All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6).
It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s true. You have seen someone trying to clean up their own mess before, and that this just ends up making things worse as long as they continue doing more of whatever caused the mess in the first place. If it is the Cat in the Hat’s “spot killing” war on the pink cake stain that started in the bathtub but ends up covering the snow in the front yard, it can be comical. If it’s Macbeth seeking in vain to solidify the kingship he obtained through murder, by committing many more murders, it is tragic.
We turn to our own way to solve the problem we have made; but that just makes the mess worse.
But have you noticed the same trend in your own decisions? Or, for that matter, in humanity everywhere? Ever since Adam and Eve tried to solve their separation from God with the solution of running away from God and blaming each other, we’ve been reenacting the comic tragedy in every generation since.
We turn to our own way to solve the problem we have made; but that just makes the mess worse.
Before we look down our noses at the drunkard, or the drug addict, who is an obvious example of repeated foolish solutions, we all can see some manifestation of that tendency in our own lives personally. We go shopping to overcome discouragement about our finances, or we yell at our teenagers about their bad communication, or we quit reading the Bible and going to church because we don’t feel close to God.
Jesus died on the cross to clean up our sins precisely because we could never do it ourselves.
Do you have some Cat-in-the-Hat cleaning going on in your life? The only solution in a troubled marriage is to repent yourself and start shining the gracious light of Christ in your home. It may or may not change your spouse’s attitude, but it will display the evil-overcoming goodness of Jesus. The solution to a lack of respect or recognition in your workplace is to recognize your own shortcomings and lead by your humble example of hard work and respect for your employer.
But most importantly, the only solution to dealing with your sin — whether for the first time ever or the hundredth time today — is to stop blaming others, stop running from a recognition of your guilt, and run to Jesus Christ who knows how to clean up the tangled mess of sin’s consequences in your life. In fact, Jesus died on the cross to clean up our sins — taking them on himself and forever removing them from us — precisely because we could never do it ourselves. Jesus died to save us from our own solutions.