Come Now and Let Us Reason Is Said Before Anything Is Fixed

A man told me he had a list, and that he was going to go back to God when the list was done.

He was not being flippant. He was completely serious and he had thought it through, which is what made it hard to listen to. There were four things on it. One of them he had already done. One of them was, in his own estimate, about a year off. Two of them involved other people and were not entirely in his hands, and he knew that, and he had decided to try anyway.

He said it in a way that a lot of people would call humility. It sounds like humility. It sounds like a man taking it seriously rather than treating grace as cheap, and I want to be careful with anybody who thinks that way, because they are usually more serious about God than the people telling them to relax.

But there is a sentence in Isaiah that puts a knife right through it, and it is not said to nice people having a bad patch. It is said to a nation at its absolute worst, and it is said in the first chapter, before anything has been repaired.

Read the invitation, and read where it sits

Here is the verse.

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (Isaiah 1:18, King James Version)

Come now. Not come when. Not come once. Now, which is a word about timing and is the only word in the sentence a man with a list actually needs.

And look at where the sentence sits. The chapter before it is brutal. God has just described a nation as sick from head to foot, with wounds nobody has bound up, and has told them plainly that He is not interested in their meetings.

That is the setting for come now. He is not inviting them because things have improved. He is inviting them in the middle of the worst description of them in the book.

You are invited in the state you are actually in, and Isaiah puts the invitation in the middle of the diagnosis rather than after it. Isaiah 1:18 says come now with the wounds still unbound. It is His Spirit, John 16:8 who convinces rather than accuses, who makes an invitation that early feel possible.

The word reason is not the word argue

The word translated reason together in that verse is a legal word. It means to settle a case, to argue it out, to bring a dispute to a conclusion.

Which is worth stopping on, because most people expect God's opening move with a guilty person to be a sentence. Here His opening move is a conversation, and He proposes it Himself, and He states the outcome before the conversation starts.

Read the second half again. They shall be as white as snow. He announces the verdict at the start. That is not how any court works and it is not how any of us expect Him to work.

I have sat with people who could not get out of the first half of their own sentence, and the thing they all had in common was that they were waiting to be told what the outcome would be. Isaiah puts it in the invitation.

You have already been told how it ends, and it is stated before the conversation opens. Isaiah 1:18 announces white as snow in the same breath as the invitation. It is the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 6:11 saying ye are washed and sanctified by the Spirit of our God, who is named as the one doing the washing.

Paul dates the love before the cleanup

If a person still suspects there is a threshold, Paul gives a timestamp.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

While we were yet. That is a clause about timing, and it is the whole argument. The cost was paid at the worst possible moment, before any list was started, before anybody had a plan for improvement.

Which means the man with four items is not being asked to earn something. He is trying to pay a bill that was settled while he was in a completely different state, and every day he waits is a day he is out of a house that has already been opened to him.

And Jesus says the same thing in a single line to people who were complaining about the company He kept:

I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5:32)

Notice the order in that sentence. He calls them to repentance. The call comes first and the repentance is where the call takes them. It is not a condition of entry, it is the destination.

You are called toward the turning rather than required to arrive already turned. Luke 5:32 puts the call before the repentance in the sentence itself, and it is the same Spirit, John 6:44 alongside the Father's drawing, who does the drawing a person cannot do for themselves.

The washing is described as something done to a person

Here is the part that finally took the list out of my own hands, and it is a promise in Ezekiel that is worded very deliberately.

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. (Ezekiel 36:25)

Count the verbs and notice who is doing them. I will sprinkle. I will cleanse. The person in the sentence is receiving throughout, and the only thing they do is be clean, which is a state and not an action.

Paul says it the same way in a letter, and he says it with a word about mercy:

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost. (Titus 3:5)

Not by works of righteousness which we have done. That is not a slight on the works. Paul spends whole chapters on how a person should live. It is a statement about which end of the process they belong to, and it puts them after and never before.

You are cleansed by Somebody rather than required to arrive clean. Ezekiel 36:25 has God doing every verb in the sentence. It is the Spirit of God, whom Titus 3:5 names in the renewing itself, who does the part a list was never able to do.

And if what is on your list has got past what one person can carry to a room alone, say it out loud to somebody: a doctor, a counselor, a sponsor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A man waiting a year to be allowed back is a man alone with something, and alone is the part to fix first.