The Stain That Will Not Come Out

There is a difference between a stain and a dye, and the man in this story knows it because his grandmother taught him.

A stain sits on the fiber. It is a thing that has landed. You can go at it with the right agent and the right patience and it will lift, and afterward the cloth is cloth again, and if you hold it up to the window you cannot tell.

A dye is different. A dye is taken up into the fiber. The molecule bonds. That is not something that landed on the cloth, that is what the cloth now is, and there is no lifting it out, and anybody who tells you otherwise has never dyed anything.

Trevor is forty-six and he has been in church since he was thirty-one, and he could preach you a sermon on forgiveness that would move you. He has led men's groups. He has sat up all night with two different friends in two different crises and said true things to both of them that they still quote back to him.

And he holds, privately, absolutely, and without ever having examined it once, that his own case is dyeing and not staining.

He has never said it in those words. If you asked him he would tell you he believes in grace, and he would mean it. But there is a thing he did, one thing, and about that thing he has a settled conviction: it did not land on him. It went in. It bonded. Whatever the cloth was before, this is what the cloth is now, and washing is simply not the category his case belongs in.

So he has arranged a whole life around it. He receives forgiveness for everything else, easily, and he genuinely does not carry small things. And on this one he does not even pray, because praying would be asking for the wrong process to be applied to the wrong kind of problem.

I want to say something to him, and I am going to say it to you, because you have your own one thing. I do not know what it is and I am not going to ask; that is not what this is. But you have a ruling on yourself that says this one went into the fiber, and I want to show you a verse where God names the exact color you are thinking of.

God names the color first

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.Isaiah 1:18

The first thing to notice is that God chose the words, and He chose the two strongest color words available.

Scarlet and crimson were not stains in that world. They were dyes, and famously so. Scarlet was made from a crushed insect and it was prized for exactly one reason: it did not come out. You could wash a scarlet garment for a generation and it stayed scarlet. That was the whole point of it. It was the color you used when you wanted the color to be permanent.

So God is not being asked about a stain and answering about a stain. He picks up the category Trevor has assigned himself, the fast dye, the one that bonds, the one that is not coming out, and He says: though they be as scarlet.

And then He says what He does about it.

You are named in that verse at the exact strength you have always assigned yourself, and it is already answered, and the answer is snow. I am not being warm at a man with a private conviction. It is written in Isaiah 1:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the strongest color word in the language and carries the answer to it across a laundry room.

Not bleached. Made.

Now here is the part that most people read past, and it is the difference between a promise and a miracle.

Snow is not bleached wool. Wool is not laundered scarlet. God does not say your scarlet will be lightened by several shades to an acceptable pink. He names two things that are white by nature, not by treatment: fresh snow, new wool.

Which means He is not describing a cleaning process at all. He is describing a making. The scarlet was never going to come out by any washing, and Trevor is right about that, and he has been right for fifteen years. What he did not know is that God never proposed washing. He proposed a new thing that is white the way snow is white, which is to say, all the way through.

You are being handed a whiteness that is native and not applied, and it is already what He said He does, and it goes as deep as the color you were afraid of. Scripture says that if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold all things are become new (2 Corinthians 5:17), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a word like new mean new in a man who has only ever hoped for improved.

The verse that starts with an invitation

And there is one more thing in that sentence and it is the first four words, which Trevor has never once let himself hear.

Come now, and let us reason together.

That is God opening a conversation, not closing one. It is an invitation to bring the thing and talk about it, issued to a nation that at that point in the chapter is being described in the strongest terms in the whole book. He does not say: sort yourself out and then we will talk. He says come now, as you are, with the scarlet, and let us reason.

Trevor has not brought this to God in fifteen years because he considered the matter ineligible.

You are invited to bring it, and the invitation is already open, and it was issued before anybody cleaned anything up. It is written come now, and let us reason together, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient invitation land on a man who has been holding one item back from a God he otherwise trusts completely.