Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Psalms 51:7
Very few people seem to think that they aren't good. They can easily recite the reasons that they believe they are good, and they always seem to have an excuse for their bad behavior. Truth be told, we all have plenty of bad behavior to make excuses for, and ultimately that proves the point that we aren't so good after all. Jesus pointed that fact out when He spoke to the rich young ruler: "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God." In the Lord's case it was, of course, true. He is God, and He is good. That label however, doesn't apply to any of the rest of us.
By extension, the fact that we're not good means that we're also dirty. In fact, we're filthy at best. Isaiah 64:6 says that our righteousness is as filthy rags. If that's the best we have to offer, how bad must our worst be?
The fact that we are dirty means we can't enter into Heaven. That's a concept that any parent can easily grasp. Imagine a group of kids that have been playing in the mud after a rainstorm. They end up with mud caked onto their clothes and their bodies. Once they've had their fun, they decide to go inside, but their mother stops them. She won't let them in the house until they're out of the muddy clothes they're wearing. If she were to do so, there would be mud all over the carpet and everything they touched. That being the case, why would we expect God to be any different?
We see then that we have to be clean to have any hopes of getting into Heaven. Our biggest problem is that God's standard of clean is much different than ours. His is nothing less than perfection. White has long been associated with cleanliness, and as such, God uses it to represent spiritual cleanliness in the Bible so that we can relate to it. Snow specifically is used in the Bible to represent something that is clean. Freshly fallen snow has an albedo of up to 0.90. That means that it reflects up to 90% of the light that hits it. A completely white object would have an albedo of 1.00.
That means that not even snow is completely "clean." We therefore have to be whiter than snow. In fact, there's not a single object in the universe that reaches the standard of being perfectly white. Of all known objects in the Solar System, Saturn's moon Enceladus (seen in the photo above) likely has the highest albedo at 0.99. The surface of Enceladus is made of ice, which can be compared to snow since snow is crystallized flakes of ice. In other words, even the brightest known object in the Solar System isn't completely "clean."
Going back to the concept that our best is filthy rags, we see just how far short we truly come. If there's nothing in the universe that reaches the standards of pure whiteness, there's no hope to be found for us unless the only "good" One does the job for us. The good news is that He did. He came to this earth and lived the perfect life that we were incapable of living, and traded His righteousness -- His "whiter than snow" life -- for the filthy rags that we wore. In fact, He literally became sin so that we could be righteous.
The only way to get into Heaven is to be whiter than snow. The only way to become whiter than snow is to have our sins washed away by the precious blood of Christ. Are you whiter than snow? You never will be in your own right. A spiritual trip to Calvary to meet and trust in the Saviour is the only thing that will do it. The good news is, He's eager to do it. If you'll call on Him, He'll take you to Calvary and wash you whiter than snow.
We see then that we have to be clean to have any hopes of getting into Heaven. Our biggest problem is that God's standard of clean is much different than ours. His is nothing less than perfection. White has long been associated with cleanliness, and as such, God uses it to represent spiritual cleanliness in the Bible so that we can relate to it. Snow specifically is used in the Bible to represent something that is clean. Freshly fallen snow has an albedo of up to 0.90. That means that it reflects up to 90% of the light that hits it. A completely white object would have an albedo of 1.00.
That means that not even snow is completely "clean." We therefore have to be whiter than snow. In fact, there's not a single object in the universe that reaches the standard of being perfectly white. Of all known objects in the Solar System, Saturn's moon Enceladus (seen in the photo above) likely has the highest albedo at 0.99. The surface of Enceladus is made of ice, which can be compared to snow since snow is crystallized flakes of ice. In other words, even the brightest known object in the Solar System isn't completely "clean."
Going back to the concept that our best is filthy rags, we see just how far short we truly come. If there's nothing in the universe that reaches the standards of pure whiteness, there's no hope to be found for us unless the only "good" One does the job for us. The good news is that He did. He came to this earth and lived the perfect life that we were incapable of living, and traded His righteousness -- His "whiter than snow" life -- for the filthy rags that we wore. In fact, He literally became sin so that we could be righteous.
The only way to get into Heaven is to be whiter than snow. The only way to become whiter than snow is to have our sins washed away by the precious blood of Christ. Are you whiter than snow? You never will be in your own right. A spiritual trip to Calvary to meet and trust in the Saviour is the only thing that will do it. The good news is, He's eager to do it. If you'll call on Him, He'll take you to Calvary and wash you whiter than snow.
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