Quick Note – Jeremiah 2:22 – The Ultimate Cleanser

Jeremiah 2:22 – “Though you wash yourself with lye and use much soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me, declares the Lord GOD.”

Whenever I do the laundry, there are two solutions that I pour into the washer with the pile of dirty clothes I throw in.  The first is laundry detergent to make sure that the clothes are soaped up and smell good when they come out, and the second is bleach to remove all the “hard-to-remove” stains.  Whenever I use bleach, I need to make sure that the bleach I use is the color protecting one, instead of ordinary bleach, because ordinary bleach strips away the color dye on the clothes, leaving the colors on the clothes faded.  It can do this because bleach is such a strong cleansing agent.  I also use bleach in the lab, because just a 10% concentrated solution of it is enough to kill bacteria and other harmful organisms to the environment.  If I grew a bacterial culture, all I would need to do is disinfect it for 10 min with a 10% bleach solution, and then I can pour the liquid down the drain.  I need not worry about causing any negative ramifications to anyone or anything, because the bleach would kill everything.  Bleach is the ultimate cleanser.

In our passage from Jeremiah 2 today, the lye that the people of Israel were trying to wash their sin away with is the same thing as bleach.  The sin of Israel and Judah had gotten so bad that God told them that even if they tried to wash the guilt of their sin away with soap and bleach (the ultimate cleanser) they would not be able to remove it.  It would just sit there revealing God’s righteousness in punishing them for their sin.  They could offer as many sin offerings at His temple as many times as they wanted, but they would never be able to take away their sin.  Nothing they could do could cleanse them.  What they needed to do was to come to the Lord with a simple heart of repentance turning to Him for undeserved forgiveness.  Sadly, they would continually refuse His offer for forgiveness and restoration.

Likewise, we as human beings have a sin stain over our hearts that cannot be cleansed by bleach or by anything we say or do.  No amount of good works could cover that blemish in our lives, for even our righteousness is but filthy rags in the sight of God.  Because of that irremovable sin stain, we can never be seen as perfect in the sight of God and are rightly condemned to judgment.  Fortunately for us, God sent us His Son who is much stronger at cleansing than bleach.  When Jesus Christ gave His life on that cross for our sins, He provided us a way to cover that sin stain in our lives.  By receiving His offer of salvation by accepting Him into our hearts as Lord and Savior, we allow His blood to cover our sin.  No longer does God see a stain, but Christ’s shed blood for us.  If you have not accepted His offer of salvation, then do so today, for He alone can cleanse each heart.  But if you have done so already, than thank Him today for the miraculous cleansing of that stain.