According to the number that ye shall prepare, so shall ye do to every one according to their number.
In Numbers 15 the verse stands among the various laws given in that chapter regulating acceptable offerings. Within those laws it belongs to the provision for sins committed in ignorance, teaching that sins of ignorance are still sins and require atonement. The same chapter sets these laws alongside the case of the man who in defiance gathered sticks on the Sabbath, sinning presumptuously against the fourth commandment. His act was not mere transgression but open, daring, Heaven-defying sin, and shows Sabbath breaking to be a sin abhorrent to God.
Including the stoning of that Sabbath-breaker, the verse belongs to subsidiary sanitary and police regulations given through Moses for Israel, adapted to that people, that time, and their wilderness surroundings. It is not part of the constitution of God's government epitomized in the Ten Commandments and summarized as love to God and love to neighbor, which is eternal in nature and unrepealable in moral principle. It is part of temporary enactments easily distinguished from that Decalogue.
In Numbers 15 the verse stands among the various laws given in that chapter regulating acceptable offerings. Within those laws it belongs to the provision for sins committed in ignorance, teaching that sins of ignorance are still sins and require atonement. The same chapter sets these laws alongside the case of the man who in defiance gathered sticks on the Sabbath, sinning presumptuously against the fourth commandment. His act was not mere transgression but open, daring, Heaven-defying sin, and shows Sabbath breaking to be a sin abhorrent to God.
Including the stoning of that Sabbath-breaker, the verse belongs to subsidiary sanitary and police regulations given through Moses for Israel, adapted to that people, that time, and their wilderness surroundings. It is not part of the constitution of God's government epitomized in the Ten Commandments and summarized as love to God and love to neighbor, which is eternal in nature and unrepealable in moral principle. It is part of temporary enactments easily distinguished from that Decalogue.