I walked into Wal-Mart yesterday and the smell nearly knocked me over. Bleach, cleaner, disinfectant, chemical-whatever seeped from the doorway. I’ve smelled the same things pretty much everywhere I’ve gone lately, and I bet you have too. Businesses care about protecting their employees and maintaining the trust of shoppers. They can’t physically hose us down when we enter, so they’ll do the next best thing.
I recently heard that real clean has no smell. Supposedly all the bleachy, ammonia-heavy fumes don’t actually make a surface safe. Natural products can properly disinfect without producing one single smell. I usually subscribe to this idea. But you better believe during this pandemic, I’m locking arms with my scrubbing, wiping, fumigating, sanitizing, bleach-happy friends who empty every toxic-cleaner shelf in America!
The truth is when I walk through that “cloud of amonia” to enter a store, I’m just reminded how very unclean things actually are right now. I feel that little twinge of anxiety, that gnawing sensation that I don’t actually know what the next few days or weeks or months will hold for my family or our church. It smells a lot like fear to me.
Then God and his word cut through that cloud like a beam of fresh air. Do you know that there is an actual spiritual “smell of clean?” The phrase “pleasing aroma” appears in the Old Testament over 40 times, and almost all of them refer to us being clean before God.
In Exodus 29, the burnt offerings and the lamb killed on the altar become a “pleasing aroma” before the Lord.
In Leviticus 8, the food offering that helps consecrate the first ever priests becomes a “pleasing aroma” to the Lord.
When God rescued Noah from the flood in Genesis 8, Noah sacrificed many of his newly rescued animals to the Lord. Genesis 8:21 says, “And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground …Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.”
When the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma….
I think there’s a real live smell of clean before an Almighty God: It’s the smell of blood.
We can’t be clean any other way. We can’t scrub ourselves with spiritual bleach. We can’t perfume our lives with good deeds. We can’t meditate away our infected hearts. Not even the blood of a hundred thousand animals could permanently clean a single soul (hebrews 10:4). We needed a savior.
God sent his son, Jesus, who knew no sin to become sin for us. His death on the cross satisfied the wrath of God. All our sin fell on Christ. And all his righteousness now falls on us if we are in him. Hebrews 10:14 says, “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.”
This is what it means to be gloriously, spotlessly clean! When we are in Christ, his blood covers us!
2 Corinthians 2:15 says, “For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.”
I’ve always seen that we are the aroma of Christ. But I’ve never noticed those two little words after: “TO GOD.” You are the “aroma of Christ to God” among other people. What does God the Son smell like to God the Father? Could we even fathom. What Holy, Righteous, Pure, Splendorous smell of clean! Because of Jesus, we have this exact aroma to God. We smell like the Son. We are eternally, forever made clean before him. The blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin and gives us the actual blood-wrought smell of clean.
Today as I was scrubbing the fool out of our bathrooms, I smiled long enough to remember how Christ has cleaned me. Sisters, in these uncertain times, may you be swept up in the glorious reality that you are made clean in Christ if you are saved by him. There is no power of hell, no scheme of man, things present nor things to come, and no roaring virus that can take away your “pleasing aroma” before the Father.