WILL YOU STILL NOT BE MADE CLEAN?

Read Jeremiah 13:18-27

If we do not humble ourselves, then God will humble us.  We can bow our knee to God willingly or God can bring us to our knees forcibly.  We can be broken before God in contrition or be broken by God in correction.  This is the warning God gave to Judah through Jeremiah.

He began with a message to the leaders of Jerusalem—the king and queen mother—for they had failed to shepherd the people spiritually and the result is they would see the people suffer physically.  As a woman conceiving, carrying, and birthing a baby, they would see the process James describes, “Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death” (1:15).  

The people of Jerusalem had committed spiritual adultery against the Lord as unfaithful idolaters.  Their morally lewd practices and shameful acts arose from the worship of promiscuous, pagan deities whose temples essentially housed an orgy. Since they wanted such nakedness, God would pull their skirts over their heads, exposing them to the Babylonian conquerors who would strip them bare and shackle them in bondage.  Away to Babylon they would be taken, to a place flooded with idols, since that was the kind of worship they set their hearts on.  God would gorge them with it, until they could bear no more.

The reality is they could not cleanse themselves.  Lest we sit in self-righteous judgment on those Jews, we had best look in the mirror of God’s holy law and understand our hearts are likewise depraved.  As an Ethiopian cannot change the color of his skin and a leopard cannot exchange his spots for the stripes of a tiger, we cannot change our sinful nature.  It is who we are.  

That’s why Jesus told Nicodemus—an extremely committed religionist—that he had to be born again—to gain a new nature (see John 3).  Christ said that none get to heaven otherwise.  It is not reformation of our old nature, but regeneration bringing a new nature that saves us and fits us for heaven.  Only the blood of Christ can cleanse us from sin.  God must make us clean.  Apart from that He will say, “Woe to you....  Will you still not be MADE clean?” (Emphasis added)