Sin pollutes. It makes the heart dirty. It stains, not the kind of stain that ‘Shout’ or ‘Mr. Clean’ can remove. It is a bottle of black ink poured over white satin, the kind of stain about which we would say: ‘That will never come out.’
Genesis is where the story of sin begins. Adam and Eve, faced with a choice, chose not to trust God but to trust their own judgment, and so they disobeyed God. Thus, they opened the door to sin, and then sin, as it were, ‘kicked down the door’ and took over. Sin entered the human heart, and there it has resided ever since. And like the slob that sin is, it has messed the place up. It has made it filthy.
This is how the Word of God describes the human heart after the Fall: The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually and The Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.’
Is the heart that bad? ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick’, said Jeremiah.
We have our own conception of what ‘dirty’ is: it is spaghetti sauce splattered on our new white shirt; it is the layer of dirt on your car after driving on a wet road in the winter; it is the blackness of your fingers after tinkering under the hood.
But what we call dirty is not really dirty: even after the spaghetti stain 99% of the shirt is still white; no matter the amount of dirt, you can still easily see what color the car is.
The heart made dirty by sin isn’t like that kind of ‘dirty’.
In a scene early in the movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, a boy’s hero is approaching in a helicopter, and the boy wants nothing more than to see this man whom he idolizes. But there is an obstacle: the boy’s brother has locked him in an outhouse. The boy pounds on the door, tries to kick down one of the boards of the wall, but he can’t get out. Increasingly desperate, he then notices the hole in the seat of the outhouse. He deliberates for a moment, then plugs his nose and jumps down the hole, crawls out from the sewer slime under the outhouse and runs to find his hero. But of course, he is covered head to toe in this foul brown sauce, filthy and with a stench that makes people clear out of his way.
That is a much better picture of what sin is like. The human heart, out of which we live our lives, is immersed in the worst kind of vile, reeking filth. Worse, though, it is filth that cannot be washed off. It permeates the heart. This is the very heart of which Jesus said, ‘But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles (or pollutes) a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person.’
Foul deeds grow out of a foul heart. ‘From the root of sin grows the fruit of sin.’ The human heart cannot but help defile a person.
Obviously, this is a real problem for us. For we were made for God, we need God, our souls desperately yearn for God, nothing matters more than God’s approval… and yet the Psalmist asks, ‘Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?’ And his response: ‘He who has clean hands and a pure heart.’
In the history of Israel when God was showing them what he was like and what it looked like to be his people, there was a major obstacle: God was perfectly holy, people were utterly polluted by sin.
This week, I walked out of the church door, and the sun was shining on the white snow at such an angle that made the snow blindingly brilliant. I had to squint and shield my eyes with my hand. Later I drove on roads on which the same snow had fallen, but now it had turned into dark, runny, brown-sugar slush. Such is the difference between God’s heart and ours, and therefore God’s actions and ours.
As God was teaching the people of Israel what it meant for them to be his people and to be in relationship with him, there was the insurmountable obstacle of how a sinful people could possibly interact with their holy God. God made a provision that would allow a single representative of the people – the High Priest – to enter God’s Holy Place, and that only once a year, to intercede for the people by offering a blood sacrifice for their sin.
Though the people did not know this at the time, this provision arose sheerly out of God’s grace, and was based on a future action of God which would retroactively validate the priest’s intercession.
On this one day each year (the Day of Atonement, or ‘Yom Kippur’), the High Priest would begin the sacred activities of the day by exchanging his regular clothes for pure linen. This would represent purity, putting on robes of righteousness, and thus the priest would visually depict the reality that only pure righteousness could stand in the presence of God: He shall put on the holy linen coat and shall have the linen undergarment on his body, and he shall tie the linen sash about his waist, and wear the linen turban; these are the holy garments. He shall bathe his body with water and then shall put them on.
Then after the sacrifices of the day, he would take his now bloodstained garments off, wash again, and then put on his regular priestly garments. The time of being in the very presence of the LORD was bookended by these rituals of cleansing. In between, only the blood of the sacrifice that atoned for the sins of the Priest and people, blood that was an acceptable offering to God, marked the linen garments.
Only righteousness can stand before God, only the one who has a pure heart. And that’s not us. Could someone climb out from the pit under an outhouse and in the next moment be ushered into the inner chamber of the King?
The Bible gives us some symbols that point us to the perfect righteousness of God, both the Father and Jesus Christ the Son, and even just of heaven itself.
In Daniel 7, the Ancient of Days is described this way: his clothing was white as snow,
and the hair of his head like pure wool.
A similar description is given of Jesus in John’s vision in Revelation: The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow.
In Matthew 17, Peter, James, and John get a glimpse of Jesus’ glory when they see him: And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.
Even angels are sometimes described as being robed in white, participating, as it were, in the righteousness of the God of heaven, in the same way the white of the full moon simply reflects the blinding light of the sun.
If this is how God is described, how could we stand before him?
Not that we do not try, of course. We are aware of the stain of sin and we try various things to deal with it.
We try to clean it up. My wife and I have different values when we clean. I like things tidy; Kara likes things clean. I can put things in order, everything in its place; I make it appear clean. But it is not clean. It just creates the illusion of clean. Have you ever cleaned a window until it was ‘spotless’, but when the light came to that side of the house, it showed how much of the dirt remained?
If we cannot get clean by trying, then we try to hide or disguise our uncleanness. Ripley’s Believe it or Not 2013 has a section devoted to artists, some of whom make art out of fingernail clippings, belly button lint, or vacuum cleaner dust. But one man outdoes them all: he makes ‘memorial ashwork’ paintings created from the ashes of beloved pets: ‘The tasteful tributes are full of color and decorated with jewels and stained glass – although others also incorporate horse manure and goal pellets.’ But filth disguised is still filth.
If our trying to clean ourselves fails, and our disguises do not work, then we have no choice but to redefine ‘pure’. So by ‘pure’ we mean ‘relatively pure, compared to most other things’. There is a soap that boasts that it is 99.4% pure. What do we call something that is 99.4 % pure? Impure! ‘Pure’, by definition, is to be absolutely and perfectly free from anything that is not the substance itself. Whatever the ‘%’ material in the soap, it makes the soap impure.
But even that does not really matter to us. Compared with God’s perfection, sin has so covered and permeated that our very best is dirty. Isaiah was bang on when he said: ‘We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment’ (‘filthy rags’, as some translations translate it). ‘We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.’
‘Love the LORD your God with all your heart’. Well, considering the nature of our hearts, we cannot love very well.
We need help.
David knew his unclean heart when he acknowledged his ‘from-birth’ sinfulness, and prayed: Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. ‘Only you can cleanse me, LORD. If I am to have a pure heart, you’ve got to do it.’
Thankfully, this was and is exactly God’s intent. In the Gospel, the good news is that God has done for us what we could not do for ourselves. Only God can (and does and will) purify us, cleanse us. God pulls us out from the outhouse and makes us able to stand unashamed before him.
God gave us clues (in the Old Testament) that this is exactly what he would do. In Ezekiel 36, the prophet receives God’s word concerning Israel, which in the Old Testament is the image of the Church of Jesus Christ. In speaking of Israel’s restoration from captivity, God says,
Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord,” declares the Lord God, “when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land” ’.
And then God says:
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses.
There is this great picture of this in the book of Zechariah. In a vision, he sees the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the Lord. But instead of wearing the clean garments of the high priest, he is dressed in filthy garments. And Satan is standing at Joshua’s right hand, to accuse him: “Look at him! Your high priest? This is the one who’s supposed to offer sacrifices and intercede for your people! He’s filthy himself!”
But the Lord immediately silences him:
And the angel said to those who were standing before him, ‘Remove the filthy garments from him.’ And to him he said, ‘Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.’ And I said, ‘Let them put a clean turban on his head.’ So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the Lord was standing by.
In all of this, Joshua is passive. The filthy garments are removed for him and pure vestments are put on him. God takes away his sin. God has him clothed in purity because only God can do that.
And only God can do that for us.
And he has. The Gospel is that God has done for us, through Jesus, what we could not do for ourselves. We ask the questions we have asked every week of this series, ‘How did he accomplish this?’ And we give the same answer that we have given every week: ‘By the death of Jesus on the cross.’
Contrasting the ultimate inadequacy of the Priest’s yearly sacrifice in the tabernacle, which only served to make the people outwardly pure but did nothing for the heart, with the death of Jesus, the book of Hebrews says this:
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
The book of Revelation:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’ …Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, ‘Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?’ I said to him, ‘Sir, you know.’ And he said to me, ‘These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’.
There are the new ‘holy garments’. The people of God have had their filthy garments stripped off and are reclothed in the robes of righteousness, that are made pure by the blood of the Lamb, by the sacrifice of Jesus.
How is this righteousness appropriated? Not by our righteousness. Not by our purity. We have none.
There is only one way to obtain this righteousness, and that is by faith, as the early Jerusalem church understood. God had made no distinction between Jews and Gentiles, having cleansed their hearts by faith.
Faith is simply recognizing the filth of our heart, to throw yourself on the grace and mercy of God and say, ‘Create in me a clean heart. Cast me not away from your presence,’ and to hear God say, ‘Yes. And I have already prepared your clothing. You are robed in Jesus’ righteousness.’
If you have done that, you are fine, secure in God’s sight. If you have not thrown yourself on the mercy of God in Christ, then you need to. Christ is your only hope.
What are we to do, then, with this glorious truth? What are its implications for how we live?
Well, first, we continue to fix our eyes on Jesus, and thus we can quit trying to earn this white robe of righteousness after the fact, quit trying to prove to ourselves that we have contributed any righteousness of our own. We did not. We could not clean our hearts up. We can stop trying to make people think we’ve got our act together, disguising our sins. Let us never redefine purity in such a way as to say, ‘We’re not so bad.’
Just say, ‘Thank you! Thank you! I love your mercy! What amazing grace!’ That’s our first response.
Second, be confident in the grace of God. Or, to frame it negatively, do not be afraid of God. Do not worry that you are not clean enough. Do not try to complete what God has done. He has done it all. And do not think, if you commit a sin, that all God’s work is undone, as if the mighty work of God and the very death of the eternal, perfect Jesus and his resurrection can be knocked down by a flick of your sinful finger. Do not worry over whether you are good enough. Jesus is good enough, and God applies Jesus’ righteousness to you and is actually working to conform you to the very likeness of Jesus. At the end of the day, God does not just clean up your heart. In a very real sense, he forms Jesus’ heart in you.
So do not be afraid that God is still angry with you, or keeping his distance until he has made sure you have been good. He who did not spare his own son but graciously gave him up for you, will not now withhold his acceptance and love. Do not be afraid.
And thirdly, live a life of purity. It may sound odd to have a call to purity after everything I have just said. But the New Testament emphasis of grace always has an ethical component. That is, when amazed and changed by the action of God on our behalf, the Word of God always knows – and reminds us to know – that life is lived differently. Cleansed hearts produce different fruit than do filthy hearts.
Paul tells Timothy to set an example in speech, in love, in faith, in purity.
He urges the Ephesians to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel.
There is a major difference, however, in how the Bible treats this expected purity, and it is this: We don’t work toward purity any more than we clean up in order to take a bath. But we work from a place of purity. We don’t work hard to become pure; we are to intentionally live as a people who have become pure.
We do not live rightly in order to earn God’s acceptance. We live rightly because God has accepted us.
When we lived sinfully, it was because that was who we were: from a defiled heart come defiled words, thought, and actions. But as God has cleansed us by the blood of the crucified Jesus, now if we live sinfully, we are doing things counter to who we are. When we sin we are not being who we are.
We do not live like a parent in order to become one; we start living like a parent when we become one.
The Bible lays out pretty clearly the difference between an impure life and a pure one:
The works of the flesh are sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissension, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like these… But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.
In which of these ‘works of the flesh’ are you reminded that this has no place in your heart any more? In which of these ‘fruit of the Spirit’ are you reminded that this seed needs to be more intentionally cultivated, given more sun, more water?
Philippians 2 says, Work out your salvation. The idea is that of working the soil, taking what is just underneath and working it to the surface. Take your salvation, your cleansing, which is already there, and which only could do, and work it out, make it visible in a life of purity.
This is Gospel: God in Christ has cleansed a filthy heart by robing us in Christ’s perfect, unblemished righteousness. This Gospel changes who we are. And therefore it must by necessity change how we live. Everyone lives from who they are. By their fruit you will know them.
In awe of God’s cleansing of us, in confidence of his acceptance of us because he has made us acceptable, let us live our new lives, lives that reflect this new heart, this new life.
Amen.