(The view expressed in this blog are my own and should not be taken as inspired in any way.)
Numbers 15:30–36, “But the soul that doeth ought presumptuously, whether he be born in the land, or a stranger, the same reproacheth the LORD; and that soul shall be cut off from among his people. Because he hath despised the word of the LORD, and hath broken his commandment, that soul shall utterly be cut off; his iniquity shall be upon him. And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day. And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation. And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him. And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp. And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.”
It is easy to overlook something that you have to do. We can often be taken up with the busyness of our lives and discover, at the end of the day, that we have done something that we should not have done or not done something that we should have done. However, there are other times when we deliberately do something that we know to be wrong. We may hurt another person when we don’t have to or we may go out of our way to manipulate someone so that we can get our own way. This is called a presumptuous sin. The first time that we sin in this way we have to do it deliberately but then it may become a habit after a while and we just do malicious things because they have become a habit. This doesn’t mean that we are no longer committing a presumptuous sin, it just means that our consciences have become hardened and lost sensitivity (compare 1 Tim 4:2, “Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;”) The Lord knows that this kind of habit can be catching and other people will follow this example and sin presumptuously as well. This is why sins of this kind have to stamped out before the infect the entire group. A specific example was given of this happening. One particular man didn’t rest on the Sabbath as the Law commanded. If nothing was done and the man was allowed to get away with doing that, it wouldn’t be long before everyone was refusing to keep the Law and they would soon slip into the bad habits that characterised the nations that didn’t know God. The Lord would no longer be respected and no one would see that the Lord was good and had something special to offer all the people in the world. In order to make sure this didn’t happen straight away this man was punished according to the Law.
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