"The Lord spoke to Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho, saying, 2 “Command the people of Israel to give to the Levites some of the inheritance of their possession as cities for them to dwell in. And you shall give to the Levites pasturelands around the cities. 3 The cities shall be theirs to dwell in, and their pasturelands shall be for their cattle and for their livestock and for all their beasts. 4 The pasturelands of the cities, which you shall give to the Levites, shall reach from the wall of the city outward a thousand cubits[a] all around. 5 And you shall measure, outside the city, on the east side two thousand cubits, and on the south side two thousand cubits, and on the west side two thousand cubits, and on the north side two thousand cubits, the city being in the middle. This shall belong to them as pastureland for their cities.
6 “The cities that you give to the Levites shall be the six cities of refuge, where you shall permit the manslayer to flee, and in addition to them you shall give forty-two cities. 7 All the cities that you give to the Levites shall be forty-eight, with their pasturelands. 8 And as for the cities that you shall give from the possession of the people of Israel, from the larger tribes you shall take many, and from the smaller tribes you shall take few; each, in proportion to the inheritance that it inherits, shall give of its cities to the Levites."
Numbers 35:1-8
These verses begin a chapter full of interest in a number of ways, and highly instructive in application to the Christian life. The main part of the chapter concerns the appointment of cities of refuge, but the first eight verses deal with the appointment of cities for the Levites to dwell in, and it was from these cities allocated to the Levites that the cities of refuge were set apart. We have already seen that the Levites were to have no inheritance (see Notes on chap- ter 4) in the land the Lord was to be their inheritance. They were called to be separate, to be different from, the others. The extent of that 'difference' is seen further, here, they were, to be dispersed throughout the land in forty-eight cities set apart for them by the twelve tribes that is to say, they were to have no corporate existence as a tribe, but were rather fragmented in this way in a Godappointed isolation. Furthermore, the purpose of this dispersion was with a view to the instruction of the people of God in the law of the Lord (cf Deuteronomy 33:10). There is a twofold lesson in this for us. On the one hand it underlines the fact that the sepa- rated life, so far as those called to the ministry of the Word is concerned, is likely to be a life of loneliness and isolation, and that it is in the context of such a loneliness that the Lord's work is to be done. There is a sense in which the Lord cannot afford a strong concentration of His servants in one place, when a whole land, and a whole people, have to be served in the gospel. And if there are relatively few who are men after His own heart, it is not surprising that they will not be stationed alongside each other, but often far apart, with only occasional meetings with one another. We should spare a thought, then, for men labouring in lonely places, and pray for them. And in the matter of holidays it might perhaps fulfil a ministry of real encouragement to go and sit under them, to strengthen their hands in God.