day no. 15,796: spotty reception

Jeremiah 13:23
Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?
Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil.

The Ethiopian's blackness is something he has always known. He possibly even takes it for granted. It is what it is. Same goes for the leopard's spots. He has always been that way and doesn't even notice he is spotty. If you pointed out the Ethiopian's blackness, he would be able to see it the same way a fish could be made to consider how wet he is all the time. Same can be said for the leopard and his spots. 

The point is not that blackness is sinful, but that sin is built in, like blackness. Spots are not problematic for the leopard. Jeremiah's point in referencing the skin colors of people or animals is that it is hard-wired. Our sins are like this. They are built in. It's all we've ever known. We have no context for a time when we lived our lives by the golden rule. We had to learn that maxim and work hard to apply it even after we adopted its truth. In fact, we're so sinful, that we don't spend much time even thinking about it. Sin is just one of the facts of life, the backdrop, the et cetera. If someone points it out to us, we can see it if we look intently upon it, but we're so used to seeing it, we're often blind to it. We live in an ocean of air at all times, but it is invisible to us though we breath it in and out and see it moving the limbs of trees in the distance. We take special note of our breath on cold days and use the fact that we can see it to highlight how unusual it is. We see it on the glass expanding and then quickly retreating, but most of the time, we forget. Breath is easy to forget.

So our sin is like the Ethiopian's skin or the leopard's spots: part of who we are. To change the Ethiopian's skin is to rob him of something Ethiopian. To change the leopard's spots is to unleopard him. To tell an Ethiopian that he must change his skin to enter eternity is to tell him that Ethiopians cannot enter eternity. To tell a leopard that he must change his spots in order to be blessed is to tell him that leopards cannot be blessed. For to change the skin of the one or the spots of the other is to unmake who they are. So it is with our sin. If it is removed, it results in a new creation. Whatever was will no longer be. Whatever remains cannot be what it once was. In other words, we cannot be saved by staying who we are. We will have to die. And we will need to rise again in order to live.

Put another way, what must be done cannot be done if things do not change. Sinners cannot be righteous anymore than leopard's can be spotless. If you remove the leopard's spots, you kill its leopardness. If you change the Ethiopian's skin, you end his Ethiopianess. So too we must die to ourselves if we are to become who God calls us to be. We cannot enter the kingdom without being changed -- not merely a costume change or a cosmetic alteration, but an entirely new creation.