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.”

Heavens

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” – Psalm 8:3-4

While raiding the library last week, I ventured into the non-fiction section and checked out some reference books. One of them is a Picturepedia, the first spread of which is entitled “The Universe.” In it, there are a series of seven pictures, each one a zoomed-in view of the one to its left. First is the universe (“full of dark energy, dark matter, and other matter such as superclusters of galaxies”). Then take a tiny speck there and zoom in, and it’s a supercluster (“made up of a cluster of galaxies”). Then zoom in on one tiny speck, and it’s a local group (“a cluster of about 50 galaxies inside the Virgo Supercluster”). Then zoom in on one of the smaller bright spots there, and it’s the Milky Way Galaxy (“200 billion stars”). Then zoom in on one of the smaller specks there, and it’s the stellar neighborhood (a gathering of stars in one arm of the Milky Way). Then zoom in on one of those stars, and it’s our sun in its solar system, then finally zoom in on the third planet from the sun, and it’s Earth.

This is difficult to comprehend. Personally, I work in a microcosmos. I specialize in a part of the body that measures 24 millimeters in its entire diameter (26 for the highly myopic). The posture of my profession is hunched, looking down and in: I don’t so often look up. And these days, we are all indoors; it’s easy to forget we can still go out. The most profound words in this Psalm seem to me today to be “When I look.” When have I looked? When have I taken my eyes off myself, my troubles, my concerns, my microcosmic world, and looked, really looked, at God’s heavens?

When we look, David says, what we see is the visible definition of God’s glory, the outworking of his power. What we get is a glimpse into the reality of God’s being compared with our being. As R. C. Sproul wrote, “Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.” The same line frames the start and end of this Psalm: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”—and that word “majestic” means large, very great, might, powerful, glorious. It is also translated “magnificent,” “excellent.” You get the sense David means something utterly beyond us in scope, beyond even his ability to really describe. 

That, David says, is God’s name. In that context, it’s interesting that David writes into these lines two names for God. He says, “O Yahweh,” (God’s given, unutterable, unique name) “our adown” (personal lord, possessor, master, husband). The only possible reaction to a comprehension of the universe is to say, what is man? Who the heck do we think we are? Yet this God, with the name too holy to be uttered, displayed in a universe too vast to be comprehended, is also our God, as close and intimate as a spouse. That is the real mystery, the real secret of the heavens, written large for us all to see if we look.