Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Polluted Garments

“We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” – Isaiah 64:6

I heard somewhere that the words “polluted garment” here actually mean “dirty menstruous cloths”—and if you look it up, that’s true. It’s like the translators couldn’t quite bring themselves to write that out in the English, so they went for something a little less shocking.

Recently I came across a book by Clay Jones in which he suggests that questions like “why does God allow suffering?” and “why do good things happen to bad people?” reveal an inadequate grasp of several aspects of theology, one of them a realization of how bad people really are, of what the fallen, sinful nature really means. It made me realize that I do tend to think of people as basically nice and good. It’s easy to separate ourselves from perpetrators of evil. But one has to come to grips with the fact that many of those involved in evil, or who stood by while allowing evil to happen, were ordinary people. Elie Wiesel observed of Auschwitz administrator Adolf Eichmann: he was “an ordinary man. He slept well, he ate well. He was an exemplary father, a considerate husband… I was shaken by his normal appearance and behavior.” As Langdon Gilkey writes, our niceness is so often “the thin polish of easy morality.” Even when we seem to be doing what is righteous, it’s often motivated by self-interest. We don’t engage in extramarital affairs, for example, primarily because we fear getting caught, while Jesus says that even lustful thoughts are adulterous. Jones writes, “We may think those who restrict their adultery to their minds are good, but they’re not. The world is full of such ‘good people.’ Ultimately, evil is a matter of the heart… Bad things aren’t happening to good people because there are no good people.” As R.C. Sproul quips, “Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, that only happened once, and He volunteered.”

This isn’t some brand of shameful pessimism; it’s simply an accurate view of our sinful nature. This verse is pretty unequivocal: all of us are unclean. It casts out in pretty graphic terms the idea that there is any such thing as a righteousness of our own. This must be grasped before we can comprehend what salvation means. We tend to think of ourselves as better than we ought, and then of salvation as less crucial and glorious than it really is. Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes, “Most of our troubles are due to the fact that we are guilty of a double failure; we fail on the one hand to realize the depth of sin, and on the other hand we fail to realize the greatness and the height and the glory of our salvation.” Or (to continue the torrent of quotes) as C. S. Lewis writes, “Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—in itself very bad news—before it can win a hearing for the cure.”

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