God Cleanses

The Bible gives us a lot of rules about what (and who) is clean or unclean. Beef and pork and lamb and rock badgers and two different fabrics and mold and mildew and blood and emissions and periods and death and sacrifices and all the things. And God's people spent a really long time - thousands of years - trying to live by these rules, trying to keep themselves from unclean things, separating themselves from the community until morning, engaging in ritual bathing, cutting out the mold, burning the offending substance in fire. Again, all the things. Because there are a lot of rules about what (and who) is clean or unclean. 

Christ only has one rule:

Everyone is clean. 

Everyone is clean until they choose not to be clean and even then, it's kind of iffy.

See, until Christ, nothing unclean was ever made clean by being touched, but after Christ, that all changed. Before Christ, if you touched a bleeding woman, her blood might get on you; after Christ, His blood gets on everything. Before Christ, if something died, the death, the offense of lifelessness, might spread to you; after Christ, death walks right out of the grave. Before Christ, you had to really scrub the walls of your house to try to get the mildew off; after Christ, everything has been washed and made clean. 

Do you get it yet?

Peter really struggled with this. He was a guy who had spent his whole life keeping the commandments, separating himself from unclean things, following all of the rules. And then Christ comes to him and tells him that He wants the young apostle to go to the Gentiles, and Peter's like...what? The Gentiles? 

Do you know how unclean it is over there, Lord? 

And Christ gives him all kinds of visions to show him...it's not unclean over there (Acts 10:28). Under the blood of Christ, what's clean and unclean has changed. While it's still true that nothing unclean becomes clean again by being touched by someone clean, it's more true that what was once unclean becomes clean by being loved. 

And that's what God is sending Peter to do. 

Go love them. 

Go love them in the Gospel and tell them about Me and tell them about grace and tell them about mercy and show them about love. 

Show them that blood is catching, but this blood makes them clean. Show them that death is defeated, that we walk right out of the grave. Show them that they not only can be washed clean, but they have been. 

Don't worry about getting a little Gentile on you; worry about getting Me into the Gentiles. 

And that's still the mission for the rest of us today. There is no place in the world left unclean if we are willing to enter it with love. With grace. With mercy. 

With Christ.