Leprosy

“As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp.” Leviticus 13:46
Leviticus 13-14 gives us God’s rules, as dictated for the priests, concerning the diagnosis and handling of a person with leprosy, and the procedures for ceremonial cleansing in the event that he was healed.
Leprosy in those days was considered incurable. It is a disease that causes the nerves to become numb. The person is unable to feel pain when they injure themselves or touch something hot; it is these injuries that cause the extremities to eventually start falling off. Lepers were to live alone, outside the camp, wearing torn clothes and crying out ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ whenever anybody approached. It was a miserable existence – and it paints a graphic picture for us.
In the Bible, leprosy is a picture of sin. Think about it: as we continue in sin, against the conviction of the Holy Spirit, we harden our hearts and our moral senses of what is right and wrong become numb. Sin separates us from God; we are outside the fellowship of the camp. Often lepers would band together in colonies to help each other. Isn’t this what happens among the people of this world? – we have the ‘prostitutes’ collective’ and the ‘gay community’, etc.
But all hope is not lost. In the event that a person was cleansed from leprosy, the priest was to go to him outside the camp to inspect him, and start the cleansing process that would enable him to come into the camp. Jesus is our high priest. He came into this fallen world to reach us, in our sinful state. He came outside the camp, so that we might come back into fellowship with God.