Imagine your living room is perfectly clean.

I mean perfectly. Your white couch is utterly spotless. Your white carpet looks pristine. There isn’t an iota of dust or dirt anywhere in the room.

And then your dog wants in.

Rover somehow found the only mud puddle in the dog park and spent a considerable amount of time rolling around in it.

He stands on the other side of the back door, wagging his tail and smiling, unable to figure out why you won’t let him in. After all, surely you love him, don’t you?

But you know that the second you let Rover in, he’ll shake his fur and send thousands of bits of mud all over your perfectly clean living room.

The solution?

Clean Rover off before he can enter the house. Hose him down, dry him off, and wipe his paws. Rover may not understand the necessity of all this, but it’s your living room and your rules.

Likewise, we sometimes can’t understand why God wouldn’t let us into Heaven just as we are.

Sure, we’ve committed a few sins, but we’re pretty decent people overall, aren’t we? Doesn’t God love us? What’s the necessity of a having a Saviour to atone for our sins?

I think we underestimate how abhorrent sin is to a perfectly holy God.

God can’t allow the most minuscule amount of sin into His Heavenly abode: even the tiniest measure would contaminate it.

Consider how this works with contamination of groundwater.

The maximum allowable level for barium in drinking water is two parts per million (ppm). That’s the equivalent of one drop of barium in a 200-litre/53 gallon bathtub of water.

The maximum drinking water contaminant level for benzene is even stricter, with the allowable amount even tinier: 5 parts per billion (ppb). That’s billion, not million.

To give you an idea of how small this is, here are some equivalents: One ppb of one year is 1/32 of a second. Put another way, one minute is 1 ppb of about 1900 years. This is an astonishingly small amount.

But only five ppb of benzene is enough to contaminate the contents of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, were it filled with drinking water. In other words, about 5 drops of benzene is all it would take to make 500,000 litres/130,000 gallons of water undrinkable.

If scientists are this scrupulous when it comes to the safety of the water we drink, do we really think that God would be any less rigorous when it comes to sin? Do we believe that even a small amount of sin in Heaven would escape the notice of God?

And make no mistake, we’re covered in sin. But like Rover, we’re often oblivious to the muck that has stuck to us.

That’s why we need a thorough washing before we can be allowed into Heaven.

“Wash me clean from my guilt. Purify me from my sin.” (Psalm 51:2)

“Purify me from my sins, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.” (Psalm 51:7)

“Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a loyal spirit within me.” (Psalm 51:10)

Thankfully, Jesus has provided a way for us to be cleansed of our sins. All it takes is to repent of them, ask His forgiveness for them, and believe that His atoning work on the Cross has paid the penalty for them.

That’s a lot easier than cleaning off Rover!

Jesus told Peter, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with Me.”

john 13:8

© 2024 Lori J. Cartmell. All rights reserved.