Forgiveness and Cleansing

Forgiveness and Cleansing

Cleansing by the blood is not the same as forgiveness by the blood. Forgiveness by the blood encompasses sin in its entirety. Cleansing by the blood concerns the individual sin, as we read: But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. From every sin. In order to experience this, we must be willing to renounce every sin and allow every sin to be brought into His light. Then we will not deal with sin in the grand scheme of things, but on the level of the individual sin. And the Spirit of God is so faithful that He does this. For every sin there is an appointed time and a place when He brings it to our attention, before our eyes, and shows us how God sees it in His light and asks us how we respond to it.

John says: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light,” . . . not in the light of the assembly, which we have chosen as our measure, but in His light. Many things have become sin in His light, things that had never been revealed to us as sin in our Christian environment. For He brings not only our words and deeds into the right light, but also our motives and the disposition of our hearts, and we come to know that we are dealing with Him who has eyes like flames of fire, and before whose eyes all things are naked and open.

Therefore, the cleansing by His blood in the first instance is not a cleansing from the manifestations of sin, but from sin itself in all its hidden forms and varied manifestations. In His light, all these things are brought out into the open.

And it came to pass, when Israel had sinned in the holy place, in that they trespassed with the accursed thing, that all the people came into the presence of the Lord, and they were searched, clan by clan, family by family, household by household, until the accursed thing was found. Joshua 7. And it came to pass, when Israel was come face to face with their sin and had humbled themselves before the Lord, then the Lord turned from the fierceness of His anger towards the people. Cleansing in the blood of Jesus is, therefore, conditional on walking in the light. In His light, the bare nerve of every sin is exposed and condemned. We must not try to suppress sin but seek full cleansing from it. And it is found in the blood of Jesus, the Son of God.

It is well worth noting that John says: “If we walk in the light as He is in the light.” God is in the light without ceasing. If we are to be cleansed from all sin, we must learn, above all things, To walk in the light without interruption; not today in the light and tomorrow in darkness, in the light this week and in the shadows the next. In this way, we are always looking to the forgiving power of the blood, and will never experience the cleansing power of it.

He who has seen, in God’s light, sin for what it is, and what it is to God, is not satisfied with forgiveness alone, but rather seeks a deeper cleansing therein. And John says of him who does not seek it, that he walks in darkness.