Who Can Bring What Is Clean From The Unclean?
Joe Terrell

"Who can bring what is pure from the impure? No one!" (Job 14:4)

"Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me." (Psalms 51:10)

The natural mind must consider it an impossibility that something clean could be brought forth from something unclean. Yet, what is impossible with man is possible with God. Yeah, God glorifies Himself in performing the impossible.

The Lord Jesus was clean in every sense of the word, yet he came from a long line of the unclean: The father of His clan, Judah, had a child by his dead son’s wife, Tamar, thinking she was a common prostitute. Perez, the second of twins born to that union, is the ancestor of Boaz, who married the Moabitess, Ruth, a Gentile woman whose ancestry comes from Lot and his incestuous relationship with his daughter. That is only part of the "unclean" line from which the Lord comes. The very best of the men in the Lord’s ancestry, David, was a violent and passionate man, guilty of adultery and murder. Yet from this unclean line, the Lord God brought forth the Clean One, even the Lord Jesus Christ, who did no sin, and knew no sin.

But much which passes for Christianity in our day is an attempt to bring the clean out of the unclean, for they believe and preach that an unclean man may produce something as clean as saving faith. Not even God tries to bring the clean and pure faith of the gospel out of an unclean heart. Instead, He regenerates the heart - creates within a natural, unclean man a clean and pure nature which, quite naturally and properly, believes God with a clean and sincere faith.

Do not ever expect that something clean will arise from your unclean flesh. It will be a constant source of pollution from now to the grave. Look to the Clean One, and trust that His cleanness will stand good for you. And rejoice that the God of all grace has created within you a clean heart, and from that heart you have been enabled to believe the gospel to the saving of your soul.