The very feeling of being outcast, unworthy to mingle with former associates and friends, must have been humbling and instructive.  Miriam had been the foremost woman in Israel; now she would gladly have changed places with the least known and be lost among the throng from the eye of wonder, pity, contempt or cruel triumph.  All sin makes us unworthy of fellowship with the people of God.  And the feeling that we are thus unworthy, instead of being lightly and callously dismissed, should be allowed to penetrate and stir the conscience.

If the leprosy departed from Miriam as soon as Moses prayed, yet the shock to her physical system, and the revulsion of feeling consequent on being afflicted with so loathsome a disease, would tell upon her throughout the week.  All consequences of sin, which are prolonged after pardon, have their proper effect and use in begetting shame.  We are not to evade what conscience tells us of the connection between our sin and many of the difficulties of our life.  We are not to turn away from this as a morbid view of providence; still less are we to turn away because in this light sin seems so real and so hideous.  Miriam must have thought, “If this disgusting condition of my body, this lassitude and nervous trembling, this fear and shame to face my fellows, be the just consequence of my envy and pride, how abominable must these sins be.”  And we are summoned to similar thoughts.  If this pursuing evil, this heavy clog that drags me down, this insuperable difficulty, this disease, or this spiritual and moral weakness be the fair natural consequence of my sin, if these things are in the natural world what my sin is in the spiritual, then my sin must be a much greater evil than I was taking it to be.

But especially are we rebuked for all light-heartedness in our estimate of sin by remembering Him who went without the camp bearing our reproach.  It is when we see Christ rejected of men, and outcast for us and for our sin, that we feel true shame.  To find one who so loves me and enters into my position that He feels more keenly than myself the shame I have incurred; to find one who so understands God’s holiness and is Himself so pure that my sin affects Him with the profoundest shame—­this is what pierces my heart with an altogether new compunction, with an arrow that cannot be shaken out.  And this connection of Christ with our sin is actual.  If Paul felt himself so bound up with his fellow-Christians that he blushed for them when they erred, and could say with truth, “Who is weak and I am not weak, who is offended and I turn not?” much more truly may Christ say, Who sins and I am not ashamed?  And if He thus enters into a living sympathy with us, shall not we enter into sympathy with Him, and go without the camp bearing His reproach, which, indeed, is ours; striving, though it cost us much shame and self-denial, to enter heartily into His feelings at our sins, and not letting our union to Him be a mere name or an inoperative tie which effects no real assimilation in spirit between us and Him.