You Cannot Scrub Your Way Across A River

There is a bar of soap on the ledge above the wash basin in the garage, worn down to the shape of one man's thumb.

His name is Dale. He has used that basin every Saturday for eleven years. The tap runs cold enough to make your wrists ache, and he scrubs until the skin between his knuckles goes pink, and then he dries his hands on a rag that used to be a shirt and goes inside and sits at the table with his wife. For about a day and a half he is a man who feels clean.

By Wednesday it is back.

Not the grease. The grease comes off. What comes back is the other thing, the one nobody in that kitchen says out loud: the sharp word, the sentence he threw at his boy in the doorway in the second week of March, the one he has apologized for four times and never once believed was gone. Saturday morning is when he goes and stands at the basin about it. He does not tell anybody that is what he is doing. He tells himself he is washing his hands.

Then one Saturday the tap ran and he did not scrub. He just stood there with his hands under the water, tired in a way that had nothing to do with the week. And a thought arrived that was not his, plain and unhurried, the way a neighbor arrives at a door.

You have been trying to get clean on the wrong side of the water.

He shut the tap off. He stood in a cold garage in the second week of October with wet hands, and he laughed once, and then he stopped laughing, because he had understood it.

Eleven years of washing. Not one step of crossing.

Now I want you to put Dale down, because he was only ever standing in for you.

You have a basin too. Maybe yours is a Sunday night rather than a Saturday morning. Maybe it is the drive home, or the last ten minutes before sleep, when you go over the same ground with God and hand Him the same thing you handed Him last week and the week before that. You are not lazy about it. That is the part nobody ever says to you. You have been more diligent about this one square foot of your life than most people are about anything, and you have the worn-down soap to prove it.

And you still cannot remember the last time you felt finished.

Washing was never meant to be the last thing

Here is the first thing I want you to have, and I want you to have it before anything else: the washing was not your idea, and it was never wrong.

Long before John ever stood in the Jordan, God gave His people water. Whole chapters of it. Leviticus fifteen is a book keeping careful, tender account of a body that leaks and bleeds and gets tired, and what it says over and over is: wash, and be clean until evening. Numbers nineteen sets up a water for a man who has touched death, sprinkled on the third day and the seventh, and then he washes and he is clean.

Read those pages slowly and you will find the ache sitting right there in the text, and it is your ache. Until evening. A cleanness with a sunset on it. Clean, and clean again, and the sun goes down, and tomorrow the same man comes back to the same water.

God was not being cruel. He was teaching a whole nation what clean feels like, and He was teaching them how badly they wanted it to hold. He was building the hunger before He answered it. And you were never wrong to be hungry. That ache is written into those pages deliberately, and the same Spirit who moved them is the reason it still aches in you, because it was pointing at something and it was never evidence against you.

And then, through Ezekiel, He said what He was going to do about it Himself.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.Ezekiel 36:25

Count the pronouns in that sentence. I will sprinkle. I will cleanse. Not wash harder, not come back Saturday. The water in that verse is poured from His side of the river, by His hand, and the man standing under it is not the one working. You are that man tonight, standing under water you did not carry in. Ezekiel 36:25 is where it is written, and His Spirit lifts that promise off the page and sets it over the room you are actually sitting in.

He had drawn the picture at the very beginning, too. On the third day God spoke and the waters under the sky were gathered into one place, and dry ground came up out of them, and He looked at it and called it good. Gathered. One word in Hebrew for that gathering of the waters, and the whole point of it is that the water is collected in one place by somebody else, and you come to it. You do not carry it in a jug. You do not make it in a basin. You go to where it already is.

Now, a small thing, and I want to be straight with you about what it is. That Hebrew word for a gathering of waters is spelled the same as the word for hope in Jeremiah, where the prophet turns and calls God the hope of Israel, the spring of living water. It is a play on words. It is not a doctrine and I am not going to preach it as one. But it is lovely, and I think it is worth a minute of your evening: the same letters, water gathered and hope gathered, and God at the bottom of both.

Because look at what He actually does with water in the story.

Israel did not wash in the Red Sea. They crossed it. They walked down into that place as a nation of slaves with a mud-brick empire at their backs, and they walked up the far side as a free people, and the water closed behind them. Paul says they were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. Nobody scrubbed. The whole event was a change of address.

Naaman came to the Jordan wanting a technique and was handed a word instead. Wash seven times, said the prophet's servant, and the general was furious, because he had rivers at home and he had expected a ceremony worthy of him. He went down into the water anyway. He came up with the skin of a young boy.

And when John stood in that same river years later, what he was calling people into was not another rinse. It was a turn. Then Peter stood up in Jerusalem on the loudest morning of his life and told a crowd of three thousand to turn around and be baptized, and he attached a promise to it, and the promise was a gift. Not a fee. A gift. You have that gift in Christ and it never came with an invoice, because what was promised in the same breath was the Holy Spirit, and He is the gift and the giving both.

That is the difference, and it is the only thing I came here to say.

A washing sends you back to the bank you came from. A crossing changes which bank you live on.