Answers (5)

“Come now, and let us reason together,” says YHWH.  “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” Isaiah 1:18

White – To make laban.  Hebrew for “white” is laban.  Of course, this has exquisite irony in the story of Jacob and Laben (the same consonants).  Jacob’s manipulation of the flock is also a Hebrew play on words.  You will recall that Jacob leaves Mr. White (Laben) with only the white (laban) sheep and goats.  Every reader of Isaiah would know this story.  Part of the history of “white” touches the story of Laben.

The pictograph of laban adds more.  Lamed-Bet-Nun is “control of the house of life.”  YHWH declares that He will turn my second-choice blood-red disasters into control over the house of life.  But wait!  I can understand that forgiveness might result in a new man in a new house.  My theological education might tell me that God restores me to His house in the process of redemption.  But how can my sins become the elements of control over the house of life?  How can my actual sins become white?

Of course, it’s a metaphor.  Sins don’t change their spectrograms.  But even as a metaphor, it leaves some questions.  We understand white as a mark of purity (except for Laben?).  We are familiar with the contrast between white and black in religious terms.  But doesn’t it seem just a bit odd that God ties “sins” directly to “white’?  It does until we realize what God intends to do with those sins.

Sometimes I burn piles of fallen branches.  The fire rages yellow and red, consuming the wood and debris.  Left overnight, all I find in the morning is a pile of white ash.  All those various materials, all those colors in wood and leaves, are reduced to fine white powder.  The only evidence of the past is the ash left behind.  What was once individual objects in the world is now completely undifferentiated residue.

Perhaps this imagery is present in God’s metaphor.  My sins – all my second choices – are piled on the altar.  They are destroyed in His consuming fire.  What’s left is the ash of my past, uniformly converted to nothing more than a trace of evidence.

How does this evidence, this ash, become “control of the house of life”?  It becomes the control over my house of life when I pay attention to the end result of second choices.  It becomes the warning signal, the buoy marker, the danger sign that keeps my future choices pure.  I need to look at that ash-evidence to remind myself where I was going.  Sins have a use.  Once they are burned in God’s refining fire, they leave behind evidence that I have been redeemed and markers of the way I dare not go again.

White as snow, burned to ash.  That’s the final resting place of my sins.

Topical Index:  sins, white, laban, laben, Isaiah 1:18