"The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Command the people of Israel that they put out of the camp everyone who is leprous or has a discharge and everyone who is unclean through contact with the dead. 3 You shall put out both male and female, putting them outside the camp, that they may not defile their camp, in the midst of which I dwell.” 4 And the people of Israel did so, and put them outside the camp; as the Lord said to Moses, so the people of Israel did."
Numbers 5:1-4
In the previous Note, reference was made to the stringency of the enactment about lepers, being an evidence not so much of harshness as of the divine discipline necessary to maintain the image of purity in the corporate life of the people, and we referred to a New Testament parallel in the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. There is a sense, of course, in which discipline is harsh, and that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The truth is, in the case of Ananias and Sapphira, summary judgment had to fall on them at that particular juncture. The young church was newly born, and this evidence of ugly, deadly hypocrisy and double-dealing was a threat to its very life, a virus that would undoubtedly, if it had been left unchecked, have done untold and permanent harm, possibly paralysing the church's witness and forever preventing it from becoming what it finally became in the ancient world. Is it impossible, then, to see the same pattern in the Old Testament, in God's dealings with His people, in His desire to have a pure instrument of His purposes, especially since having a pure instrument would in the end lead, not to the exclusion of the lepers, but their cleansing and blessing? For this disciplinary exclusion was a means to an end, the end being seen in its fulness in the ministry of Christ and the word of the gospel. In Acts 5, a new accession of divine power followed the divine discipline - this is the ultimate justification for striving for a church purged and cleansed from the leprosy of 'other things' in its life, for it is never such an influence in the world as when it has been most separate from it.