{"id":1000,"date":"2021-09-08T08:50:01","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T12:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=1000"},"modified":"2021-09-08T08:50:01","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T12:50:01","slug":"getting-clean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2021\/09\/08\/getting-clean\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Clean"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Less than 200 years ago, few people suspected that we live in a world saturated with microorganisms.

A handful of scientists, led by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s, had begun to discern the connection between tiny creatures and certain human diseases. 

But no one could have imagined that the average human body is home to hordes of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and assorted other entities that are invisible to human eyes. 

How much of \u201cyou\u201d is you?  The current scientific guess is that your body is comprised of about 30 trillion human cells.  You also walk around with about 30 to 50 trillion bacterial cells.  So half of you, from a cellular perspective, is not human.  Most of your body\u2019s cells, of course, are immensely larger than your accompanying microbes.  So you can at least be comforted that most of you is you. 

Something like 40,000 different species of microorganisms are happy to use your body as a mailing address.  There are more than 900 varieties inhabiting your nostrils, 800 on the inside of your cheeks, and at least 36,000 lining your gastrointestinal tract.  It\u2019s estimated that one billion<\/em> bacteria are transferred from one mouth to another during passionate kissing. 

The average bacterium lives only 20 minutes.  That\u2019s less time than it takes to watch a single episode of Family Feud<\/em>.  Bacteria self-replicate 72 times a day.  In theory, a solitary bacterium could produce a pile of descendants that outweighs the Earth in less than two days.  Thankfully, theory quickly runs into the hard reality of limited resources. 

As Bill Bryson observes in his book The Body: A Guide for Occupants<\/em>: \u201cMake no mistake.  This is a planet of microbes.  We are here at their pleasure.  They don\u2019t need us at all.  We\u2019d be dead in a day without them.\u201d

Bryson is referring to the fact that even though the word \u201cbacteria\u201d conjures up images of dirt and slime, the vast majority of these hitchhikers are harmless.  They never give us a thought.  Bacteria that live in the soil make it possible for us to grow food, and the ones that live in our gut are essential to our digestion. 

Then there are the viruses, which have been much in the news in the past 18 months.  They are vastly smaller than bacteria and considerably more mysterious.

There are also a lot of them.  Until a few years ago no one suspected that viruses could live in seawater.  When someone finally went to the trouble of checking things out, it was discovered that a gallon of seawater contains up to 400 billion viral entities. 

Dr. Peter Medawar, the Nobel Prize winning biologist, famously described a virus as \u201ca piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein.\u201d  But most viruses, like their bacterial counterparts, have no impact on human beings whatsoever.  Bryson points out that they don\u2019t eat, breathe, or do much of anything.  They have no means of locomotion.  And they tend to infect bacterial cells, not human tissue.

COVID-19, of course, is a frightening exception.  Which is one reason why anti-microbial soaps flew off the shelves so quickly in 2020.

Several brands offer this reassuring promise: \u201cKills 99.9% of germs.\u201d 

Unfortunately, independent studies have been unable to confirm such claims.  It seems that most soaps merely wash microbes off to a new location.  But let\u2019s suppose a best-case scenario.  Even if just 0.1% of microorganisms remain alive, that\u2019s still a lot of germs.  And since they cling to virtually every surface, they\u2019re reliably found in places that don\u2019t always get reliably washed.  A widely-circulated 2017 study, for instance, demonstrated that your cell phone is likely to have ten times more bacteria than your toilet seat \u2013 a whole new reason to let your next call from \u201cUnknown Contact\u201d go right to voice mail. 

Long before people began to obsess about ridding their lives of microorganisms, millions of men and women felt anguish about the cleanliness of their souls.  In a dispiriting, broken world, how can we ever wash away \u2013 for want of a better term \u2013 the spiritual cooties in our lives?

David the king \u2013 writing from the depths of despair about his own dreadful behavior \u2013 yearned, \u201cCreate in me a clean<\/strong> heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me\u201d (Psalm 51:10). 

What we ourselves cannot accomplish, no matter how hard we try, God offers as a gift.

One of the most moving pictures of this reality is found in the Old Testament book of Zechariah.  As part of a vision, the prophet sees the high priest Joshua, who served Israel about 500 years before Christ.  It\u2019s one of the darkest moments in the nation\u2019s history.  Jerusalem is devastated.  The temple, which had been burned to the ground by Babylonian invaders almost a century earlier, remains a heap of ruins.

Joshua stands before the angel of the Lord.  That\u2019s a good thing.  However, \u201cJoshua was dressed in filthy clothes\u201d (Zechariah 3:3).  

The word translated \u201cfilthy\u201d is soim<\/em>, the strongest word in the Hebrew language to express something loathsome.  Some commentators suggest that his clothes might be covered with excrement.  According to the Torah, the high priest had to keep himself as pure as possible in order to represent God to the people and the people to God.  How can he ever do that in such a condition? 

Help arrives in the next two verses:  \u201cThe angel said to those who were standing before him, \u2018Take off his filthy clothes.\u2019  Then he said to Joshua, \u2018See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.\u2019\u201d

In our present condition, how can we ever stand before a holy God?

He will have to do the cleansing.  He will have to supply clean clothes and a clean heart. 

And he is able to do so.   

Jesus said to his disciples, \u201cYou are clean<\/strong> because of the word that I have spoken to you\u201d (John 15:3).  That\u2019s his promise to us, too. 

The best news in the middle of a pandemic is that we can all experience the single cleansing that we most need.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Less than 200 years ago, few people suspected that we live in a world saturated with microorganisms. A handful of scientists, led by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s, had begun to discern the connection between tiny creatures and certain human diseases.  But no one could have imagined that the average human body is home to hordes of bacteria, viruses, fungi,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1001,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[305],"class_list":["post-1000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-spiritual-cleansing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1002,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions\/1002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}