soul stained

Though you wash yourself with lye

and use much soap,

the stain of your guilt is still before me,

declares the Lord GOD.

Jeremiah 2:22

A good look at what God is saying to Israel through Jeremiah in this passage convinces me that sin too easily draws us into unrestrained worship of what we want. This stains the soul. In the case of Israel, they repeatedly took up the worship of pagan gods of the nations around them. God does not have kind words for their sin. He calls their idolatry unfaithfulness and says that the nation acted like a whore (Jeremiah 2:20).

God saw their wanton idolatry as a degeneration.... a deep soul stain (Jeremiah 2:21). They could not just quickly wash up and be clean from this sort of betrayal of their covenant with God. They were wild and out of control. They were like wild animals bent on fulfilling their wildest urges (Jeremiah 2:24). And in all this they also abused and misled the poorest people of the land to follow their idolatry. Soul stains never affect just one person. (Jeremiah 2:34). But the end of this chapter, God promises to bring swift judgment to Israel and to the nations that Israel had grown to admire and trust more than God.

Judgment is not a pretty picture because sin is not a pretty picture. The magnitude of sin is revealed in passages like this. It should make us very uncomfortable. It should cause us to think about our own hearts, to then grieve for what sin does to us, and to turn from sin to trust only in what God has done for us. Jesus taught the reality of eternal punishment for sin. He also died and rose again to deliver humanity from that consequence. But we cannot wash ourselves of our own guilt. We cannot remove our own stain. Only the blood of Jesus can cleanse us (1 John 1:9), so to Him we must go, repenting and trusting only Him. And then our stain is washed... then our hearts are made new... then our guilt is removed by the work of Jesus for us and in us.