ARE you, dear reader, trying to make yourself clean, and fit for the presence of God? If so, you will never succeed, though you persevere and devotedly and earnestly to the end of your days: for, “Who can say I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?” (Prov. 20:9.) “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.” (Job 14:4.) “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” (Jer. 13:23.) And as Job, when under the hand of God, said, “If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean; yet shalt THOU plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me. For He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come together in judgment.” (Job 9:30, &c.) And as the Lord Himself says (in Jer. 2:22), “Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me.” A sinful man may, therefore, cleanse himself from outward impurities, yet is his cleanness but filthiness, in the sight of Him who is of purer ayes than to behold evil, and cannot look on iniquity, and who is “the righteous God that trieth the hearts and reins.”
But if God cleanse you, that is quite another thing. He cleanses by the blood of His Son, and that cleanses from ALL sin. (1 John 1:7.) The song of the redeemed is, “Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood.” (Rev. 1:5.) Washed in that precious blood, and knowing Christ as their righteousness, they can bear the scrutinizing gaze of the holy, heart-searching God without a quiver, and, as His children, can rejoice and delight in Him as their God and Father.
If you, then, give up all thought of cleansing yourself, and, as a defiled, impure, unholy one, trust in Jesus who shed His blood for the remission of sins, you will be “clean every whit;” not as washed with snow water, nitre, or soap, but modo “whiter than snow,” suited for the holy, blessed presence of God Himself. Then you will be enabled, through grace, to express the joy of your heart in some such language as the following: ―
“The Lord of Life in death hath lain,
To clear me from all charge of sin;
And, Lord, from guilt of crimson stain
Thy precious blood hath made me clean.
“And now a righteousness divine
Is all my glory, all my trust;
Nor will I fear, since that is mine,
While Thou dost live, and God is just.”
Christ stood before God, as a sacrifice, on the ground of what I had done; I now stand before God, in Christ, on the ground of what He has done.