Blanket On A Dunghill

“If one bear holy flesh in the skirt of his garment, and with his skirt do touch bread, or pottage, or wine, or oil, or any meat, shall it be holy? And the priests answered and said, No. Then said Haggai, If one that is unclean by a dead body touch any of these, shall it be unclean? And the priests answered and said, It shall be unclean.” (Hag 2:12-13 AV)

We know the above principle is true.  But there is part of our thinking that cannot compute the above formula.  The above example is a practice of the priests to take to their home holy flesh to meet the needs of his family.  The skirt of his garment would have been cleansed by religious rites and thus the garment also is holy.  So, the flesh and the skirt would have been considered holy.  However, if the priest were to touch a dead body and then put on his holy garments, the garments would not make the priest holy.  They were to bathe before dressing in their holy garments.  The principle here is simple.  The holy cannot make the unholy holy by mere proximity.  That which is unholy must be cleansed or taken away.  However, that which is unholy can make that which is holy unholy by mere proximity.  We know this as a practical principle.  However, when it comes to a spiritual principle, there is a disconnect.

To place it in another context, imagine a ‘clean room’.  We have seen this depicted on film of a medical nature.  There was a program my wife and I watched.  A medical program.  The patient had a severe immunity deficiency.  She could not be around any kind of contaminant.  She was placed in a negative pressure isolation room.  There were barriers placed between her and access provided to the care team.  The doctors and nurses had to scrub down, disrobe, and clothe themselves are sanitized garments that were discarded after each use.  There could be absolutely no outside foreign substance allowed.  The simplest little microbe could be the end of this patient’s life.  The doctor treating her discovered a new treatment for her condition.  By the end of the program, the last shot was of this patient opening her own cocoon and standing on the balcony of her room overlooking the world she could never before interact with.  The point is this.  Nothing could go into her perfectly sanitized room unless it was sanitized first.  Otherwise, it had the potential of contaminating her perfect environment.  Placing an object in her sanitized world did not sanitize it.  It has to be cleansed first.  That is the understanding of the above verse.

The problem with religion is we have the misunderstanding that we add more white to make the black, white.  It doesn’t work that way.  No matter how much white we might use, there still remains a tint of black.  The black has to be removed.  One might argue the doctrine of imputation or the washing of the water by the word disproves this principle.  Quite the contrary.  In both cases, for the wicked to be made righteous, wickedness has to be removed.  Practically, the priests and people treated sin in the manner spoken of in our passage.  They didn’t repent of their sin.  Rather, they offered sacrifices as the means to cover it without taking it away assuming covering it made it go away.  Not true.  The filthiness of sin remains.  This is the vast majority of religion today.  Including contemporary Christianity.  There is no repentance from sin.  Adding emotionalism and mysticism to worship seems to be the solution to guilt.  But sin remains.   We can try as we may to cover our unholiness with holiness, but if the unholiness is not removed, all we have done is throw a blanket over a dung pile.  It is still there and now we have ruined the blanket.