These white-robed inhabitants of Heaven were once sinners, for they all needed to wash their robes. Had their robes been perfectly white, then there would have been no necessity to cleanse them certainly not to cleanse them in the blood of Jesus! Yes, those glorious ones were once sinners like us! Look up at them now! Observe their ravishing beauty! See how faultless they ARE! And then, remember what they once WERE.
Oh, trembling sinners, whose bruised hearts dare not indulge a hope of salvation those spotless ones in Heaven, were once like you! And you are today, what they once were!
They were all sinful at birth, and children of wrath just as you were.
They were all placed in circumstances which allured them to sin; they had their temptations, and they lived in the midst of a wicked and depraved generation even as you now do.
What is more, they all sinned, for mere temptation would not have soiled their robes, but actual sin defiled them.
There were thoughts of sin,
there were words of sin,
there were acts of sin in all of them!
You will say, perhaps, that none of those saints had committed sins like yours, but there I must flatly contradict you. Among that illustrious company, there are those who were once sinners of the deepest dye adulterers, thieves, harlots, murderers! They have all been forgiven, sanctified, and at length glorified!
[Charles H. Spurgeon]
✞ ✞ ✞
Revelation 7:13-14 ... And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
1 Corinthians 15:10 ... But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11 ... Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. ❤
