Troublesome Topic: CLEANSING PRECEEDS ATONEMENT EVEN TODAY

Water cleanses, blood atones.

Cleansing must always come before atonement.

Cleansing and atonement were the mechanisms God gave Israel for movement from common and unclean to clean and holy.

It is highly unfortunate that we don’t hear teaching about clean and unclean in the church today. While we do not need to follow the regulations which served as the teaching tool in the Old Testament, we should follow the principles those regulations taught. This issue was one of the most important foundation stones of God’s spiritual teaching method. We should not ignore it.

The realities of clean and unclean are true even after Jesus died for our redemption and rose again for us to live a holy life.

We are cleansed when we repent and confess; we are atoned for when we use faith to grab hold of the atoning blood of Jesus. In our minds they go together when a person decides to follow Jesus, but in reality they are two different things that fulfill the two requirements of God’s spiritual economy.

I know that when I said that cleansing must come first, some of you thought about baptism and how baptism comes after salvation. But baptism does not cleanse us, the cleansing has already occurred; baptism is only an outward sign of what has already happened inwardly. And in this case, the water of baptism does not represent cleansing, it represents death! That’s right. Baptism is a type of burial, except we don’t bury people in dirt and then pull them out again; some might not get pulled out in time to stay alive. So we “bury” them under water, just long enough to represent death and resurrection. So the truth still applies – cleansing must come before atonement.

That fits the Old Testament pattern that one could not jump from being unclean and common to being clean and holy; first one needed to become common and clean and then he was eligible to become clean and holy through the atoning work of a blood sacrifice.