A clean slate
Ezekiel 18:31a “Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit.”
Our verse for this week is a very dramatic and visual reminder of what repentance and forgiveness is all about.
Very often people tend to think of forgiveness as something like balancing a scale. On the one side are all the things you have done wrong and then somehow you need to make up for or balance out the wrong with something good. The question is what can or do you use to balance out all your sins? Some people think that they can do enough good actions or deeds to make up for the “bad” things they have done. There is one small problem with the thinking that our good can make up for our bad. God reminds us from the pen of Isaiah “All our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” (Isaiah 64:6). That is a very stark reminder that nothing “good” we do can make up for the “bad” we do. Any supposed good we do is like the most foul-smelling, stained rag you can think of.
Our verse for this week gives us a much better understanding of the mess which our sin causes and how that mess is cleaned up. God through Ezekiel encourages each one of us “Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed.” Visualize your young child/grandchild taking a pack of markers and drawing all over a crisply painted white wall. If you’ve ever dealt with such a situation, you know that there is no easy way to clean up such a mess. The best thing to do is get the can of paint and repaint the wall. In other words you need to create a clean slate.
The one difference is that the “clean slate” we need to create with the mess we made with “markers” of our sin cannot be accomplished with a fresh coat of paint. Rather, our spiritual “clean slate” is accomplished by being washed in the bright red blood of Jesus. That alone can rid us of all the offenses/sins we have committed.
Once that washing in the blood of Jesus is completed, we can then” get a new heart and a new spirit.” That new heart and spirit is again not accomplished by what we do, but rather what God does for us in and through Jesus.
Maybe you’ve figured out that this getting a “clean slate” is not a one-time occurrence in the life of a Christian or even a once a decade or once a year occurrence. This clean spiritual slate is something we need each and every day and thank God that he gladly and freely gives us that clean slate through Jesus our Savior!
Is there something which really bothers you or seems to be hanging over your head? Have you taken that offense/sin to the cross of Jesus and had it washed clean in his cleansing blood? The devil wants us to waddle in around in our filthy rags and feel like there is no hope.
What a joy and blessing it is to know that we can start each day or resolve each ugly situation by wiping our slate clean in the blood of Jesus! Take confidence in what that “clean slate” gives you and daily use the cleansing power and confidence it gives us!