341How to Get Rid of Guilt
hooks. With great pain and agony they jammed them into their bodies so they might carry, with these fish hooks weighing down the flesh, the statues of their gods. It was almost more than we could bear to see. In no sense is this what David has in mind. The purging is not on our part. It's what God does for us. David is asking the Lord to wash him and the cleansing is performed by the Almighty Himself. And I can assure you, the purification that comes isn't with Dove soap, partially soap and partially cleansing cream. The Lord's washing is not even with Ivory, which is 99.44% pure. That's not sufficient for soul-cleansing. God does it with the perfect peerless blood of His own Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Whiter Than Snow Listen to David's words, "Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean." The reference here is to being ceremonially clean as far as the perfect law is concerned. The washing, of course, is the reality of cleansing which comes experientially. We have absolutely no more right to blame God if there's sin in our lives than we might blame soap for all the unclean people in the world. The difficulty is that we fail so often to apply the perfect provision which has been made available for our lives. It's interesting, too, that the Psalmist uses the simile of snow. You remember Isaiah 1:18 avows, "Come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson they shall be as wool." I remember when we lived in Chicago just after being married 34 years ago. It was our first opportunity to see what snow really was. Nothing was ever so white as that first fallen drift. But it didn't take long in the city of Chicago before the coal smoke and the mud of the automobiles would make certain that white turned black, or at least a dirty brown. But the snow David's talking about here is an enduring purity. When God cleanses us we are
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