Before Mike Rowe, there was J. R.  J. R. was a janitor during my formative years at Rowland Elementary.   While children are often not sympathetic toward adults, I always admired J. R.  And I felt sorry for him.  He had the dirtiest job imaginable.  And while I am sure his usual duties included vast unpleasantness, it was the incidental things that were particularly filthy.  The overflowing toilets, the projectile vomiting, not to mention the occasional dead varmint removal.  J. R. made dirty things clean.  Whenever you heard his name over the intercom, you knew that some grossness would soon be dealt with. 

But you never heard J. R. grumble or complain.  He was a quiet man with a sweet spirit.  Though poorly remunerated for the job he did, he was unflappable, indefatigable.  His gentle spirit caught my attention and his sense of duty my imagination.  J. R. did hard things.  Before Mike Rowe gained fame for exposing us to dirty jobs, there was J. R. who routinely, quietly, and discretely did things that would make Mike Rowe shudder.

J. R.’s trials were child’s play, however, compared to the dirty jobs parents face every day, especially mothers.  Dirty jobs that bring redemption, love, and grace.  Though rarely observed or remembered, and certainly never celebrated, the dirty work of raising children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord pays eternal dividends.  For the Christian, parenting is discipleship.  And every dirty job, every painful discipline, every struggle with our own sin while teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training sinful children prepares the soil to receives the Word and produce a harvest.

At first glance Leviticus 12 seems out of place.  Up to this point the sacrifices and the priesthood have all been about atonement for sin.  Next come the ceremonial laws sometimes called the ‘purity laws.’   These explain what it means to pursue holiness in daily life.  And how to avoid unclean things and identify clean things.  Juxtaposed with warnings about the impurity of dead things, Leviticus 12 declares childbirth defiling.

Aren’t children pure, innocent, and unstained?  What is sweeter than the birth of a child?  And the parental bliss of our first few months with baby carries us through sleepless nights, diaper changes, and relentless feeding schedules.  And then they begin to talk.  We thrill to hear MaMaMaMa and then DaDaDaDa.   But soon enough we begin to hear something else, “No!” 

It does not take long to realize that our children are willful rebels and sinners.   From the womb they have been in “an estate of sin and misery… consisting of the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called original sin; together with all actual transgressions which will shortly proceed from it.” 

And as our Westminster Shorter Catechism laments, the misery of this condition is that, apart from God’s grace in Christ, our beloved children have “lost communion with God, are under His wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever.”

The impurity that Leviticus 12 describes in the wake of a baby’s birth arises from the estate of sin and misery into which we are all born.  And in which we will remain unless there is a new birth through faith in Christ.   But Leviticus 12 does not simply point out that we are “by nature objects of wrath.” For the greater emphasis is what God has provided.  In a sense, the purity rituals of Leviticus 12 form an early answer to Question 20 in the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Question: Did God leave all mankind to perish in the estate of sin and misery?
Answer: God having, out of His mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring them into an estate of salvation by a redeemer.

And here, in the instructions given to new mothers, we see the beauty of Christ held out as “the only redeemer of God’s elect.”  Join us as we examine Leviticus 12 and consider how the purity laws regarding childbirth reveal hope, mercy, grace, and salvation through Jesus. We meet on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube.