Daily Manna · Day 220 · August 8
Cleansed from All Sin
“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.”
A hallway light left on, and somebody in the dark deciding whether to step into it.
Keep the light for all of this, because John does. He has just said that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. Walking in the light is therefore not a picture of moral achievement; it is a picture of location. You are in the lit part of the house or you are not, and the light here is not a searchlight pointed at you. It is where God himself lives.
Notice what he says the light produces first, because the order is not what anybody expects. Not cleanness. Company. We have fellowship one with another, and then, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. That order matters, because the thing you have never told another human being has been kept in the dark on the theory that saying it would cost you the company. John says the reverse: the hiding is what costs you the company, and the light is where it is found.
And he defines walking in the light in the plainest possible way two verses later, so that nobody can inflate it into something heroic. Say the sin out where God can hear it, and he is faithful and just about the forgiving. It means agreeing with God about what is true, out where it can be seen.
Which is the truth to take, and its edge steadies rather than cuts. The blood cleanseth, present tense, continuing, from all sin, and John was writing to people who knew exactly what they had done. Not the presentable portion of it. All of it. The one thing you have decided is the exception was never the exception. It has only been in the dark, where cleansing was never on offer, because that is not where the light is.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 220 is Thou Shalt Not Die (2 Samuel 12:13).