Numbers 15:31

In the verses before, the person who sins through ignorance or oversight brings an offering, the priest makes atonement, and the sin is forgiven, in keeping with the sin-offering laws of Leviticus 4. Verse 30 begins with “But” and sets a second kind of sin beside the first.

“Presumptuously” translates a Hebrew phrase built from rûwm, to be high or to raise, and yâd, the hand. The sinner acts “with a high hand”, his hand lifted up against the LORD. It is a picture of open, arrogant defiance. He knows the command, and he decides to break it. “Doeth ought” covers any deed at all, so the verse fixes on the proud attitude behind whatever is done. The same outward act can be a stumble made in weakness, which God has made a way to forgive, or a deliberate challenge to his authority, and the difference lies in the heart.

Behind “soul” is nephesh, a breathing creature, a life, the person himself. “Soul” stands twice in verse 30, for the one who sins and for the one who is cut off, and once in verse 31. Each time it names one person who answers for what he has done.

The psalmist knew this danger and prayed against it: “Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me” (Psalm 19:13).

“Born in the land” is ʼezrâch, a native, and “stranger” is gêr, properly a guest, the foreigner who lived among Israel. The sentence falls on both alike. Everyone who lived within the covenant community and enjoyed its protection and blessing was bound by its law, whatever his origin. The LORD had already said, “One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you” (Exodus 12:49). Deliberate rebellion is judged the same whoever commits it.

This clause is the heart of the offence. The verb gâdaph means to hack with words, to revile, and the KJV renders it elsewhere as blaspheme and reproach. The one who sins with a high hand breaks a command with his deeds, and God counts the deed as reviling him. To defy a command you know is to show contempt for the one who gave it, scorning his holiness and his right to rule. In Israel God’s commands were the foundation of the nation and of its bond with him, so open defiance was treason against Israel’s King.

Verse 31 gives the reason for the sentence. “Despised” is bâzâh, to disesteem, to despise or think to scorn. What this man scorns is the dâbâr, the word, of the LORD, which God has spoken plainly to his people. “Broken” is pârar, to break up, to violate or frustrate, as though the command could be made void, and “commandment” is mitsvâh, a command, a word also used of the Law as a whole. Contempt for God’s word takes root in the heart first, and the broken commandment is how it shows itself.

Both verses use the same verb, kârath, to cut off, down or asunder, and by implication to destroy or consume. In verse 31 the Hebrew repeats the verb, and the KJV renders the doubled form “utterly be cut off”. The doubling makes the sentence final and complete.

The one cut off is severed from among his people, and he loses his place in the covenant community with its blessings and protection. The law sets this penalty on the gravest offences, those that strike at God’s authority and at the covenant itself, as with the uncircumcised male in Genesis 17:14 and the man who sacrifices his children in Leviticus 20:3. Being cut off could mean death, at God’s own hand or at the hands of the community, and it meant the loss of a person’s standing and inheritance in Israel. Beneath all of it lay separation from God’s covenant blessings and presence, a foretaste of the final judgment on those who persist in rejecting his rule. Scripture shows the same severity from the man driven out of Eden (Genesis 3:23–24) to the curses for disobedience in Deuteronomy 28 and the judgment on the wilderness generation after its rebellion in Numbers 13–14, the chapters just before this one.

“His iniquity shall be upon him” closes the sentence. The word ʻâvôn means perversity or moral evil, and it can also mean the punishment that iniquity brings, and both senses fit here. The man bears his own guilt and its penalty. The sin offerings of this chapter were given for sins of ignorance, so the law sets nothing between the defiant sinner and the weight of what he has done.

Right after these verses comes Numbers 15:32–36, where a man is found gathering sticks on the Sabbath and is put to death. The account follows the law at once and shows it in practice. The Sabbath was among the foundational commands of the covenant, and this man’s deed is the chapter’s own example of willful defiance and its consequence.

Under the law of Numbers 15, atonement through sacrifice was appointed for unintentional sins, and the sin done with a high hand received the sentence of being cut off. The law’s sacrifices answered sins of ignorance and weakness, and for open, contemptuous rebellion the law itself held only judgment. Yet God’s own mercy could still reach a sinner whose repentance was deep and real, as it reached David when Nathan confronted him over his sin with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12).

Christ’s sacrifice is enough to atone for all sins, those done willfully among them, for everyone who turns to him in repentance and faith. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9), and “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). Christ was “once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28).

The New Testament still carries the warning of these verses forward: “For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:26–27). The danger it names is a hardened heart that goes on in deliberate rebellion and so rejects the one sacrifice by which sin is forgiven. Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient, and the person who throws it away has turned from the only source of forgiveness. The cutting off in Numbers foreshadows that final separation from God, the end of a life lived in unrepentant rebellion.

The law, this severe verse with it, was “our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ” (Galatians 3:24). It shows how deep human sin runs and how impossible it is for us to make ourselves righteous by perfect obedience. For the high-handed sinner the old covenant held only the sentence, and the new covenant offers “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

Jesus bore the full weight of all sin, the rebellion that reproaches the LORD included. The final cutting off is eternal separation from God, and Christ himself endured it on the cross when he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Because of his death and resurrection, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Those who once stood under the sentence of being cut off are grafted into the family of God and given eternal life, for “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20).

These verses show a holy God who takes his word as seriously as he takes himself, so that contempt for his commandment is contempt for him. They show his justice, which gives each person the weight of his own iniquity, and his fairness, which judges the native and the stranger by one law.

They show his mercy too. In the same chapter he provides for the sins his people fall into through ignorance and weakness, and he knows the stumbling of a weak heart from the defiance of a proud one. What cuts a person off is the contempt that refuses his word. Christ changes such hearts, and God promises a new heart and a new spirit within his people by his Spirit (Ezekiel 36:26–27). The sentence these verses pronounce on the rebel was borne by Christ, and he has said, “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).