Come and Argue

“Come now, and let us reason together,” says Yahweh: “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, WEB)

God does a strange and generous thing in Isaiah. He invites his people to reason with him, to bring their case into the open rather than slink away into the dark with it. Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. He knows exactly what color your record is. He names it scarlet, crimson, the deep dye of something soaked all the way through, the kind of stain that has set and will not lift no matter how you scrub, and then he tells you what he intends to do with it.

What strikes me is that he asks you to come and talk it out. He is not waiting behind a closed door for you to grovel at a distance until you have earned an audience. He calls you near, sins and all, and lays his offer on the table before you have cleaned yourself up. The stain you think disqualifies you from the conversation is the very thing he is proposing to make white.

For a man who has learned to hide his worst, this is almost hard to receive. You expected an interrogation and got an invitation. You brought scarlet and he is speaking of snow. Something in you keeps insisting there must be a catch, that surely he wants to hear how sorry you are first, but the promise comes before any of that, laid down while your record is still red. You do not have to argue your way to mercy. You only have to come, bringing the very evidence you were sure would end the relationship, and watch him treat it as the thing he has been waiting to wash.

Lord, I have been hiding the reddest parts of me. Today I bring them into the open with you, and I trust your promise to make what is scarlet clean.