Daily Devotional

Pull all the threads of this week together and the whole verse turns inside out. We are not the priests guarding the pearls from the dogs. We were the dogs who were brought in. Go back to Welch’s four categories, holy, common, clean, unclean, and ask where you stood. We were the unclean, the outsiders, the ones who took what was holy and treated it as common, and the Bible has a word for that. We profaned the very name of God.

And here is the gospel. The unclean becomes clean, and the common is made holy, but it always came at a cost. In the Old Testament it went through the temple and required the shedding of blood. Welch shows that all those pictures pointed to one person. Jesus is the temple, the sacrifice, the one who gives the water for cleansing. Unclean people touched him and became clean. The price was not a lamb or a pigeon. The price was his own blood.

Remember how this series began. At last the King had come, and the genealogy in Matthew 1 carried Tamar, Rahab the prostitute, and Ruth the Moabite, outsiders, dogs by the standards of the day, written into the family line of the King. Remember how the Sermon on the Mount opened, with the poor in spirit and those who mourn, the empty handed, not the strong and qualified. The heart of Christ deals gently, and only gently, with sinners. He did not shake the dust off his feet at you. He went all the way to the cross.