offense of that is in a sense released when another of God's image bearers,

specifically the high priest, loses his life. Well, this is a picture in the Old

Testament, but we obviously know where this kind of thinking and this theme leads in the bigger

picture of the Bible. So, Jesus, our great high priest, his death, his laying down his life, opens the door for all kinds of

freedom for those who have offended God and others.

Like this is the picture of grace in Jesus that is available to every

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