Stripped To Be Clothed

We struggle mightily much of our lives to avoid revealing our true selves. Dark, secret places crouch within our souls and we take great pains to avoid entering them. We possess ugly deformities, horrible scars, and shameful memories which we hope will never see the light of day, which we dearly hope none will ever see. If anyone saw us truly and fully, it would force us to either double down on our efforts to hide these defects and flaws, or we would simply shun life and finish our days lurking in the shadows.


We expend great effort in striving to keep these matters secret from those around us, but we employ even greater sweat in the vain work of hiding the hideous in us from the One Who made us. We believe at a deep and primal level that the ugliness residing in us not only repels the Creator of all, Who is breathtakingly beautiful and perfect, but such a sight must deeply horrify Him. He must avert His penetrating gaze from us, or we would melt away, evaporate, or otherwise be obliterated by His Perfect Presence. We conclude we cannot survive such a confrontation, so hide we must.

But in concealing our state of disfigurement, we effectively cut ourselves off from the only One Who can beautify us. He has created us "in His image," so who but He holds the perfect picture, the perfect blueprint, of how our unblemished faces should truly appear? And who, but He, possesses the exquisite surgical skills necessary to extract our deformities and restore our symmetry? Yet we recoil from His touch and we cloak ourselves in the thick, oppressive shrouds of the dead.

In thinking of the work of God in rescuing us from such self-imposed oppression, I often think first of the Son– of Jesus. He certainly appears, and with good reason, the most visible agent of this work of God. Yet deeper reflection reveals His Holy Spirit performing the initial work of this rescue effort. The Spirit silently, and secretly, slips up and walks alongside us, well before we realize it. Piece by piece, article by article, He begins uncovering us, lovingly peeling away the heavy cloaks and concealing capes with which we wrapped and weighed ourselves down.

We wrestle frantically against this unclothing. We have long been comfortable in the soft, warm, darkness we have gathered around us. Uncovered, we now blink at the painfully bright sunlight streaming into our faces, and we shiver uncontrollably as the fresh, cool breeze touches our naked skin. He has stripped us bare and now our secrets lie open to view. Our ugliness, once known only by us, is now our shame, exposed and horrific. In panic we search for any means to recover ourselves and hide again what has been unmasked.

Yet our Comforter performed this work in love, to take us from the defacement of His image in us, toward the unblemished beauty of His own face, extravagantly revealed in the Son, the Christ, our Jesus. We have been uncovered, not to sadistically expose us to public humiliation, but that the glorious garments of Jesus might clothe us.

As the Son prepared to enter the universe, an object of His creation, He stripped Himself and laid aside the glory and privilege that had always and rightfully belonged to Him. He made Himself "nothing" and became like one of us, knowing that one day He will wrap around us His own robes of righteousness, forever and always to cover our shame. One day, His rich glory will envelope us from the tops of our scabby heads to the soles of our dirty feet. And His perfect light will shine out from the deepest, darkest recesses of our miserable lives, proclaiming once again that we bear the perfect, brilliant image of the Creator Christ.

We are uncovered by the Spirit, to be covered by the Son. The Lord exchanges our (as Paul plainly describes them) "filthy rags" for His beautiful raiment. He replaces our shrouds of the dead with His "swaddling clothes"– His baby clothes, His clothing of the state of innocence. We lay down the wraps of death for those of being born anew. What a trade He offers us. What a promise.

I am reminded of the first instance of this trade. While in a place of perfect provision and delight, and while bearing the perfect image of their Creator, a Man and a Woman decided to jettison the invaluable treasure He had placed within them. They determined to remake for themselves new and "improved" images– images of their own creation. Though previously living in naked wonder, enjoying each other and every thing, in full uncovered bliss, they now saw in themselves, and in each other, the deeply disfigured visages they had created. Attempting to hide their new found shame from each other, they fabricated their own flimsy coverings in order to keep their shame private. Rather than run to their Creator for help in their dilemma, they desperately hoped their leafy aprons would camouflage them from His sight while they crouched in the garden.

Their Lord knew the simple coverings, made by these perpetrators of defacing His image, would not do. Only something deeper and more profoundly powerful could remove the indelible stain from their lives. Only the payment of a life could buy the life back. Only the innocent, the perfect, could satisfactorily and completely cover the imperfect. So in His wisdom He provided new coverings, bought by another life– animals slain, their skins fashioned by the Creator's hand into coverings for the nakedness of the two. He could now look upon them and remember that another life had been substituted in place of their own. He looked forward to and "remembered" that the Son would ultimately take this place Himself.

The Spirit, in love, uncovers our deepest fears and depravities– only for them to be covered by the pure innocence and perfection of the Son. Our ugliness for His beauty. Our stench for his wonderful fragrance. Our death for His life. His death for our life.

Finally, I am reminded of the the Son's last revelation to John, His servant, friend, and brother. John sees a multitude standing in God's presence, dressed in perfect, unstained white garments, and he hears: "...they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." What an unexpected, and seemingly impossible thing, that clothing could be "washed" in the crimson fluid of blood and come out of that process a sparkling, gleaming and radiant white! How could this be? How is this possible? And how can I ignore such a startling and unanticipated gift?

"Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless and with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen."   – Jude1.24

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 >>> Except for quotations, all text and images are Copyright, Bill Brockmeier, 2015.  All rights reserved.